So I did what all good sales people do when this happens.  I started looking for a new sales job.

Oh I did it discretely of course, but word got around.  I’m known in the biz.  So I got a nice set of interviews lined up.  And even though I don’t like going straight to the competition (that’s a little gauche, isn’t it?), I scheduled one for Nussey, Zucker, and Milch just for good measure.  You know, my safety net.

A week went by after my interviews and no word.  So I made my polite call backs and got the run-around.  Not good news.  I called NZM — surely they’d be putting together an offer, right?  I was shuffled from clerk to admin to low-level functionary, until I finally put my foot down (so to speak) and insisted on talking to someone in charge.  I got the head of HR.

“Tammy, I’m sorry that you had to wait on the phone.  Since you’re in sales and understand the way things are done, I’ll just ask how you want to handle this.  Do you want to go back and forth for a while and meander around until I finally tell you in delicate but obvious terms what’s going on, or do you want it straight up?”

I considered a moment.  Honestly I didn’t have time for the games.  ”Straight up.”

“No problem,” he replied.  ”We had an offer all put together for you, but our boss rescinded it at the last minute.”

“You’re kidding?  What gives?”

“Seems someone here had some dirt on you and the boss didn’t want it in his house.  I’m sure you can understand.”

I was incensed!  Some dirt?  On me?  ”Who was it?”

“Oh Tammy, you know I can’t tell you that.  Anyway you wanted it straight up — there it is.  Gotta motor.  Sorry it didn’t work out.  Oh, and by the way, we’ve gotten wind that Tom’s aware you’re looking, so if you’ve got something else ready to go you’d better take it or else just suck it up about the restructuring before Tom gets fed up and cans you.  Good luck!”  I hung up the phone and took a long lunch.  I would say that the whole thing was a sobering experience, but that would not describe my long lunch.

All-in-all, it’s given me something to work on.  I’m going to improve my sales numbers (because even being #1 means I can still get better) and find out who ratted on me.  And when I do, let’s just say that they won’t have to worry about #1 — they should worry about #2.

Then I walked through the front door.

It started with Jan.  She had some records she needed me to get from the sub-basement.  Yeah, the one that’s being fumigated for mold or rats or maybe moldy rats.  And Rachel wanted me to read all these articles on some obscure compliance auditing method and write up a digest of each one — before her 10 o’clock meeting to present them to the Corporate Risk Management Committee.  Tom wanted me to put out an ad for actors for some “secret project” he was working on for the end of the month, and Carlotta insisted I fax this giant stack of shipping receipts to her cousin Dino.  When I asked why she got all defensive and told me to just do it (sigh).

It was about four as the last page was going through the fax machine when Phil came up to me with a demand that I get moving on collating the Loblaw report before he had to have it in to the courier in order to make the last overnight pickup.  So I dug in and started collating the pages, stapling, hole-punching, and (at the same time) calling my folks to let them know that I’d maybe be a little late and to start without me.  It was right before five as I was handing Phil the perfectly collated report, he took it from me, and I turned to get my coat and keys that it happened.  ”Hey, where are you going?” he called back after me.  ”I need the metrics calculated for Monday’s staff meeting!”  He held out a folder of papers expectantly.

“But that meeting’s not until 11.  I can do it first thing!  And I have a thing to get to.”

“Whatever.  I don’t want to be worrying about it all weekend.  Just bang it out and text me when it’s done.  C’mon, I’m gonna be late for happy hour at Schnookers.”  He shook the papers in his hand, expecting me to take them.

Unfortunately that’s when I snapped.  I snatched them from his hand and started slapping them on the desk as I walked toward him defiantly.  ”I (smack) will (smack) do (smack) it (smack) on (smack) Monday (smack) morning (smack)!”  And with that, I threw the folder in his face and stomped out.

So of course I got in early this morning and did the metrics and had them ready for Phil on his desk before 8.  I’m honestly not quite sure how the rest of the day is going to go for me.  But it turned out I was right after all — it was the best birthday ever.

So when he took the servers down for maintenance and the blog server wouldn’t come back up, I thought it was just another of his typical attention-getting stunts.  But after his promised deadline came and went, it was obvious it was really broken.  Tom helpfully told him to just reinstall it.  But the blog server also has our quasi-legal iTunes office music server.  And since Brad hacked the install code, he couldn’t just do that.  He needed the tapes from the offsite backup.  Yeah, and that’s in Nebraska somewhere.

So Brad hops in his car and forces us to promise not to use email until he gets back.  ”You’ll just break it and then you won’t have email until I get back to fix it.”  Jane tried to ask why that would be functionally any different from promising not to use it, but Brad just reminded us of our promise and drove away in his Volvo.

I tried to call him from time to time and get an ETA, but I could never get a clear answer.  He finally showed back up at the office three days later having drive non-stop for 36 hours.  Turns out the tapes are stored in Maine, not Nebraska.  Would have been smart to check that before leaving, huh?  But he got in, spun up the backup tapes, restored the blog server (and here we are again, taa daa), and all was well.

He was feeling pretty good about himself until he dove into three days of missed emails.  He’d missed something from the vendor explaining how to recover the blog server in case of a crash.  And no, he didn’t need the tapes.

Anyway even though Ned had insisted on giving me all the alarm sounds himself I had nothing anymore, and if I went back to him to ask to re-record them, he’d figure out that I’d lost them.  So even though I’d built a sweet iPhone app for Ned to trigger over 40 different types of alarms over our office PA system, I was two days away from go-live with no viable alarm sounds.  My entire house of punchcards was about to come crashing down on me.

Then I heard it.

I wasn’t originally sure I knew who it was, but after listening for several minutes I figured out it was Mallory, one of the new folks over in Operations.  She must have been practicing scales or something, but she was singing in the supply closet.  Suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration.  I grabbed a digital audio recorder and captured it all.  And back at my desk, I worked my magic.  A little reverb here and we had our Toxic Gases alarm.  A little backmasking there and voila, we had our Escaped Animal alert.  After just three hours of taking the same few sounds, working and blending them, I was done.  Then I could finally work on installing those security patches Microsoft’s been telling me about the last few weeks.

Later, as I was demoing the system for the office, I was cycling through the alarms and explaining each one.  Everyone seemed pretty impressed until the very end when Tom spoke up.  ”That’s great work, Brad, but what’dja do to get those alarms?  Record Mallory singing and just mess with the sound board settings?  How hard could that have been?”

I am fail.  Hear me squeak.

So I walk into the break room Friday for lunch, and I’m going to warm up some soup I made myself.  It had been a bad morning, and I was looking forward to a little comfort food.  My mom’s old shrimp chowder recipe.  Kinda reminds me of home when work’s been sucky all week.  So I open the fridge and look around for my bag.  I rummage around and it’s just not there.  About that time, I detect this strange odor coming from the microwave, something like badly burnt seafood and cream.  The microwave dings and I carefully open it.  And of course the inside looks like that scene from Gremlins (you know what I’m talking about).  And there in this smoldering, half-melted tub of plastic, is my chowder.  Right then Tug walks in past me, grabs it out of the microwave, and whisks back out again, carrying the stench of disappointment and ill-gotten gains with him.

I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but I started crying.  Not only did I not have any lunch, but that … rat took the one thing that made the week worthwhile.  I fumed about it all weekend, but I got over it.

Besides, I brought in a slice of my trademark Ex-Lax chocolate cake and left it in the fridge for later.

We are so excited about the entire upcoming season we have in store for you.  Be sure to tune back in tomorrow, because we know you’ll love “The All-American”!

