Town Website

Dear Small Massachusetts Town: Somehow it is 2010 and your official town website does not come up in a Google search. Instead, the #1 search result is an unofficial page full of Linkshare ads for Barnes & Noble. I like B&N as much as the next gal, but my bosses don't give a shit about free shipping. They want meeting agendas and zoning regulations.

I finally found it after adding "town of" to my search, and only then does it show up at #7. Do you even have paved roads?

A Fine Display of Patriotism

I don't know about you, but I don't really find sticking a flag in the claw of a dead boiled lobster all that Ha Ha funny. This guy doesn't love America, if he'd stayed far enough away from it he'd still be alive instead of posing for some company's 4th of July cookout flyer. Melting pot...they weren't kidding.

Muffin

Dear Taker of One Quarter of the Chocolate Chip Muffin: Just take the whole damn thing. Or cut it in half. With a quarter I don't know what parts you touched. It's worthless now.

Ode to Summer

At last it's here, these summer days,
With Winter gone so far away.
The beach, the sun, they're quite the perks.
Except for those who have to work.

The weather jerk on Channel 10,
Says "Great day for the beach, stay home if you can!"
"The sun is out, it sure looks swell!"
To him I say, "Just go to Hell."

These summer months are all enjoyed,
By teachers, kids, the unemployed.
The rest of us stuck at our desks,
It turns us into jealous wrecks.

I used to drive up to the mall,
At lunch in Winter, Spring, and Fall.
But now it's always over-run,
With teenaged punks and carefree fun.

Instead I eat my lunch outside,
At the picnic table my building provides.
I enjoy the weather, it's picturesque,
But my boss can watch me from his desk.

Weekends always bring some rain,
Then Monday brings bright sun again.
His sick sense of humor sure is stellar,
That patron saint of office dwellers.

~ Secretary4Life

Summer

It's that wonderful time of year again - time to hide all my Facebook friends who post status updates about going to the beach and sleeping late on weekdays. See ya in the Fall turdfaces.

Yeah, I Wrote This

Published in The Chick Lit Review May/June 2009, a site that is unfortunately going offline in October.  I won't take it personally.

The gray fabric wall loomed up between them as it always did.  Gray and suffocating without the slightest intention of turning into an escape route to the outside world or at least some sort of screen where she could maybe watch some television.  The Price is Right would be nice.  It was about 11:00 a.m. and there would be a fresh new set of contestants who had the day off from work, or were unemployed, or were just plain lucky to be there, ready to bid on canned vegetables and fabric softener, and not stuck in here.  Here being an office on the 13th floor of a building in a city whose name does not particularly matter.  The name of the company does not particularly matter either as they are all very generic, with their cubicle walls that loom and refuse to turn into televisions or escape routes.  From within a cubicle Bridget Baxter-McSweeney tipped an entire cardboard box of paper clips into her hand, stood up, and poured them over the wall.  Click here to read the rest while you still can...

My Heart Belongs to You, Frodo

Many people that know me, and know that I’m a nerd, would be very surprised to hear that when The Fellowship of the Ring arrived in theaters in 2001, I had barely even heard of The Lord of the Rings.   It was not until after I went to see the movie that I picked up the book that my mother had lying around the house.  From the very first chapter, all those hobbits and elves and characters that you only talk about when making fun of your reclusive cousin, really sucked me in.  LoTR became my favorite book and set off chain of total dweebism rivaled only by Samwise Gamgee himself.  You see, the year 2001 also coincided with my graduating college and having not yet found a job.  I was faced with oodles of free time and a new goal to read all the books that I should have been forced to read back in high school.  To tell you the truth I’m not sure why I didn’t read them in high school.  I was in marching band for Christ’s sake.  Dweebism was rampant. 

Anyway, when I finished Lord of the Rings I moved on to Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Once I had my fill of demented, deformed, and ostracized freaks, I moved on to Jane Austen to get my fill of dainty 1800’s girls who didn’t have jobs and waited around sewing doilies until a husband turned up.  Didn’t take long to get sick of those.   When I finally did find a job I began spending nearly every lunch hour reading.  For the next 3 or 4 years I plowed thru book after book, covering everything from Animal Farm to Gone with the Wind to Huck Finn.  I looked pretty damn intellectual sitting in Wendy’s with my copy of The Silmarillion.  Yeah, I’m the one person who bought that book.  It's like the bible of Middle Earth if you must know.  

After about 4 years of this I began to slow it down.  The old time language started to wear on my brain.  I tried reading a Charlotte Bronte book a few months ago and couldn’t even finish it.   I think my body is rejecting anything written prior to 1996.  But I’m proud of what I accomplished.  I didn’t waste a single minute of personal time that I was given at work.  And that is kind of the point of this article.  Use your lunch hour to do something for YOU.  Read a book, work on your blog, go outside and take pictures, whatever.  If you don’t absolutely need to work through your lunch hour, then don’t.

I did good, and you can too. 

Dear Lean Cuisine,

Maybe if you made your portions bigger people wouldn't need to eat Cheetos from the vending machine at 3:00.

Note to self - maybe if you didn't eat lunch at 11:00 am you wouldn't need to eat Cheetos at 3:00. Touché.

Google Massage

Google Maps has taken to asking me if I'm looking for a massage parlor everytime I search for directions at work.

Pickle

4:30 pickle break. Too late in the afternoon for bad breath to be of any concern.

