Worst Things of 2009

That GoTo Meeting commercial that played six times a commercial break on TLC.

Best Thing of 2009

Went out at 11:15 to run some errands and bring back lunch.  Returned to the office to find everybody else heading out to a group lunch.  Here's to 2 hours of peace, quiet, and Lostpedia.

Worst Things of 2009

"I get 1,000 hugs from 10,000 lightning bugs."

Worst Things of 2009

Going to the downstairs ladies room and finding somebody else in there.

Christmas

Offices have the unique ability to always produce the opposite results of what they intend - take for example any attempt by management to organize a “fun” event in which you are supposed to bond with your coworkers. The end result of this event is that the coworkers you already disliked you now dislike even more, and the ones you didn’t really know you now know enough to dislike.

Christmastime around the office is no exception. Nothing makes you long for your own living room like watching the office Christmas tree be removed from the storage tubs that its been crammed into for the past 11 months, its tubular sections of aluminum trunk snapped into place, and its molded polymer needles fluffed by an underpaid receptionist. The empty paper boxes that are gift wrapped and placed under the tree always keep me in eager anticipation of Christmas morning. God help me if I ever wake up at the office on Christmas morning.

Starbucks

Get the hell outta Starbucks you college kids on break. This is the place where miserable coffee addicted secretaries come on their lunch hour to pretend they're writers, it is not for you.

Sensors

The light sensors in the ladies room sensed me and turned on. When I left I suspect they turned off. Something to think about in the new year.

My stress was not relieved

I Wish

New Year

I hope somebody ordered me a 2010 desk blotter. I don't want to miss out on any blank squares.

Today

Today I will leave for lunch and finally, like I've always dreamed of,not come back. It's a half day.

Lunch

The lunch I ordered for a 12:00 meeting arrived on time and was placed in the conference room. I laid the forks next to the pickles.

Toner

I tried to put a Dell toner in my Brother printer. You can imagine what happened next! It didn't fit.

Birthday

On this day 31 years ago I was born. On this day 31 years later I was bored.

Ladies Room

Since I came back from maternity leave the ladies room in my office building has, no pun intended, gone down the toilet.

1st Attempt: Entered stall number 1 and went to hang my coat and bag from the door hook only to discover the hook dangling precariously from the tips of its screws. As there was no other place to hang my stuff, I moved over to stall number 2.

2nd Attempt: Entered stall number 2 which had a fully functioning hook and hung up my bag, only to discover the door is so warped that the lock barely reaches the other side and there is a 2 inch gap where everybody at the sinks can get a full frontal peep show. By having the audacity to hang my coat and bag from the hook I warped the door an extra millimeter causing it to burst open. Onward to stall number 3!

3rd Attempt: The third stall, which used to have a newly installed and very solid sliding latch, for reasons unknown now has no lock at all. Somebody just took it. My last resort before having to head to an Exxon station was to move on to the handicapped stall.

4th Attempt: The handicapped stall, despite almost getting trapped due to a lock that requires a shot of human growth hormone in order to unlatch, was a success.

Thanks

A woman from the office across the hall just tailgated me through the parking lot.

UGH

PDF'd an ENF ASAP.

Gray Cubicle Fabric

Office Christmas Party

Avoiding coworkers from other branches was a nice change of pace.

Environment

Pretty sure the several thousand pages of draft environmental report I've printed out have a worse impact on the environment than the strip mall we're building.

The Neighbors

I returned to work this week to find that absolutely nothing had changed in the land of bad coffee and outdated computer monitors.  Once I sterilized my desk and confirmed that for 8 weeks nobody did any of my filing, it was time to get back to the business of hating things.  Today's topic is the annoying people who inhabit the hallway outside my office.  Anybody whose company shares a building with at least one other company has their own versions of these mutants, so let's get to it:

1)  Cellbert.  This guy is constantly in the hallway on his cell phone, but unlike a normal person he's not making a personal call.  He's on a work call, on his cell phone, in the hallway.   He's always in the middle of some mega-crisis using phrases like "You're killin' me!"  and "I'm havin' a real helluva week!" If you judge by the shit you hear him saying he's pretty high up in the company so I find it odd that he spends half his day sitting outside the restroom between two ficus trees.  Oftentimes with a Cellbert it's hard to tell if he's saying hello to you or to the person he's talking to on the phone, resulting in you oftentimes sounding like an idiot.  It's best to just ignore a Cellbert and continue on your way to the ladies room.

2) Crazy Muppet-faced Lady.  I dunno, this lady just looks like a crazed muppet.  She's often on her cell phone and may speak in either really fast English or some kind of Croatian.  Not quite sure.  She wears short skirts with pumps and takes these really big strides that are just gross.  Avoid her on the road as it can be assumed that she also drives like a maniac.

3) I'm Better Than You Because I Work at My Company and Not Your Company.  This is your run of the mill snob who can't make eye contact and never says hello.  From the way she flounces out of her office you'd think she's in there drinking highballs with Blake Carrington all afternoon.  Hey guess what?  You manage car loans and I build Walmarts, I think we're pretty much on the same playing field.  Also, I've heard you pee.