So the bad news is that we’re going to suspend the blog posts for a little while, but good news is that we’ll pick them back up in late July just in time for the release of Season 3′s new video content!  So sit back, enjoy a refreshing beverage of your choice, maybe catch a soccer game on the boob tube, and rest your eyes.  We’ll be coming back at you in a few weeks with new and improved hilarity!  See you then!

Anyway I play golf once a month with a guy I know at our arch-competitor, Nussey, Zucker, and Milch.  It’s a casual game, or so I’d like him to think.  The truth is that I use it to ferret out intel from him about how things are going with them.  I’m mostly interested in the usual stuff that it in that fertile area below company top secrets (like what are their financials like this quarter) and above thinly-veiled intentional marketing leaks (Oh wow, did I leave my top-secret prototype iPhone at the bar?  Man, I need to be more careful with that thing or Steve’s gonna be ticked!).

So there’s not much to report this month, but let’s just say I need to make sure I don’t cancel next month, since I’ve got a big feeling that they’re on the verge of making some kind of big announcement and I need to get the jump on it.  My guy was acting all cagey, but he let me take a second mulligan on the back nine.  My research shows when he does that, they announce a new product an average of 6.8 weeks later.

You see?  That’s why I got game, kid.  Keep your eyes and ears open and you might learn a few things.

As you may recall, the last boat outing ended very badly.  I will not shame our distinguished leader by recounting it in detail, but suffice it to say that Tom insisted we all come out for a trip around the lake, a bit of awkward and unavoidable social time together, and an opportunity to expose our skin to destructive, carcinogenic radiation.  Regardless I wished to make Tom’s invitation successful, so I arrived on time only to find I was the only one to have accepted.  We shared a brief shameful moment at the realization.

Tom, ever the consummate host, nevertheless insisted we sail around the lake a bit.  As we set out, Tom piloted the boat clumsily, yet pulled us out into the main flow of traffic after fewer than seventeen attempts.  As we puttered about the large lake, there were very, very many others who were also inexperienced and likely intoxicated.  I silently hoped that Tom would steer clear of them.

Unfortunately, we drew within a few feet of another boat whose occupants were all dressed like seamen.  Oh, pirates, yes.  Suddely as we passed by they threw a grappling hook, which caught on the front handrail.  The burly seamen began to reel us in.  Tom attempted to steer us away, but they were already aboard.

“Dude, where’s your beer?” said one moments before Tom knocked him overboard with a boathook.  ”You scratched my new deck!” Tom shouted after him.  Meanwhile I was busy subduing two others who had stepped onto the foredeck.  Within seconds I had lashed one to the mast and thrown the other back into the boat from whence they had originated.  The attack ended just as quickly as it had begun.

As we sailed back to the harbor to drop off our new passenger at the harbormaster’s office, Tom remarked at what an amazing team we’d made fending off the intruders.  I blushed self-consciously, unwilling to admit that I had been a little slow to react and that my skills garnered from years of fending Somali pirates off from commercial freighters had obviously gotten rusty.  I simply thanked him and remained quiet.  Upon reaching land again, he insisted that we must go boating again.  I nodded, this time with no hope that we would be joined by our landlubber coworkers.  We would be able to handle the pirates just fine ourselves.

Still, there’s nothing like being the one with all the information.  It’s like being the center of the universe.  I really hope that I find a way to figure out what’s going on.  I mean, without having to worry about it.  ’Cause that’s one thing I don’t have time for.

I’ll explain.  He’s apparently not getting in at 7:00 or leaving after 6:00 anymore.  He’s not volunteering for the … less glamorous jobs we have here at Branch 7.  And for sure he’s not greeting us with the same chipper, go-get-em attitude he’s become famous for.  And by famous I mean reviled, of course.  Still with all that we’ve done for that young man, I’m concerned for his level of company alignment.  I mean that’s why we have the intern program at all — so we can bring on young, fresh-faced go-getters with hearts full of ambition and drive to change the world and show ‘em what business is really like!  If they didn’t want to know what it was like to be part of a successful business, they should have gone and worked for Goldman-Sachs or something!

But the truth is we’re getting more than our money’s worth out of Kevin, so we need to look into what’s wrong.  We can’t go losing one of our most valuable interns (one of our two interns to be entirely accurate) because of anything we can do something about.  And though this is normally an HR matter, I’ve recently been asked by corporate not to give any new HR-related work to Jan, our Director of HR.  I didn’t really read that memo — the gist of it was that I needed to treat this matter with an unusual level of concern.  So I’m gonna have one of our other go-getters start mentoring him, to see if we can salvage the boy.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to make Phil’s day really unpleasant.

“Honey,” she told me confidentially, “You really should smoke his sausage.”

I was perplexed, because I’d been handling his sausage ever since our first date.  Sometimes I’d pan-fry it, sometimes I’d boil it, sometimes simmered in a light sauce.  But this was a new angle.  His mom bought me a smoker and showed me how to use it.

“Careful with the smoke,” she warned me, as I was trying it myself for the first time.  “You don’t want it too thick or else it won’t be even all the way around.”  After a few minutes of her watching me (and evern showing me by smoking a few herself), she declared me a pro and said that she’d let me smoke her son’s sausage any time.

“In fact,” she said, “My husband’s been having me smoke his sausage for years.  Some people say variety is the spice of life, but maybe those folks never had a sausage smoked the way I do.  It’s pretty special.”

I had to agree with her.  Wouldn’t you?

So I ask you, do I look like a genie in a bottle?  No, I didn’t think so.

As a result of this, I’ve had to endure a seemingly endless parade of supplicants at my doorstep, requesting some of the company’s munificence.  Of course, I’m under strict orders not to give any out, so I’ve had to say “no” an awful lot lately.  In fact, I’ve become a kind of gatekeeper for the company’s hoard, a goalie for the gold, a master of the moolah.  Whatever.

But saying “no” to each and every one of my colleagues who’s asked for money for his or her meaningless pet project was starting to get me down.  And that’s when I decided to perfect the art of saying “no” — to make it so subtle yet effective that my co-workers are actually excited not to get any money from me.  Let me share with you some of my most prized conversation-enders:

See how easy that is?  Feel free to practice on your friends and family when they ask for things you don’t want to give them, like a small loan or a kidney.  Good luck.

“So what i hear you saying is that we’re encountering some minor difficulties that will sort themselves out in time,” he said back to me.

“That’s not it at all.  The problems won’t sort themselves out until we get more help or shed some work.”

“Got it.  So I’ll just let Tom know that we’ll have that catalog rewrite ready a week early.”

“No, the catalog won’t get done at all unless we stop work on your underground zombie-proof bunker in the undisclosed location.”

“Hm.  Well, we can’t delay that.  How about I just tell Tom that we’ll have the catalog rewritten a week late, instead?”

This went on for about half-an-hour.  Let’s just say that by the end we had no more clarity about what we were supposed to be working on, whose work was highest priority, or how we were going to tackle the resource shortfall.  As I turned to walk away, I overheard Ned as he walked into Tom’s office.

“Hey Tom, great news!  We’re going to get the catalog done just two weeks delayed, but we’ll make that time up on the customer information survey you said would be nice to do.”

I shook my head.  This kindof stuff is enough to drive a man to drink.  But not to drink a daiquiri – that’s a late summer thing only.  I hate mixed drinks out-of-season …

Between Jan making decidedly non-secretarial demands, Tom making every excuse under the sun why he won’t take calls from Corporate HR, Rachel demanding copy after copy of the dress code, the computer use code, the expense reimbursement policy, and the branch manager’s handbook be printed up and distributed to the employees, no temp we get ends up having any time to do anything that’s on his or her official job description.  So come Friday (if they haven’t quit already), we end up having to ask for a replacement because, well, stuff just didn’t get done.

