The Sweet Release of Death

Your New Life Coach

I pledge Allegeance To Post-It Notes

04/13/2010 06:07 AM

Who would have thought a 2” square stack of yellow paper and glue could bring such bliss? Oh my, the heaven of it all! I’ve not quite come to grips with the nature of my strange obsession with Mr. Post-It, but some things are better left alone, than to over-analyze them and strip them of their simplistic beauty. Post-Its are the Bee Gees of stationary, they’re bright, peppy and if they made a sound, I’m sure you could unleash a dancing fury to it. (Please refrain from sporting a white leisure suit though)

Maybe it’s the challenge of fitting as much info as possible onto that 2” square slab of real estate. A grocery list? Sure. A brief list of your workday to-do’s? You bet. Post-its come in many colors but I find the standard yellow to be most excellent. Now as bitchingly cool as they are, they are not the medium for long-winded Dear John letters, nor are they the vessel to leave your last will and testament on. Although since I mentioned wills, they are the happy medium for leaving notes to your attorney within said will for revisions, for example: “Please change. Cut my sister out. She is a douche and Mom never liked her.” Short, simple and to the point. Thanks 3M!

All legalize aside, I have seen some co-workers try to fit full paragraphs onto Post-Its, only to fail horribly in the legibility arena. You don’t want your “Note” to look like your daughter’s Barbie doll came to life and left a pre-nup for Ken doll on your desk. Post-Its are for the quick. They are for the “let me jot this down” crowd. They are not for the deep thinkers. You don’t want to look at a Post-it and ponder as to what you are going to put there. In short they are not for the long-winded time-sucks of Officeland. You’ve seen these people in action too. You’re away form your desk, and Time-Suck wants to leave you a note, but the limited space of two inches is more than they can bear. It’s like a Microsoft Blue Screen in human form.

By then you have returned to your desk only to find them slumped over, staring at the Post-it, unable to write. These are the types that instead of telling you what they want will look up at you and go “I was going to leave you a note, but since you’re back, I can send you an e-mail now.” As they walk back to their office, you glance down at the blank, yellow square and a thought comes to mind. You grab your pen and jot down on the magic square; “Kill Bob” Yeah, I love Post-its.

Tags: Post-It notes, Bee Gees, Bliss,

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The Ballad of Mr. Miserable

03/30/2010 06:19 AM

It starts with a heavy sigh, followed by a rolling of the eyes to the back of the head. Add in a little rosy tone flush to the cheeks and, cap it with a whine of “really?” and what do you have? Well at first blush, it sounds like the warning signs of a stroke. But no, it’s just the calling card of Mr. Miserable. His misery is not just a character trait; so much as it is a reckoning. Where you or I have a bad day and move on, Mr. Miserable has bad days in spades. A good day for him is as mythical as a unicorn or underwear on Pam Anderson. I remember when Mr. Miserable came aboard the Good Ship Lolipop, a young, fresh piece of meat for the corporate sales grinder. As part of sales training, you do a stint answering the phones in reception. This little maneuver is what unmasked his super power from the start. And yes, his misery is a super power as it can suck the fun out of a room in a single breath. I’m just glad he doesn’t wear a cape. Well Mr. Miserable was crowned and lived up to his name, much to do the delight of the rest of us entrenched in our own corporate hell. Each overhead page that he droned was like a sad Tom Waits song pieced together from each incoming call.

A call on hold was a desperate cry for help. He’d place the call on hold and then the most agonizing, self loathing drone of “Get me the hell out of here” was interlaced with “Tim Stevens, you have a call on line one...Tim...sigh... line one.” Seriously, I didn’t know whether to call the suicide hotline for him or me. As the day pressed on, his pages became more hopeless. Lonesome. I don’t recall how many days I awaited an overhead page of “ Anyone... somebody... Please report to the front lobby and just put a bullet in me... Anyone? Lobby. Now. PLEASE!!!!” Poor lug. The girls in reception were not easy on Mr. Miserable not the least bit. For he was the blood-feast for that marauding band of sharks. The gangs of vixens, made the Hells Angels look like ill-tempered teacup poodles.
The ladies took off the gloves and went to work of puttin’ a hurtin’ on Mr. Miserable. In the back of my mind I figured there could only be two scenarios form this combo, both of them bad. I figured #1: The ladies would come in one morning and Mr. Miserable would be hanging by a lamp cord in their jacket closet or, #2: One of us fellow co-workers would saunter in one morning and find Mr. Miserable sitting in reception like a Caveman, grunting and chuckling whilst gnawing on a leg bone of one of the dead receptionists.

