Four Ways to Survive the Summer While Stuck in a Cubicle
1. If you have younger friends and relatives who are still in school, do yourself a favor and hide them from your Facebook news feed. If you are like me, you spend a good part of your day reading people's useless status updates while you are pretending to work. The last thing that you need to see while trapped at your desk are pictures of tanned college kids frolicking at the beach in the middle of the God damned afternoon. Yeah, we know, you shop at Hollister. You’ll just end up filled with rage, shouting "get a job!!!" at your iPhone while your boss walks by wondering what that blank Excel sheet did to upset you so much. It's best to just pretend that college kids don't exist. Rather than basking in rays of sunshine, you can instead bask in the thought that someday soon they will graduate and be as miserable as you are.
2. Get some good island-y music going. If my son didn't demand to listen to Could This Be Love on a loop during every car ride we take, I would probably be listening to Bob Marley right now. But there are plenty of other reggae artists out there and infinite Pandora stations to choose from. Or, if you don't like reggae, you can always make a playlist consisting of Kokomo and that Paris Hilton song from a few years ago. Remember, the one that made you want to kill yourself? Well now it's going to make you feel terrific. This kind of music will lighten your mood and make sorting that 3-foot stack of filing seem like you're building a sand castle. Or, if you're not delusional, it will make sorting that 3-foot stack of filing just a little less sucky.
3. Go out and get an ice coffee. I don't care if they give you diarrhea. GO OUT AND GET AN ICE COFFEE. They're delicious, they caffeine you up real nice, and unless you work at Google and there are ice coffee waterfalls literally cascading down the God damned corridors, it'll get you out of the office for a few minutes. Leave your purse at your desk and some kind of boring report up on your screen so nobody will notice that you're out. If you want to get fancy, I recommend a Coconut Mocha Frappuchino from Starbucks, or a Mocha Ice Coffee from Dunkin Donuts. And don't worry about the money. Remember, it's summer and getting an ice coffee is pretty much all that we have to live for. So spend it.
4. Take advantage of office road trips. Okay, yes, I turned down a drive into Boston last week. But me driving your precious delivery into Boston is the equivalent of me driving it straight into the Atlantic Ocean. Those roads are like the moving staircases at Hogwarts. But if something needs to be delivered anywhere else in the tri-state area, I’m all over it. One of the best work days I ever had was spent delivering plans to New Hampshire on a Friday afternoon in April. It was 75 degrees outside, I had my ice coffee (see above), I opened the sun roof, and I took a nice jaunt up I-495. Take your time. Fabricate traffic jams. However, stick to simple drop-off/pick-up road trips only. If the trip involves any kind of jerk caveat like "By the way, you have to first stop in Lawrence and get signatures from these three homeless guys," then simply pass the road trip along to an intern.