Until the new gal showed up.  I think she had us whipped into shape in a matter of days just by saying “No.”  And it was not a selective negative attitude designed to allow her to cherry-pick her alliances among the powerful and influential movers and shakers of Branch 7.  No, indeed it was a blanket “No” designed to enforce good boundaries, maintain her professional dignity, and ensure her job would be completed satisfactorily.

I bet she doesn’t last two weeks.

With this whole mess about hiring a new office manager, she’s up to her eyeballs in paperwork.  I’d have guessed that the head of HR would understand how much work is involved in the new hire process.  And I guess she hasn’t made many friends at Corporate, because no one’s giving her any help.  I watched from the hallway as four different people (including Tom) went into her office for something only to run back out seconds later amid a flurry of Jan’s barbed insults.  I guess it wasn’t not going so well.  In steped Miss Order-and-Detail.

“Hello there, Jan.  Wow, that’s quite a pile of paperwork!  I bet you need it all filled out before the new office manager can start, huh?”  Okay, so I was twisting the knife a little.  C’mon.  It’s Jan we’re talking about!

Well, of course she let loose with a new string of obsceneties that do not bear repeating here.  Let’s just say that when she was done, I dangled the carrot.

“Okay, okay.  No problem. I’ll leave you alone.  But I just thought you might appreciate a little help with all those tedious forms.  But if you’d rather I leave …”

“No, no.”  She was all sugar now.  ”If you want to help ….”

“Well,” I baited, “I’m very busy, but maybe I could spare a couple of hours to help.”

She seemed about to smear me with more charm, but then stopped, realizing.  Suddenly it was all business.  ”Okay, toots.  How much is it gonna cost me for you to do all the work?”

“It’s gonna be expensive.”  She cocked her head slightly.  ”You’re gonna owe me one.”  Her shoulders fell.  But all the same, she turned around , gathered up what was unquestionably a massive stack of papers and forms, and handed them over to me.  Taking them from her, I turned to go back to my desk, where I’d plow through them with my usual efficiency and rectitude.

As I left, I stopped in her doorway.  ”We have an understanding then, yes?”  The great Jan, knowing defeat when it came knocking on her door, nodded silently.  And so I departed, knowing that I now had one of the most powerful favors in the entire office to call in whenever it suited me.

Oh yes, it’s going to be a very pleasant summer, I can tell already.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few last forms to complete.

Unfortunately, it’s looking like a harder task than I thought.  And not for the good reasons like too many qualified candidates willing to work for free or too many candidates with male modeling experience.  The reason I’m having so much trouble is that we can’t seem to find anyone willing to do the work we described in the job specification for the salary we’re offering and who isn’t too stupid to handle it.

It looks like we’re able to get desperate idiots or expensive overachievers, but we’re missing that sweet spot of competent and desperate.  So after over 50 interviews, all we’ve got is this one guy, and he’s really … well, kindof a jerk.  And by “jerk” I mean 40-year-old-man-still-wearing-his-high-school-letter-jacket jerk.  Yeah, that’s our viable candidate.  Sucks to be us, huh?

Well, as nice as it is sharing my woes with you about the sour-cream of the crop that we seem to be attracting here, I’ve got to get back to interviewing more of the kind of quality people the rest of Doogleheimer & Schmitt is known for.

Present company excluded, of course.

So we’re all good to go here with the whole navy thing and all.  It’s gonna be awesome.  I’m gonna learn how to sail, how to stand watch, how to put out fires on ships, amazing stuff.  We got just one problem.  You guessed it, kiddos.  Little Miss Pru gets a little seasick sometimes.  Unfortunately when I get seasick, it’s not some ladylike urp and it’s all over, we’re good to go.  No, I turn into a terrible, deck-clearing vomit hose.  So this whole navy thing was looking like a bad idea from the get-go.

So before I leave Doogleheimer & Schmitt for the last time, I’m mentioning this to Jan.  Now everyone knows she’s normally like the least helpful person on the planet.  But this day she tells me about this homoerotic cure she knows about.  And so she opens up this desk drawer fill of pills and hands me some ginger tablets.  She tells me it worked for her when she had to go on Tom’s boat and he drove around in lazy circles for an hour.  Whatever, lady, I think to myself.  Anything to keep from having to swab the decks after a rough episode.  Anyway, I’m not sure if it’ll work yet, but I got nothin’ to lose, right?

So that’ll be it, folks.  I’ll write again once basic’s over.  I have a feeling I’m gonna be pretty busy until then.  Smell ya later!

– Pru

When I call around Corporate, I get the same thing.  A bunch of “Hey, Phil, nice to hear from you.  Oh, can’t say anything about what’s going on.  Very hush-hush.  I’d get canned in a minute.”

This, by the way, is making me crazy.  Because here I am — my awesome network of contacts built up over years of favors cannot get me the one piece of information I so desperately need:  WTF is going on here and how do I make sure I end up on top?

I’ve started doing crazy stuff, just to see what happens.  I’ve managed to get Ned sent off to hand-to-zombie training school in Bucharest, I’ve requisitioned a hot tub for the building, we now get premium box lunches in the break room three days a week, and I had my reserved parking spot paved over with rhinestones.  That last one was a long-shot and really more of an extravagance than anything I could say had measurable business value, but that’s not the point.

The point is that no one’s looking at the cash flow right now.  This means one of two things: we’re either sinking so fast that they’ve got bigger problems than a few thousand for this or that or … things are going so well that we’ve got the free cash to absorb my profligate spending.

I don’t know which is better for me, but it doesn’t matter.  This whole thing is just corporate motion.  And like Tony Robbins says, “Motion creates emotion.”  So here I go creating some emotion.  Do you feel it?  I sure do!  Yeah, let’s do this thing!  Woohoo!

Oh look! They have blue erasers here! Yeee!!

What? Oh. Yeah like I was saying, the parking here is atrophys. Terrible. And it’s so confusing with all the lines. I’ve never seen so many lines in a parking lot. Usually it has cars over the lines and i just park between the cars and ignore the lines. Lines at the grocery store are usually long. Long like that time in Cabo on spring break when this one guy….

What was I saying? Oh yeah. I love ribbons. Don’t you love ribbons. Ribbons on presents, in my hair, bobby pins, unless I can’t find them and then I use paper clips. I wonder if they have metal or plastic paper clips. Oh! *snort* Mrhhhh! I just said “plastic or paper.” Just like they do at the department store. Oh, look at me going on and on just saying whatever comes off the top of my head. It’s what my professor used to call the “Steam of Coniferous.” I do it all the time. So you’ll just have to get used to it with me.

It’s great here. I can’t wait to get started on my first real job.

Unfortunately, when Ned got his big promotion to company-wide Emergency Preparedness Coordinator, I had no idea it was going to infringe on my hard-won sense of insulation from the daily goings-on at Doogleheimer & Schmitt.  Last week he waltzed into my server room where I was patiently schooling a bunch of nooblings on the fine art of corpsehumping and asked if I could help him with emergency preparedness.  After a few minutes of talking to Ned, I realized that “help him” really meant “do everything”.   He wanted a system rigged up through the company’s computers that would allow him to use his iPhone to trigger alerts at any Doogleheimer & Schmitt branch office based on the type of emergency.

So I start worlking on creating a VPN tunnel via IPsec whose configuration would match the protocol that … never mind.  Let’s just say it was hard, but I did it.  I brought Ned in to test it out for him.

“Watch,” I said.  And I took his iPhone out of his hand and casually set off the fire alarm.