4)  Trent.  This guy looks exactly like Vince Vaughn in Swingers.  I'm not sure where he works or what he does other than come to work in a zoot suit and walk around the hallway smiling at chicks.

I wish there was a tunnel that I could take from my desk to the ladies room but I don't think that's gonna happen, not in this economy.

At least none of these people think I'm weird.

Lean Cuisine

To be safe, I put my Lean Cuisine back into the microwave for an extra minute. Nobody else was waiting to use the microwave.

Power

We lost power today due to the severe weather. When it came back on everything looked the same.

Pendaflex

The "W" tab has been torn from my Pendaflex. I taped it back on so I may continue to file "W" entitled documents.

Stall

Somebody and/or some thing has removed the lock from the door of restroom stall number three, once my favorite of the stalls.

Work

Back to work tomorrow. It'll be nice to hate everything again.

Annoyances

I always knew being home all day would drive me insane.  But I never expected it to be because of two asshole cats.  Let's review a list of the things that have driven me off the deep end and about 15 seconds away from slugging my cats with a sack full of soiled Pampers Swaddlers:

1)  When I feed the baby it takes about 30 minutes.  This is 30 minutes in which I can't get up and probably shouldn't yell at anybody as supposedly the baby senses my anger.  The cats take this opportunity to do all or any combination of the following:  eat plants, eat tinsel, destroy the Christmas tree, knock the bottle cover off the counter, wrestle, rip the activity gym to shreds, and pick a fight with another cat thru the sliding glass door.

2)  My cats eat twice a day.  According to the vet who suggested this brilliant plan of attack for one of my cat's obesity problems, they would soon learn that they only get fed twice a day and they would eat enough at each meal to tide them over.  Well let's see:  every single time, on every single day, whenever I walk in even the remotest vicinity of the closet where the cat food is kept I find myself being tripped and meowed at as if Dr. Purrbusters Catnip Chorale were putting on a performance behind the door and they've just gotta get front row seats.  They don't learn.

3)  Cat toys and baby toys are one and the same.  They're either soft and fluffy or they rattle and crinkle. The cats, not being the brightest little fellas (see number 2 above), think that we converted an entire room of our house into a cat palace.  One of them decided to make the changing pad into his bed.  It now has to have a piece of aluminum foil sitting on it.  Lovely.  Recently they both discovered the crib where I often find the two of them curled up in the corner giving each other a cleaning.  Great.  Now I gotta keep the nursery door shut.  This is great too because now instead of hanging out in there all night, the cats will climb all over us as we sleep.  They also love to lay on (and under, figure that one out) the activity gym which is now full of claw holes.  The monkeys and other rainforest animals that hang from it are coated with cat fur thus creating the Rainforest Activity Gym and Allergen Den.

Enough about the cats.  Here's some other things that I can't stand:

1)  The Diaper Genie is only full when you are trying to shove in a diaper that is bursting at the seams with turds.

2)  Great Value trash bags from Stop & Shop.  Are they a joke?  I pulled one out of the box and poked my finger right through.  Then when I tried to pull it out of the trash can the handles ripped off.

3) Days of Our Lives hasn't changed since I stopped watching it ten years ago.  Bo & Hope, what are they 60 by now?  How many years are they going to keep getting married and divorced?  Listen up Bo & Hope, someday you're going to die.  Face it.  You can't spend your whole life breaking up and getting back together, it's unnatural.  Someday you're going to be 90 years old and then it'll be sayonara Fancy Face.

4) Also in daytime t.v. - Dr. Oz is a creep, Jennifer Love Hewitt can apparently only speak to the dead when she's wearing a low cut top, and I hate to break it to you QVC, but you can buy a cheap watch for ten bucks at any Walmart.  Nobody's gonna faint or go into throws of ecstasy when they pull that QVC logo'd box out of their stocking.

5)  I was watching Oprah yesterday and she had a girl on whose father was a serial killer.  Then she calls out this other woman who was supposedly the only victim of his who ever got away.  Oprah says "this could have been any one of you!"  The woman comes out and tells her story which was:  she had come out of a grocery store at 10:00 p.m. carrying her 4 month old baby.  She saw the serial killer in the parking lot and struck up a conversation with him.  He seemed like a friendly chap.  She then GOT INTO HIS CAR AND DROVE TO THE WOODS.  With the baby on her lap of course, safety first with this woman.  He then proceeded to try to murder her.  Hey Oprah, why don't you find out your idiot guest's stories before you announce to all the hysterical women in your audience that this could've happened to any one of them.

In summary, while I enjoyed being home with my son, I am quite ready to head back to work.  My cubicle is going to suck and I'm going to hate everyone that I work with within 2 weeks of returning, but at least for a few more years I will never have to find out if Bo & Hope got back together.

Garbage Disposal

Just sent half a cup of potato peels and approximately 1/4 of an onion down the garbage disposal.

Target

One of the Target worker's shirts was the wrong shade of red.