Luckily for the ladies, he refrained from “getting all Jeffrey Dahmer on their ass” His words, not mine. So as the ladies narrowly avoided becoming a Tony Roma Platter, Mr. Miserable reached down and found that extra power that exists in us all when faced with extreme conditions. He persevered and made it through training. God bless him for it! He’s got to get his day in the Sun. But then again, a good day in the Sun could be a trick. I’ve seen enough Looney-Tunes episodes to know that Wyle E Coyote does not win. Its ironic too because his nemesis, his Road Runner, is a fellow salesman named Travis. As much as Mr. Miserable tries, he can never catch him. Every spring-loaded, explosive laden gizmo that ACME has to offer has failed. But he keeps trying. He perseveres. And there is nothing miserable about that.

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Calling In Well: The Art of Ditching Work

03/25/2010 07:37 AM

Some days it’s just too nice out to make the trek into work. And most of the time you’re just too damn tired and fed up to deal with the cavalcade of characters that await you there. So I suggest that today you call in well. Do it. Just pick up the phone and ring one in for me. Just give Reception a bit of “ cough, cough, sniff, yeah I’m not going to be able to make it in today. I’ve got a horrible case of the Bischon Flu... been barking all night.” If you do the cough and sniffle bit really good, the receptionist will be distracted by it and won’t pickup on the “barking” bit. She’ll hear “Bischon Flu” and think you said barfing. In her mind she’s thinking; “Poor thing is so sick, he said barking.”
Once the message of sickness is delivered, NEVER USE THE PHONE AGAIN.

Now is the time to get your butt moving! Don’t waste this opportunity by planting your self on the couch and rotting away catching up on The View, Dr. Phil and Rachel Ray’s live colonoscopy. Save that for when you are truly sick and suffering from fever delusions. Get yourself cleaned up and in your car. Point that thing 180 degrees opposite of work and blast off! You want to go at least 25 to 30 miles away, just so you don’t run into anybody from the Salt Mine. If you do, at that distance away from work, they are of the same mindset as you and will not utter a word. It will be like a meeting of the Jedi. You’ll make eye contact but what will transpire is the equivalent of a telepathic nod and thumbs-up as if to say “ Yeah! Ditching work!” Ah... the Force is strong with these two.

Now that you are a safe distance form being caught, live it up. Have breakfast someplace you’ve always wanted to go. Sit and relax at an outside table. Enjoy your coffee. People watch. Go to the library and get a book and take it to the park and read in the sun. This doesn’t mean got to Barnes & Noble and sit in there and read, that’s how you get caught. Plus it makes you look like a douche. You don’t go to Barnes & Noble to read. You find a book, buy it and get the fuck out. It’s a store, not your living room. If reading in the Sun is not your game, find something completely out of your wheelhouse like... Glass blowing! How cool is that! You get to learn how they make all that crazy, colorful stuff and you get a souvenir! Too artsy? Well there’s always the zoo, but that might dredge up feelings of work... especially the poo-flinging chimps, they have management written all over them. What ever it is you choose to do, make it fun. Make it a learning experience, but a relaxing one. If you’re near a beach, go take a surfing lesson. You’ll learn more about yourself and Mother Nature in one ride of a wave, than an entire week with Tony Robbins. So get out there! Work will be there for you tomorrow. I’ve got to run now. Gotta practice my cough and sniffle.

Tags: Tony Robbins, Bischon, Barnes & Noble

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Yoos Talkin Shaq?

03/03/2010 10:18 PM

Some days I’m simply amazed by some of my co-workers absolute disregard for the English language, and its awesome power that it can provide to those who respect it. This is not about the masterful wordsmiths among us. It’s not about those that when they speak, words flow so effortlessly and true, that the story unfolds before you. Your blood pressure lowers, your mind visualizes clearly, and robust. You escape. Sadly this is about The Butchers. The Hillside Stranglers of words and prose. The Assassins of the spoken word. The prison-shanking mob of e-mail land. Yes folks, its about the idiots or as I affectionately refer to as the (i)diots and Word Pervs. The really bad ones are the ones that write like they talk, and let me tell ya, they can’t talk very well to begin with. These folks well.. well they’re just special. Therefore they receive the honor of being dubbed the Shaq Talkers (we’ll get to their origin shortly, bear with me here) Their e-mails can just send you on your way to Laugh town. It’s almost like you woke up in a foreign country.

The (i)diots and Word Pervs, their disregard for the English language is rather pedestrian at best. They make you laugh, and you shrug it off and continue on. The Shaq Talkers on the other hand, well their execution of the English language is just that. An execution. It can haunt you for at least an hour and if you’re an English Major, it could very well kill you. Your English Lit soaked brain will try to make sense of their Word Hodge-Podge, and bring about the mother of all aneurysms. In e-mail form, you at least have a fighting chance, by deleting upon first sign of confusion, or do as my friend Malcolm does. He saves them for when he’s really hammered on the sauce. He then reads them in one massive sitting and tries to decipher them. He says it’s like a mix of Peyote and Sanskrit. Me, I just say no.