“That’s great,” he replied as the staff filed out the door and down into the parking lot.  ”What else you got?”

“What do you mean, ‘what else’?  This is the thing you wanted.”

“No, no,” Ned shook his head as the fireflighters passed by the door to the server room.  ”I need something for every emergency.  I mean everything.”

“What, like tornadoes?”

“Yes, but not just that.  I need tornadoes and floods and air raids and alien landings and zombie rampages and civil uprisings and cholera outbreaks and typhoon warnings … You know, the usual stuff.”

I was nonplussed.  We spent the next two days in the server room with me sampling Ned’s voice as he invented sounds for each of no fewer than thirty different warnings, alerts, and sirens.  Then I had to digitize all those sounds and clean up the audio by running it through a high-compression bandpass filter with … never mind.  Let’s just say it was really hard and you’d never have been able to do it.

So now we have it: Ned’s Omni-Purpose Emergency Warning Apparatus.  Sucks to be us, I suppose.  Oh, and I’d better get moving, the Endangered Species siren is going off, and I’ve only got thirty seconds to evacuate the office before Greenpeace storms in.

FML.

Perhaps the most regrettable incident of all was a falling-out they had over mixing their CD collections.  While she wanted to combine them, poor Bob (ever the cautious one) refused, citing the irreconcilable differences between their tastes.  Even though all hers were easily identified by the simple fact that none of them were in English, Bob stuck to his point.  Just so, the damage was done.

Finally last week they had an unfortunate blow-up at work.  I won’t embarrass either of them further by recounting the details, but suffice it to say the day ended with the International Girl sobbing to her mother incomprehensibly in Mandarin and booking last-minute plane travel, while Bob stormed into Tom’s office and resigned his position.  I was unable to talk any sense into him at all to stay and try to pick up the pieces and carry on.  But he would have none of that.  The damage of the broken relationship was severe indeed, and it appeared neither of them would recover quickly.

So yesterday his father and I went over to his apartment, now sadly empty and frighteningly reminiscent of his perennial nihilist phases.  I asked him what he planned next, since he’d quit his job, and he replied that he’d given it some serious thought and was going to go back to school.

“Back to school?” I asked incredulously.  ”Surely you’re not contemplating a third PhD?”  He nodded gravely.  And though I knew it to be a bad idea to ask, I simply couldn’t contain my curiosity.  ”But what subject?”

“Psychology,” he said finally.  I pursed my lips and nodded with him.

It’s going to be a long decade.

But irregardless of that fact, the matter of shipping still must go on, and now it’s up to me to make sure that every pallet, package, skid, and truckload is handled with the same aplomb that my brother would have levied on it.  So I dig in.  And right in time, as it turns out.

For reasons known only to the universe and some pasty-white geek up in Corporate who really oughta get out more, we do a tremendous amount of sales right around Easter.  I mean like huge.  Like I shipped as much last week as the entire month of March, that kinda huge.  So when Rachel wanders down last week with her red audit-pen and clipboard in her little manicured fingers, I was not in the mood to hear about what was “in a state of noncompliancy” and whatnot.  But she’s got the attention of someone at Corporate (probably the same egghead who won’t tell me why we ship so much in April), so I gotta give her my attention or she’ll get Tom on my ass.  And what I do not need on the busiest ship day of the quarter is more of somebody else’s problems.

So she comes in and starts asking for all these evidentiary items like proof that I follow the rules and stuff.  And this is me, right?  I mean there cannot possibly be evidence that I followed all the rules,’cause I got a job to do and all, and if I followed all the rules all the time it wouldn’t get done!  You know what I’m sayin’?  But she won’t leave until she gets all this documentation, so I’m rootin’ around through Hal’s files until I come across this red folder with writing on it saying “In case of Rachel being a jerk, here’s the thing you need.”

Well it looks like my big bro thought of everything.  I take the file and just hand it to her, sight unseen.  She snaps it out of my hand, opens it, and (I kid you not) mid-sentence, stops, politely hands it back, and says to me, “I think everything down here in Shipping is in order,” and walks out.  It’s a freakin’ shipping miracle!

Now since I know you’re wonderin’, I’ll mention that no, I didn’t look in the file folder.  I figure whatever’s in there, if it’s strong enough stuff to put a cork in Rachel’s pie-hole, I don’t need to know about it.  I mean, who’s gonna look a gift Hal in the mouth, so to speak?  Not me, that’s for sure.

Besides, I got shipping to do.

Oh you caught my little joke, didn’t you?  You’re so cute.  Now you just pull your chair up here next to mine and let me show you what we’ve got coming up in our spring line.  Oh c’mon, you can get closer than that.  I don’t bite.  Or do I?  You’re good for two dozen, aren’t you?  A big boy like you might need three though, right?  Yeah, I thought so …

You see, it’s that easy.

So I mind my own business for a while, eventually noticing that Tom’s got a meeting with Jan and both of the folks on the International Division and Gisele.  This may not seem like much to you, but in fact this is truly noteworthy.  These are five people who have probably never been in the same room together ever.   I ask our secretary-du-jour (whose name I believe was Esmerelda) what was going on and she said that Tom had instructed her not to discuss the interview with anyone who came asking.  Well, who am I to argue with someone named Esmerelda, so I went about my normal routine.

By normal routine, I mean the obsessive circuit between my desk and the breakroom, which took me by the hallway to Tom’s office every five minutes.  I will admit that I was hoping to get a look at the candidate.  Finally around an hour later, I just missed him.  I saw him from the back as he walked out the front door, and he looked like some cross between Indiana Jones and a model from the J. Peterman catalog.  The International Guy and the International Girl walk out chattering on in Mandarin.  No luck there, I’m afraid.  Gisele minces out with Jan right behind her.  I hear Tom say in what seems to be an exhausted voice to close the door.

“I told you,” said Gisele , removing her beret and using it to mop her brow in a motion that was simultaneously dainty and rugged.

Jan was clearly out-of-breath.  ”Honestly, you thought I’d believe you?  Not that I don’t now that I’ve met him, but really, Gisele …”

I sauntered up casually and asked, “Who was that?”

“Man of the century as far as I’m concerned,” replied Jan.  Gisele shook her head and rolled her eyes.

“A candidate we’re interviewing to help out in the International Division.”

“Ah,” I nodded, refusing to betray my advance knowledge.

“Let’s just say you’d better hope he doesn’t want your job, cause he’s better at it than you are,” added Jan.

“How can that be?  I thought he was qualified for the International Division sales position?”

“Ah, I see you read that,” said Gisele.  ”His talents are numerous.”

I tried to hide a thin film of sweat that was breaking out on my brow.  ”And what is this super-candidate’s name? I ventured tentatively.

“Dirk Danger.  Oh, that’s his real name, alright.”  I narrowed my eyes.  ”And yes, he’s all that.”

Hold on tight, dear readers.  I believe we’re in for a very bumpy ride.

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Anyway, I’ve been taking some classes.  And some voice lessons.  Don’t look at me like that.  Lots of guys take voice lessons.  So my teacher is like really encouraging me and stuff, says I’ve got a naturally talented vibrato.  Stop laughing.  I said vibrato, not .. oh forget it.  So she tells me about this thing.  It’s like an audition.  Yeah, like American Idol, but without some skinny English dumbass harshin’ on everyone.  So I go and do this thing.  And … get this … I win.  And so next thing you know, I’ve got guys calling me wantin’ to be my agent.  An agent.  Can you believe it?  I know.  Well, Dino’s handling stuff for me now, but you know, if this goes big time I may have to explore other options.  But he’s cool for now.

