A simple mind

There's no sub in my subconscious, apparently. Witness several of my dreams during this stressful holiday season:

1. I am forced to drive a bus while riding on the roof. Everyone I like or care about is also on the roof of the bus, hanging on for dear life while I skid around corners of an unfamiliar roadway.
2. I am on the third story of a house and the floor is entirely rotted away all around me--I can't take a step.
3. Tigers are the new vermin, infesting my home like mice.
4. I am going someplace and realize I suddenly don't have my purse (three times a week I dream this)
5. Similarly: I realize I lost my wallet two days ago, and missed the 24-hour period in which you can report a stolen credit card. (Is that even a real rule?)

I might as well just dream of a giant billboard reading "YOU ARE NERVOUS AND INSECURE, AND A TERRIBLE DRIVER".

Sing it, sister

http://www.fuckthesouth.com/

Public Service Denouncement

There are these ads on the trains apparently promoting abstinence or vague sexual restraint. They say "Make the first time, the best time!"
Okay, what the hell is that? Are they advocating a lifetime of ever-worsening sex? Damn, that is cold.

The south is bitches redux, plus the midwest too

From time to time I channel my father and offhandedly diss all over hillbillies and country folk and barefoot appalachians and basically anyone not from here. "Damn, those Cardinals fans are FAT," I'll shout at the TV. "Must be all that pork!" Or I'm watching Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and some snaggletoothed mother of 8 is weeping because there's a hole in her outhouse roof. "Lady, if you had fewer damn kids, maybe you'd have some money left over from your job at Walmart!" I snap.
My better half sniffs, "You're such a snob," which is quite true. "Why do you buy all those stereotypes they're feeding you?" she says.
"Look," I usually say, "TV didn't invent the fact that Kansas blacked out the word 'evolution' from all the textbooks. Those people are ignorant, poor, and under the thumb of the fundies." She rolls her eyes.
But from now on, I'm just going to say "W."
It might not turn her into a disgusting class warrior such as myself, but I think she'll get my point.

DAMMIT

Listen up, Florida...you've pissed me off for the last time, all right? I'm coming down there to punch your ballot! In the nuts! And Ohio, YOU'RE NEXT.

So that's why everyone who calls is an elderly red-stater

Apparently William F. Buckley Jr. endorses our product in his autobiography.

ew!

justin timberlake, you suck

Dear JT,
You probably get a lot of mail, and probably most of it is spelled better and punctuated better than that one letter you got from a girl in Massachusetts six weeks ago. But what kind of person doesn't respond to an earnest, hopeful letter from a child living in a HOMELESS SHELTER? Not even a postcard? How hard can you possibly suck?
Sincerely,
Your New Enemy

Smart Dumb

Like most well-adjusted and confident adults, I derive great pleasure from hearing stories about very educated people, geniuses, or people in high positions who do dirt stupid things or are otherwise unfit to handle sharp objects. Ha ha! Professor so and so can't parallel park! Doctor whats-her-name takes gingko biloba! The president choked on a pretzel!

I usually think my boss is pretty stupid, because he can't understand the difference between positive and negative numbers, and because he can't dial 9 for an outside line. But he's just a working stiff so the stories lack punch. But a friend of mine once told me a tale about his boss' boss. My friend was in the bathroom, the men's bathroom, as he is a man, where he was peeing. He hears footsteps coming into the bathroom but they sound funny, kind of like high heels. He turns his head to see what the hell is going on and sees his boss' boss, who is not a man, standing in the men's bathroom looking surprised.

"Whoops," she says.
"Whoops," he agrees.

So this morning, the news announces that this woman, who cannot remember which bathroom she is supposed to use, has won a Nobel Prize.

The South is Bitches.

Southerners like to flatter themselves that they are friendlier and more polite than northerners. This is clearly due to insecurity and lameness, because it has nothing to do with facts. I've just gotten back from some podunk town below the mason dixon line where waiters are constantly commenting on how much and how fast "y'all" are eating. THAT'S BECAUSE YOU TOOK SIXTY-EIGHT MINUTES TO SERVE MY DINNER, WANKER.
And holy shit, what is with kids in the back of pickups? Do they not have cops down there, or even some quaint substitute such as "sheriff"? The entire teenage population of Appalachia was in the back of a pickup truck, threatening to fly out at every corner and land on the hood of the rental car, thereby costing me a deposit.

Dear trash emptier,

I realize there are 10 snickers wrappers in my desk trash can, but they didn't come from me. Honest.