If you encounter a Shaq Talker face to face, and fancy yourself a good student of the words back in the day, brace yourself. For you are about to begin a journey down the trail of Abject Failure and Ignorance. You’ve been warned. There are ways to survive these encounters. I personally soak them in and then immediately write them down to expel the evil from my brain as quickly as possible. Kind of along the lines of John Coffey in The Green Mile (but I don’t grab them. That would buy me a first-class ticket to the HR dept.)
Just soak it all in...all the “eyes be doin dis an dat” and the “I gots to axe my boss da questin” So soak it in and purge it onto paper or the spanking new Powerbook Pro you bought yourself. You never know when you may have to act stupid down the line, and with all the field data you will have amassed, you’ll be all kinds of stupid. I mean Stoopid.

So where do they come from? Well, all walks of life from what I can tell. Some have been highly educated (Kegger!) and some have simply skated through life on finely tuned tits and ass or, chiseled abs and perky pecs. That’s why the Shaq moniker. Not because he’s black, because the man went to college. Holy Hells Bells! Have you heard that man speak when a flippin microphone is put before him? That frickin Baby Huey does an OJ hack-n-slash on old Mother English! Take it to the hole Shaq! Yeah, the whole sentence that is. Huh? Mumble, mumble, mumble..Icy Hot! But what if you don’t want to soak in their vile bastardized prose? What shall you do to combat the ways of stoopid? William. Fucking. Shakespeare. Or as I like to say: “Have the will to go Bill” Just as they start going down Dumb-Dumb Lane, just blurt out “Oh Titus! Come hither for art thou speaketh of Dunce! Won’t me lady flower us with brilliance rather than buffoonery? For art thou maketh my soul wander amongst fools” This is like the Brown Note for idiots. They will shit themselves... and steer clear of you for a very, very long time. You have my word on it.

Tags: Shaq, William Shakespeare, Powerbook, English,Word

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So Drunk I Gotta Blow My Car

02/14/2010 08:31 PM

There’s a semi-secret society that is lurking in office parking lots across this great land. Their chariots’ skulking in the furthest reaches of the company lot. Their owners leaving work through side doors, back doors, some leaving under the cover of night. Satanists? Nope. Republicans? Some, but the really messed up ones are the liberal ones, and I mean that in more than political jingo-jango. What’s their shame? They must commence in auto-fellatio to get their Geo’s and Jetta’s to roll. Yes, as if getting a DUI isn’t enough, Da Big Judge throws down a little bonus to add to their embarrassment. They must blow to go. Only in America! God bless her! Oh the humanity… Yep, there’s only one thing to get Mr. Kia’s motor a runnin: your lips.

Can you imagine the embarrassment if you failed in that department also? “Sorry I missed out on the post-game beer fest guys, but I couldn’t get Mr. Kia up, so I was stuck in the stadium parking lot. He just laid there all still… I even had on my special underwear.” Geesh… just shoot me. Naw fuck that, I’d just start riding my bike before I get caught blowing my car by one of my co-workers. I’d mask the bike riding as just a “health kick” that I’m on. Besides, most public transit vehicles have bike racks on them so you can ride and bus all over town, and not be stuck in the back of your Dodge Neon passed out like a pickled douche. The irony of this device is that some inventor was probably wasted off his ass with his law enforcement pals…” hey! I got…I got…hiccup! I got an idea! You guys …I say you guys wanna stop…stop…oh god….stop drunk drivers? You…burp! You…embarrass them! You make them blow their car to start it. THAT’S HOW YOU STOP DRUNK DRIVING! “

Granted there’s nothing stopping these wayward, two-legged science projects from jumping into a friend’s car and rocketing down the highway with the Whitesnake cranked, on a collision course with a nice couple from Poughkeepsie. So we as concerned co-workers need to push the scientific community for that magic bullet, The Drunk V-Chip. It’ll have magical powers. You drink one sip; you get a dent in your car. 2 sips, another dent and a case of The Clap (you’re getting of light here cause I saw that thing hangin’ on your arm at the office party, and it put the ill in Penicillin.) If you dare venture into the land of inebriation, in spite of Mr.V-Chip, well guess what Party Pixie? Good ol’ Mr.V-Chip’s gonna give you a wake up call. Literally. Cause on the third V-Chip strike, you get a phone call from your 19 year old kid from college, telling you to send the check cause tuition is due. What’s that you say? But TSROD, I’m only 25! How can I have a 19-year-old kid? Well there in lay the magic of the V-Chip. Spiting it only makes it fun for him.
So the next time you see one of your fellow co-workers sneaking out the back, surprise them and ask them if they’ve made plans for their kids college fund, cause somewhere out there is a scientist putting Mr. V-chip into motion. Now I’ll drink to that!
Dedicated to my friend Bruce Dow, Rest in Peace.

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