Anyway, so next thing you know, I’ve got these invitations coming at me from every direction.  So my vocal coach says I gotta move out to the west coast.  So I’m talking to this friend of Dino’s from college and he’s got a place I can crash for a few weeks until I get my feet under me.  And I’m gonna be doing auditions and stuff.  Yeah, for real.

Only problem is, I can’t run this place from LA, ya know what I’m saying?  I gotta give my notice and stuff.  But I mean I’m not gonna shed any tears or anything.  Still I gotta do the right thing.  What do I do?  You know what I gotta do!  I leave my resignation letter in my desk drawer and hand the keys to Carlotta.  She’s the only person I trust runnin’ the place.  Yeah, we’ll see how long it takes for Jan or Tom or heck, even for Phil to notice.

In the meantime, tell Carlotta I said you can have a latte on the house.  And keep an eye on the entertainment section of the paper.  Next stop, the big leagues for old Hal!

So I was at the fax machine picking up the … oh wow, these are really good this year <nom nom nom> … right, faxes from Corporate that were supposed to have just our year-end numbers in them.  I was going to pretty them all up and give them to Tom so he could pretend to review them and I could go back to listening to Avenue Q.  But get this … mmm, did they change the recipe or something, because I would kill all of you for another box of these and a nice spumanti and a bubble bath.  Oh yeah, the fax.  Well, they must have had that little minx Trina doing the faxes, because I got the Corporate year-end numbers.  And not the sanitized version — the real books.  And did we make money?!  Oh girl, let me tell you, we were like Liberace before he got all weird.  We are positively rolling in cash.

Um … hang on … my fingers are sticky.  Anyway, something really big is coming up.  Because they aren’t planning on giving any of that money away.  No, not the United Way.  I mean like a dividend.  You know, for the stockholders.  Please tell me I don’t have to explain how stock works.  Ugh, you are just like Dale, I swear, only not as cute.  Though the Thin Mints are a nice touch.  You can keep that up.

So they’re planning on doing something with all that money.  No, I have no idea.  They didn’t put that on the fax!  Let’s just say I’m all ears until something more useful comes along.  Like more Thin Mints.  Or some Samoas.  I saw you had some of those too.  Don’t kid me, I know you do.

Sadly that day has come, which means it’s time to move on before I’m forced to think.

The good news is that Nussey, Zucker, and Milch is looking at hiring someone to come in and clean house, to be the bad guy who makes all the changes, and then moves on.  It’d mean going back to being a consultant again, but I know it’s a cushy living for another year.  The bad news is that Brad already knows about it.  Seems he’s been snooping on my web surfing and figured out it was me who was looking for a new job.  And I was even doing it from other people’s computers to make it look less obvious!  Guess I should have done it from my own as well, since I was apparently the only one who wasn’t.  That’s one to remember next time, for sure.

Anyway, I had to bribe him with a pallet of double-frosted Oreos to keep him quiet, and in the meantime I’m telling everyone that I’m leaving for “greener pastures” — literally.  They all think I’m going be a sheep farmer in Michigan.  The up-side is that it’s extinguished any rumors that I’m jumping ship for a competitor.  The down-side is that I have to endure two weeks of wretched livestock jokes.  Let me tell you: it’s bad.  How bad is it?  Baaaaaaaaad.

See what I mean?

I mean I think about all my friends from college, like Jenny, who majored in French Literature.  She graduated and the job market wasn’t very good.  So she stayed in school, just to get her Master’s and buy herself some time.  And it was still rough when she finished that, so she kept on going to get her PhD.  And then … you guessed it.  She graduated and the job market was even worse than when she first got out of college.  Now she’s the best-educated back-up barista ever to sling the whipped cream can at Connie’s Coffee Conniption down in the lobby of our building.

So suffice it to say, I’m glad I’ve got this gig here at Doogleheimer & Schmitt.  Not that it’s all roses.  I mean I won’t bother talking about the daily embarrassment of the various ways that Phil mangles my name (even within the same conversation).  I’ll just focus on the highlights, like the time Tammy froze my car into a fortress of ice so I had to live at the office for three days straight.

But what we’ve got going on here now with this six-way power grab for the office manager’s job among Tom’s direct reports is nothing short of epic.  It was my idea and all to have the manager report to Tom, and I’m not going to let Phil think I’m ungrateful for him taking credit for it.  Because after all I’m very thankful to have this job.

No, what I know from twelve months of toughing it out every day at good old Branch 7 is that I’ve got to keep my head down and let the stuff just fly over me.  I’m not going to let myself get caught in it like Jane did.  I’m not going to let myself get all emotional over it like Brad did.  And I’m certainly not going to let myself get fired over it like Jan nearly did.

Partially because I don’t like being in the middle of someone else’s drama.  But also because I don’t want to be the only back-up, back-up barista with an MBA at the coffee shop downstairs.

But the recent mess with the office manager has got me so frustrated that I’ve been off my game for days.  Everyone been trying to make me take a side, to push Tom to favor someone or another.  They wouldn’t leave me alone — all day it was in and out of my office with this mess.  Honestly I don’t care.  If anyone can come in here and make people clean up after themselves or keep the clerical supplies stocked, they can report to whoever they want.  Hell, they can have the place if they can make the freakin’ trains run on time.

Anyway, now that it’s all straightened out, we’re hoping to start interviews relatively soon, especially with Ginger gone.  We need organization desperately, and we’re going to do what it takes to get some, including giving some small measure of control over our lives to a complete stranger.  The good news is that it’s like getting a new raid leader — it doesn’t take anyone particularly smart, just organized and relatively alert.  And you have to want to do it, which is why I won’t do it, of course.

So if you know anyone who wants to do this office manager job, have ‘em call us.  Have ‘em call the office, but don’t call me.  I don’t care.  Okay, maybe I care a little.  But you keep that to yourself, got it?

All of Phil’s organization is pretty much kept running on a combination of Phil’s infectious energy, Kelvin’s oddly inspiring naivete, and Ginger’s ability to bring order to the chaos these things engendered.  Without here there, the Operations department is a lot like a three-wheeler with the kiddie-brake off.  It’s exciting to watch, but you know it’s just a matter of time before someone gets hurt.  And like fish going bad in the fridge or house-guests wearing out their welcome, it took about three days for that to happen.

No one can get a straight answer as to how it started, but we all know how it ended — in a withering rain of accusations about whose turn it was to restock the supply cabinet, who’s not authorized to approve timecards for the team,  who’s not going to be up for promotion this fall after being a complete “d-bag”, and an ugly array of slanderous epithets unfit to repeat here, the folks in the office next door finally called the police to break it all up.  It was not our finest hour.

When the emotional dust cleared, it was obvious that we had to get our act in order pronto or else whatever psychological malaise that was afflicting Phil’s team would spread to the rest of us.  And the one cure we all knew would save us?  Hire a new secretary.

The bad news is that Tom’s taken to hiding under his desk whenever stuff like this happens.  Apparently he’s convinced that if he can’t see it, it’s not happening.  It’s plausible deniability for 4-year-olds.  The good news is that I decided to take matters into my own hands and get us a new secretary.  We’ve gotten a temp firm to start sending us a new one each week until we either exhaust their staff pool or find one we want to keep.  I’ll keep you apprised, but until further notice, just don’t ask any questions about where to get more post-its.

Of course the trouble was that I would be moving back to Georgia and leaving behind all the good people at Doogleheimer & Schmitt with whom I simply adored dealing on a daily basis.  People like Rachel, bless her heart, and Hal, what a jewel of a person.  I just can’t imagine what my day would be like without them asking for something that is not my job to do or criticizing something that is not my fault or just plain letting me know how much better my day is than theirs.  it’s so kind of them to share with me.  They are just such special people.