My DIY project of the Day

I bought a French Memo Board at the Christmas Tree Shops this weekend. Ok, ok, so it has a weird orange stain on it. So what? What do you expect for $6.99? Which, come to think of it, is probably what I could've paid for a non-stained one at Target. But that's not my point. My point is that I've always wanted one of these and I finally bought one with the intent to put it in my cubicle at work. I figured I couldn't hang it up so I planned to just put it on my desk and lean it against the wall. Well that looked extremely stupid, nevermind all the potential for sliding down and knocking over my coffee.

The back of the board has two of those jagged tooth looking things that you're supposed to hang from a nail. Yeah that's right, jagged tooth looking things. You already know I hate Home Depot, so why would I know what they're called? All the supplies I had were a bunch of cubicle clips - those little clips that have two sharp metal pins in the back that slide into the fabric. I really wanted to thread a piece of string between the jagged tooth things and then hang it from the cube clips, but where is there a ball of twine when you need it? Not in this office. Not to mention cream, good lighting, and some damn privacy. I didn't want to wait until I went home to find string or wire or whatever, so I had to get resourceful. I spotted a silver sparkly piece of wire that I had saved off a Christmas present for God knows what reason. It had sparkly stars hanging from it which I promptly cut off. I wrapped the wire tight around the jagged tooth thingies, hung it from 3 cubicle clips, and voila!

I'm pretty proud of myself. That is, until tomorrow when it falls down, knocks over my coffee, gets stained brown, and I throw the whole thing in the trash.

Netiquette

This is actually in my IT textbook. It's covering the basics.

Today Sucked

GoToMeeting

I assume everyone has seen one of those GoToMeeting commercials.  I mean everybody watches TLC on Friday nights from 8:00 - ll:00 p.m. and then goes to bed, am I right?  There was a time when this GoToMeeting ad aired during every commercial break.  Sometimes more than once per commercial break.  I'm not sure how the advertising execs settled on that time slot but I think it went something like this:

Ad Exec: 1  "Hey Joe, hypothetically speaking, say you're a businessman who's sent to a conference in Vegas.  It's Friday night, 10:00 p.m...what are you doing?" 

Ad Exec 2:  "Sinking into a 7 hour marathon of Say Yes to the Dress.

Ad Exec 1: "Excellent."

Anyway, these GoToMeetings commercials exist to inform us that attending meetings via your computer is way better than the utter turmoil encountered when one must pack a duffel bag and attend a meeting in person.  Because God knows, nobody likes to get out of the office.  Meetings are especially troublesome when your employees are as bland as this cast of characters.  The fact that they're supposed to represent office workers who we can relate to is fairly insulting.  Though I can appreciate their lack of enthusiasm.  One guy's sole purpose in the commercial is to slink out from the side of the screen in a pair of khakis and a blue denim shirt and stand next to a list of bullet points.  Then there's this woman who looks like President Taylor from 24 and Rosie O'Donnell had a baby together.  She says something about how GoToMeeting allows you to do things you never did before.  Apparently that means wearing a beige colored cardigan over a beige colored tank that comes up to your adam's apple.  I mean, wouldn't you at least try to look nice if you're going to be on television?  Maybe she didn't know that the ad would run 4,700 times per night, or maybe she did it as part of her community service for attacking a co-worker with a heavy duty stapler.  Who knows.  All I'm saying is that if you're going to be on t.v., whatever the reason, wear some color.  

And let's not forget the guy who tells us that with GoToMeeting he actually made money.  When he says "made money" he does this downward pointing hand motion that he practiced in the bathroom mirror, which is depressing enough in itself, but what I want to know is how did he make money?  I guess he could've sold a few more sets of encyclopedias while he was in the office instead of at his meeting in Tulsa, but in all likelihood he was on Facebook.  So don't lie to me man. 

In summary, with GoToMeeting you can save time and money by hiring unattractive actors and dressing them in waiter uniforms from Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse.

Feet: Who Needs 'Em

Feet have no place in the office.  In a perfect world, feet would have no place on the human body either. But until evolution decides to grow pogo sticks out of our ankles, those unappealing appendages are here to stay.  At work there is no need to show an excessive amount of foot.  I will admit that I broke this rule today by wearing a very summery shoe that just covered my dogs in an array of criss-crossy straps, but I had a good excuse.  I was going to get a pedicure during lunch and I didn’t want to ruin it by stuffing my feet back into work shoes.   If there is one thing that I will not allow work to ruin it’s my damn pedicure. They’ve already ruined coffee and a large portion of the Internet.  Anyway, the shoes I wore were summery but still somewhat dressy.  I certainly did not want to return to the office in a pair of flip-flops. Flip-flops in the office are a crime against humanity, and God help us all if a man ever tries to pull that one off.  If I ever see a hairy man-foot clad in flip-flops, or worse yet, a decade old pair of Ann & Hope Tevas, anywhere in the vicinity of my desk, he’d better head for the hills.  And unfortunately for him, you can’t really run in those things.

Moving on, if you’ve got bunions or calluses, that shit’s not professional.  If you’ve got a harelip, fine, not much you can do there.   But it’s fair to say that you could easily keep your hammertoe out of sight. And then there's that sound. A friend of mine used to refer to the flip-flop sound as “bologna suction cups.”  That sweaty thwack thwack thwack, like a curled up piece of bologna being suctioned off the backseat of a Buick in July.  Only not as poetic.

In short, feet are gross. Keep ‘em at least partially covered at work, do what you want with ‘em at home, and I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for pogo sticks.

Coffee-Mate

What exactly does "contains milk ingredients" mean? I thought the only ingredient in milk was milk. Or does that mean it's made out of multiple milk products? Then what the hell does THAT mean? They're making Coffeemate out of cheeses and yogurt? No wonder it tastes like shit.

Sucks

Four days of relaxation wiped clean in less than 30 minutes. That might be a record.