-Shirky

If the office were a person, I'd kick it in the nuts

Last week another department moved their offices down toward our end of the hall, into formerly deserted cube real estate. These new people are just as content to ignore me as everyone else so, fine. Except for one thing.
This new department is the field guide department. They produce the field guides 86 year old birdwatchers favor. So they are apparently really into birds. This actually surprised me. If it were my job, I bet birds would be right at the top of my enemies list.
Because they like birds so much, they have chosen bird calls for their computer noises. So all day long, they're getting email, their damn computers go "chir-ee! chir-eee! I'm a fucking bird!" AND THEN I KILL THEM.

the only exercise I get

In this office, my cubicle, my box of horror, is the one closest to the door. That's where they put you when they hate you. Because, you see, the door is always locked, supposedly for security. You have to have a pass to get through the door. A special pass, too. You can't just use your fourth floor pass way up here, no sir. You need an eighth floor pass to open the gates to THIS hell.
So bitches be losin' their passes all the time. Also, temps and interns are not allowed to have passes. But they are expected to be at work daily, so they have to come up and knock on the door by my cage, and I have to open it.
Besides driving me EVEN CRAZIER, this defeats all building security procedures. If you felt like sneaking into a building full of misery--perhaps your own supplies of wretchedness are running low, and you want to steal a sackful?--you could easily do so. First, you just waltz by the sleepy sentry by the elevator. A short elevator ride later, you smash your face against the glass and bang away on the door. Sooner or later a pissed-off looking, broken-spirited woman will come and smack it open with an open palm, turn on her heel, and stalk back to her cell of torment.
Pretending not to hear the tap-tap-tapping doesn't work. I've tried. Eventually someone else will hear and come stomping by my chair, see me, and realize what a bitch I am. So that's out. So ten times a day I sigh, roll my eyes, and shove back my chair to open the door for some idiot who can't keep a pass pinned to their shirt. Next time I'm asking three riddles, dammit.

all these jobs are better than mine

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,484153-1,00.html

more hate

So most of what I do here is answer the phone. People who can barely drive a mouse, let alone double-click, call from all over the nation (and America Junior!) to lie. Big-time favorite claims: it worked before, I already tried that, it was broken when I got it.

One of the great advantages I have as a customer service worker is that I have zero loyalty to my company and no visibility within it. Since people don't know I exist, no one asks me for regular reports on customer satisfaction or how much of my valuable time I spend chatting with George in Florida about hurricane whoever. Basically, if you call me, I am as desperate as you are for human contact, and will happily spend 35 minutes walking you through instructions I could have emailed you in two seconds flat. Also, since I'm completely unaccountable, I totally send out replacement software to people who have used their original CD to prop up wobbly end tables. No charge! It shows how much I don't care!

Most people are pretty nice when they call. The profile for a jackass caller is midwest or western, male, who totally knows that every marketing scheme we've cooked up, or feature we've added to the software, is a huge business mistake and totally stupid. Take credit cards, for example. There is a set of people, wannabe consumers, who refuse to use credit cards. They call up and they demand that we accept, over the phone, their preferred form of currency, bat teeth or seashells or whatever the hell it is. I tell them sorry, we can only accept credit cards, and then they proceed to act like they represent a huge chunk of the consumer base for this software, and we're so insane for cutting them out, and they're going to post this on their favorite message board, and then the WHOLE INTERNET will know how STUPID we are and will SHUN US.

Right, like hippies living off the grid in teepees with their solar powered computers are really our target market, dude. Go shear a sheep.

hating

Here's why I hate my job. My boss sends email messages like this:

I forget what the parenthesized red figures mean?

Seriously. He does. More than once. And for several years. So I hate my job more than any job I've ever hated, including third-shift stuff and hot-sun stuff. Sunday nights send me into crying fits, and I hate meeting new people because they ask me what I do, and then laugh when I blanch.

Most days at work I don't do much. There's plenty to do, but I have to save my energy for the three flights of stairs that lead to the vending machine. Three flights! That's like, a mile and a half on the moon, right?

I used to play scrabble online, but constantly hovering over alt+tab and twitchily positioning my chair in front of the computer got tiring. Plus, I'm really bad at Scrabble.

For a while I had a little web route. Kind of like the Family Circus where one of the insufferable children wander around unsupervised, tipping over garbage cans and breaking windows. I'd hop from blog to blog looking for crumbs of entertainment and links to further work-avoidance possibilities. But after a while I got sick of the blogs or they all quit updating. The Onion only comes around once a week, so I was bored. Bored enough to resolve to be a better worker! Finish reports on time! Stop exaggerating to my boss about how long it takes to get product samples shipped from the warehouse! Clean up my desk! Get Organized once and For All.

So that lasted about 2 hours. One of those was lunch.

When you're this bored at work, when you hate a job this much, when you loathe your boss and detest your office, and dream of a city-wide blaze destroying the entire tainted block your building sits on, there's only one thing to do: start your OWN blog.