Well Jane managed to arrange a little going-away party for my last day, and as the time approached, I kept being given “one last thing” to do by everyone in the office.  For your smartification, here’s a little list of everyone and everything they wanted while I was trying to get to my own going-away party:

• * Ned: a thousand copies of his emergency zombie kit instructions,
• *  Kelsi:  telling Brad to delete the entries in the phone logs for her calls to some little island somewhere far, far away
• * Ralph: faxing some spreadsheets to the other branches (after I showed him just last Friday how to do that very thing)
• *  Dale:  repeatedly calling some radio station that was giving away tickets to La Bohemian Rhapsody:  A Queen Retrospective on three different phone lines so that he and Chip would be sure to go
• *  Tom:  rescheduling all his fake appointments to make it look like he’s busy all morning and so he can come in around 10am each day instead
• *  Brad:  calling the phone company to restore the phone logs when he accidentally deleted all the entries instead of just Kelsi’s.

The truth was that by the time I got to my own party, all the cake was gone, Phil had sucked the helium out of all the balloons, which now littered the floor like a bunch of multi-colored … well, you-know-whats, and the punch had been spiked three times by three different people, making the entire room smell like the regrettable site of a liquor-store-bombing.

As I gathered up all my things and put them in a big box (which I knew that Jan was going to insist I give back when I got to my car), I thought about what a  remarkable and unusual place it’s been to work at, and how there are nevertheless some things I’m going to miss.  And even though I’ve got a great new job waiting for me back in Georgia, I can’t let my replacement start up without sharing some of that joy.  So I wrote her a little note and explained what to expect.

I figured it was the least I could do.  Bye-bye everyone, and y’all be good!

It all started a few weeks ago when Jan decided she was pretty much fed up doing her job and wanted us to hire an office manager to do all her dirty work (and by that I mean pretty much all the confrontational stuff like telling people their desks are too messy or they left a gooey mess in the microwave).  I told Ralph to move some money around and scrape us together a small salary to hire an office manager.

Well of course the entire office somehow got wind of it and I … may have made statements to a number of people that might somehow give them the impression that I perhaps would be looking to put that manager under their direct supervision.  I’m not sure how all this happened, and there’s a lot of this he-said/she-said stuff going on (though honestly it’s sounding like mostly “Tom-said/Tom-said” unfortunately).

Well next thing I know half the office is waiting outside my office when I got in this morning, and as one of her last official acts before leaving, Ginger inconveniently cancelled all my fake morning meetings that I normally use to pretend I’m too busy to interact with the office staff.

It seems they all compared notes and figured out I’d apparently promised the office manager position to their departments.  My first solution was to just hire one for each of them, but Ralph buzz-killed that one and said that it was not just impossible, it was “completely-freakin’-mission-impossible man”.  My next solution, which was to hire one office manager and have him report to each department one day a week, got shot down too.  I don’t want to tell you what they said about that.

I thought about having a 6-way cage match between my direct reports to settle who would get the new headcount, but ultimately I had to abandon that when I heard Kevin suggest that I just have the new position report to me directly, so that he wouldn’t be influenced by favoritism to any particular department.

“That’s stupid, Kevin,” Phil said.  “But I’ll say this — everyone knows this guy should report to me.  And I’ll give him up, but only if he reports to Tom directly, so that none of the rest of you Sallys try to make him your lapdog.”

I think that’s when Kevin left the room.

We all decided Phil had a pretty good idea given that the alternative was trial-by-combat.  So that’s what we’re gonna do.  The new office manager will report directly to me and have a dotted line into each of the other direct reports.  Jan insisted we do the dotted line thing for her, since it was her idea, and then each of the direct reports wanted the office manager to have a dotted line in to them, so now we have the new position reporting to each of them and me.

So in a way, my original idea won out.  Yeah, I know, but sometimes being a leader means sitting back and letting your team figure out what you already know.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think Kevin wants to talk to me.

Well you know how Ginger’s always knitting or something instead of minding the phones and telling my ex-boyfriends that I’ve moved to Saskatoon?  Lo and behold, but she seems to have won some kind of major knitting design award, and now she’s moving to Georgia to be the Technical Knitting Officer for this huge mail-order knitting company.

I asked her in the most shaming tone I could muster up, ”You’re going to be the TKO?  Who has a position called a TKO, some kind of soccer company?”

She seemed unflustered.  So I said it again louder.

But I still haven’t forgotten about those personal calls.  Let’s just say that when I was called on the carpet for making a few very short calls to Bora Bora so I could tell my stylist that I needed him to have an extra tube of that gel he uses to give my hair what you know as the “Kelsi Bounce,” I was not amused.  No, not at all.

But I wasn’t bitter about it.  So when Tom insisted we hold her a going-away party and put me in charge of it, I was thrilled to play such a big role in my colleague’s last big event at Doogleheimer & Schmitt.  I recognize that while a bunch of my colleagues who are not as nice as I am would just go all passive-aggressive on the whole thing, I’m not going to do that.  You just wait until Thursday and see what kind of party it’s going to be.

Why are you looking at me like that?

When it comes to spending personal capital on me, everyone around here saves it for someone in a higher position. Brown-nosers. No one ever asks me to go bowling, out to lunch, or even if I’d like a soda from vending machine for that matter. What they DO ask me about is how to make Excel sing. You see that’s what I’m good at. I’ll never be as awesomely handsome and rugged as Dirk Danger, but I’ve got ‘l33t sh33t skillz’ that cannot be ignored in this branch. Even Chastity finds me dead sexy in a ‘sanitized, plutonic acquaintance who’s got mad love of spreadsheets’ kind of way.

I may be a man of diminutive stature, but I put the ‘jockey’ in ‘spreadsheet jockey.’

They made some changes by removing the stall doors in the bathrooms. The boys started saying how much the place sucked and that they might quit over it. They did the same thing in the girls room. The girls didn’t care. They just chat more. Granted, it’s nervous chat because we can all see each other now, but make some lemonade boys!

We go to the bars and the boys come back whining about how they drank too much the night before or they have these unexplained bruises and broken hands. I feel fantastic! Time to man-up! In fact, I ended up spending Super Bowl Sunday with my family because the pansies at work couldn’t get a kitchen pass from their old ladies. It’s ok. I had a great time with my brothers. I’m not sure to where their wives disappeared? I mean, come on! It’s the Super Bowl. Time to drink some beer and scream at the TV.

But now I’m back at work. I think I found the source of the whining. It starts at the top. Tom came in and was whining that someone took his parking spot. I looked out the window. His car is literally one spot over from his assigned parking spot. The parking lot is empty. Why he even needs a parking spot is ridiculous enough. But to come in here and WHINE about it? It’s unbearable.

I need to find a place to work where the men are men, the women are men, and the sheep are scared.

So the bottom line is that we are not habituates of the microwave.  But we still have to go in that room from time to time, and it seems each day it gets a little more horrid and a lot less sanitary.  Yesterday, however, it appeared to have reached a new low-point, because when Ginger opened it and the encrusted and baked-in grime of a thousand exploded beenie-weenie cans confronted her, she could tolerate it no longer and barged into Tom’s meeting with Corporate HR insisting it be handled.

Well Tom immediately delegated it to Phil, who would have given it to Kelvin, except that he was out visiting his sick mother, who lives in Daytona Beach or Padre Island or someplace like that.  So Brad got the unpleasant task.  Unfortunately, Brad used his powers over the Internet to research a factory setting on our microwave that allowed him to override the normal “high” setting and set it much higher.  As he punched in the secret code, he mentioned that he had read somewhere that it was possible to clean these things like a self-cleaning oven.  I nodded sagely as he set the power to “thermonuclear” and the timer to “two hours”, while backing slowly out of the room.  It was just as Chip and I were pulling out of the parking lot that we passed the fire trucks rolling up to the front door of our building.

“Hey,” I said to him as I gunned the accelerator, “What do you want to bet we have a new microwave in the break room tomorrow?”

The reason this situation is turning out so poorly is a fundamental difference between Kelvin and me.  You see, he actually cares.  That was never, ever my problem.  I just gave ‘em the bad news, thanked them for their effort and presentation, and invited them back next year for another swing at the piñata of Branch 19′s moneybags.  Kelvin, on the other hand, thinks it’s his job to make them happy.  He just doesn’t realize that it’s impossible.  He’s looking for the win-win scenario.  And you know who looks for win-win scenarios?  People who never win, that’s who.

So when I go by his cube yesterday, he’s on this conference call with the Bunglefunks, trying to help them improve their presentation skills, their salesmanship, and their overall product quality.  So I decide to drop by later.  I come by again after thirty minutes.  He’s till talking to them.  An hour after my first visit?  You got it — still playing Freud to their business-neuroses.  Back at my desk, I scan his calendar, and he’s been coaching them for two hours a week ever since the results were announced.

I’m tempted to give him a friendly lecture on maintaining proper boundaries and stuff like that — you know, the buzzwords we all use to rationalize our indifference to others’ suffering.  But then Ned came in and wanted some kind of report, so I ended up forgetting to mention it to him.  So now that I think about it some more, I’m tempted to just let Kelvin learn the hard way.  I mean, how else is he going to grow into the full blossom of his own mediocrity if he doesn’t learn to distance himself from other people’s disappointments?

But you gotta hand it to the kid — he’s got moxie.  Whatever the hell that is.

Of course you’ve heard everyone in the branch talking about the new office manager we’re hiring.  And they all think that position is going to report to them.  It’s darling watching them plot and scheme, but it’s really all for nothing.  You see, I have Tom’s personal assurance that the office manager is going to report to me.  Really, no one else in the office deserves a personal lap-puppy more than yours truly, plus I can use this little power-grab of mine to correct some … injustices.

So I’ll let you in on a little secret.  Here’s my list of what’s coming once I lock up the new hire:

• * No more cleaning the break room microwave for me.  I think Phil’s team is going to be in charge of that from now on.
• * Tammy is going to be parking in the remote lot for a while.  I’ll reassess things in six months.
• * Let’s just say that Chastity is going to have to share the supply closet.
• * And oh yeah, I’m gonna delegate some of that tedious HR paperwork.  I know it’s not technically part of the office manager’s job, but hey, who’s gonna try and stop me?

Just stay tuned, kids.  And oh, don’t get on my bad side.  You might find yourself promoted to an office with a door — a bathroom stall.  Heh.

Normally I resist the temptation toward self-aggrandizement (out of respect for my parents’ strongly bohemian and nihilist leanings), but in this case, I felt that shoring up my own sagging staff (no offense intended, Tammy) was a priority that I could no longer afford to ignore. The good news is that with this addition to my staff, I’ll be able to stave off Phil’s unwelcome advances and even potentially move on Ned’s weak organization.

All I’m looking for here is a little something with which I can impress the ladies.  And by that I mean the International Girl.  Wish me luck!

You’re just questioning why I’m going to be so chipper and gung-ho.  I don’t doubt that; it’s only natural.  It’s because I’ve got a secret.  I’ve got Tom’s personal assurance that he’s going to put the new hire we’re working on under my organization.  This adds another minion to my private empire here at Doogleheimer & Schmitt, and if I get just a couple more, I’m going to have the largest group of all Tom’s direct reports.  And you know what that means, BABY!

You don’t?  It means that when Tom finally gets promoted out of here, I’m gonna be the new branch head, the big Kahuna, main man, whatever.  And because I’m huge and my balloon is on the rise, I’m the one who’s gonna get this new hire.  And then things are gonna change.  We’re gonna run this place like only Tony Robbins would.  I’m gonna start by cleaning house, and then we’re gonna really get things going.  We’re going to get the whole office eating the Fit for Life diet, I’m going to throw some subtle neuro-linguistic subliminal messages in the background of the elevator music we pipe in here, and we’ll have a branch-wide firewalk every Monday morning first thing in the back parking lot.

This is going to be huge, and it’ll all be because of me.

“You mean you need someone to be the office jerk-slash-buzzkill.”  Jan shrugged.  I knew what they wanted.  They moved some money around and pulled together a small salary for an office manager, whose job would be to keep Tom and Jan from having to listen to everyone whining about the size of their cube, who left a mess in the microwave, and whose turn it is to inventory the supply closet.

Not long after I left, folks started coming by my desk asking pathetically veiled questions about what they would have to do to “snag that new open position”.  I couldn’t say anything about it yet and the decision about where in the organization that person was going to go had already been made, but I didn’t let it keep me from intimating that they could sway the choice in their direction.

I’m hoping that as time goes on I’ll be able to parley this into significant personal advantage.  So far I’ve scored rinkside season tickets to the local minor league hockey team, a handmade wheel of Gorgonzola cheese, and a matching set of knitted “door snakes” to keep drafts out.  Oh, and I have dates with half the single ladies in the office.

Yeah, I know you envy me.  Now, how to hire the office manager and also elegantly avoid disappointing everyone in the office I’ve promised something to …

So last week I was doing my typical search through the internet domain logs, just making sure that Jan wasn’t doing any offshore betting from the office computers anymore and Fred wasn’t trying to get back into Tammy’s good graces by shopping for her lingerie online.  You know, routine stuff.

I wrote a script that searches through the DNS registry and … well it’s too complicated to explain to you how it works, but in simple words, it gives me a list of everywhere everyone in the office has surfed to.  Now I know this is sensitive information.  And I’m used to seeing all kinds of things — it’s remarkable what I’ve been able to deduce about folks at the office from what websites they think they’re visiting anonymously.  So I treat that knowledge with the respect I should:  I make a note of it in a secret file and save it for when I really screw something up and need to blackmail someone into taking the fall for me.

But recently I’ve been seeing someone visiting Nussey, Zucker, and Milch’s careers page on their website.  And when I tried to narrow down which computer it was being accessed from, I saw hits from computers all over the office.  Worst of all, some even came from my own computer!  And I would tell you before I started looking across the street at our main competitor for a job; you know that, don’t you?  Well I don’t care if you don’t believe me.

Anyway, something’s going on here, and someone’s clever enough to cover their tracks well enough to make me really have to dig in and do some hard-core investigative work to find them.  But find them I will, rest assured.  I’ve got root privileges and I’m not afraid to use them in the pursuit of unauthorized and valuable secret knowledge!

So over the holidays we rented a copy of some movie that my children wanted to watch about spies or about hamsters or about spying hamsters perhaps.  I do not remember precisely.  But I went to turn it in the next day and I was told that the machine was “full” and could not accept my return, but that I could simply return it to another red box kiosk elsewhere in the city.  I drove a short distance to another and received the same sad news.  A third told me again.

And so here I am, almost a week later, trying to return the spying hamster movie, incurring a daily charge of another $1.00 as I find myself facing that daunting but yet hope-inspiring message from my red boxy friend.  It is surely where you Americans must have gotten the phrase, “Another day, another dollar.”

Regardless, I have only a few more days left to return the rodent espionage movie until it is mine to keep forever.  Please send hope in my direction that tomorrow finds an empty red box into which I might dump this silly movie.  Tomorrow.  Yes, perhaps tomorrow.

Brad was kind enough to “give” me some pads of paper and a new box of pens.  I got one of those nice desk chairs pretty much brand new from Jan.  Ginger gave me some sticky-notes, Fred half-a-case of Ramen noodles, and Kelvin lent me his computer monitor.  Of course I don’t have a computer down here, but in case I do, I’ll be ready.

Now I know what you’re thinkin’, and I want you to know that I made sure to do something in return for everyone who donated supplies to me for the year.  I took ten dollars off their coffee tabs and made sure that for all of January they get the very best blend I was able to lift from my coffee supplier.

Now who’s being all Santa-Clausy now, huh?

No, I just miss being at home with my family and watching old home movies and stuff.  But alas, it was not to be this year.  I’m stuck here keeping a lid on things, making sure the trucks all get back in okay before we close up shop for the long weekend.  I’m pretty much the only one in the place, but I can’t leave until the last truck arrives.  Never mind that though.  No one wants to hear about my various woes and whatnot.

When the phone finally rings, it’s a driver and he’s stuck in a bunch of snow.  He’s not gonna make it in on time.  So I’m like fine, and I make some calls.  In a jiff, my friend Dino gets a guy out there and gets my driver unstuck.  I’m back on track, and the guy rolls into the dock with just enough time for me to get him unloaded, off the lot, and outta my hair so I can leave and hustle to my party.  And so I rush outta the office and drive half-way across town to my friend’s place.  And all the way I’m thinking what a buzzkill this whole thing is — putting in a whole day of work to make sure Tom ships a few more pallets of product and top it all off with an evening with some people I barely know getting all liquored up and making out with each other.  That’s what I was thinkin’ as I walked in the door.

But my folks were there.

Now I’m not an emotional kinda guy, but I have to admit getting a little misty-eyed seeing my mom and dad and my two little sisters (counting Carlotta, who had said she had “other plans” and wouldn’t be seeing me until New Year’s Day).  Honestly, it was better than Christmas, being able to ring in the New Year with my family.  I hope you all have as great a time as I did.

Maybe you can watch some old home movies.  Happy New Year, kids.

So I put my shopping outfit together, the doctor had cleared me to shop again, and I mapped out my route.  I knew the stores, the target gifts, and the price points.  I parked at the far side of the lot and jogged inside.  In no more than a few minutes I had everything I needed from that store and was out the front door.  And as I stepped into the crosswalk, that’s when I nearly died.  A car blared on its horn and ran right in front of me.  I was so startled that I jumped back and avoided being creamed, but I caught the license place of the offender:  SUPRSHPR.

Suddenly everything made sense.  The push in the store four weeks ago, the near-miss here in the pedestrian crossing — it was my shopping nemesis again!  Instantly I knew what I had to do.  It was payback time for a December-full of crutches and impatient glares from everyone around me.  I quickly abandoned my intentions of getting presents for my friends and family and went into stalker mode while I followed “SUPRSHPR” around the city: from the Galleria to the Valley Woods Mall to the Athaneum to West County Place.  Always I’d arrive just in time to see my target pulling away and getting back on the highway.

So I took an educated guess and headed via my secret shortcut to the last shopping center we hadn’t been to yet.  And I waited.  Sure enough, I saw her headed into the Best Buy and followed.  Once inside, I watched from two rows over as she picked up the very last copy of some game that I didn’t want.  But it didn’t matter.  It was THE LAST COPY IN THE WHOLE STORE.  As she strode confidently to the checkout line, I sidled up to a security guard and whispered that I didn’t want anyone to get in trouble, but I’d seen that woman attempt to hide a memory stick in her clothes and might be trying to steal it.  The guard nodded knowlingly, as though to say that they got a lot of that around the holidays, and pulled an astonished SUPRSHPR aside out of the line.  She waved her copy of the game I didn’t want helplessly before the guard made her put it down and escported her to the back of the store.  I picked up the last copy of “Small Game Hunter 2010 — The Critters of Madison County” and stepped into the checkout line, which had miraculously cleared away, and I was able to go directly to a checker.

The last thing I heard as I left the store was an announcement over the PA, “Security with gloves to the interrogation room for customer inspection.”  Honestly, those words gave me the most warm and joyful holiday feelings I’ve had in … well, in four weeks.  Merry Christmas, SUPRSHPR, wherever you are.

In the course of a few short hours I noted numerous violations of office protocol.  Among these were the following:

• * initiation of the festivities before the appointed time when Kelsi began opening the Cherry Diet Dr. Pepper before 3:00 pm,
• * excessive expenditures on decorations, including a laser light show and miniature battery-lit necklaces emblazoned with the company logo,
• * the use of the conference room table as a kind of “stage” upon which my co-workers mangled the lyrics to several of my favorite songs from the 1980′s while crowing boisterously,
• * Hal’s adulteration of the cherry punch with what smelled suspiciously like a mixture of 45% Absolut Citron and 55% Jaegermeister, and
• * repeated requests to play games of “Pin the Tail on the Intern”, “Chair-Jousting”, and some other activity that seemed to have no rules whatsoever but involved broom-handles.  (In a side note, it appears that I won that game somehow, since I was referred to as “Broom-Hilda” for the rest of the night.)

I won’t even go into the violation of the time limits applicable to company-sponsored parties.  Suffice it to say that when I woke up in Jane’s cube with the lampshade from Tom’s office on my head, I knew we had exceeded our allotted time and I would need to write that up also.

Just the part about the time.  Not the other stuff of course.

But here at work, it’s also turned out to be a bit of entertainment.  Entirely accidentally, Phil had his intern Kelvin stay overnight to finish some mundane-but-laborious task that Phil really shouldn’t have left to the end of the year.  And while Kelvin was here overnight doing it, it snowed a lot — several inches in fact.  Here’s where it got interesting.

The snowplows came out the next morning early to clear the parking lot, but Kelvin’s was the only car there.  So they plowed the snow all around his car, blocking him in.  We didn’t even realize it until we came in the next morning and he was still in his suit from the day before.  Then he pointed outside and explained, and all the while, more snow fell softly outside.

Well Tammy couldn’t leave this alone.  She went outside with two big buckets of water and soaked the snow piled around Kelvin’s ride.  It promptly froze, entombing Kelvin’s Geo Metro into a car-shaped glacier that would probably be impenetrable until early-Spring.

And then Fred made up something to force Kelvin to stay all night again.  So we came back in the morning and he was in the same clothes now for the third day.  And honestly this prank was starting to cross the line between hilarious and unsanitary.  I’m not sure where he hid all day, but Kelvin managed to keep anyone from finding him and giving him another all-night task, and a friend must have picked him up and driven him home.

Normally that’s where our little joke would end, but it appears that our timid little intern finally found his backbone.  I’ll explain.  I suspect he went to Home Depot and rented a jackhammer, because when we came in the following morning, his car had been freed from its icy prison.  Bully for him, but the best part we didn’t even realize until Tammy came in later.

It seems someone had jackhammered up her reserved parking space.  Touche, little man.  Touche indeed.

The reason it’;s bad is that if we don’t spend what we said we’d need for expenses this year, we (1) look like we can’t do a good job estimating our own expenses, and (2) our budget for next year gets adjusted downward by the amount we’re under.  I know.  Sucks to be us.

So that’s why when we run into this kind of situation, we have contingency plans prepared.  We just start spending money until we’re close enough to budget that we’re safe.  Now I’ll be honest, only Tom and his direct reports know about this favorability, because if the whole office knew we’d get flooded with frivolous requests for training, supplies, reimbursements, and that sort of nonsense.  As it is, we’re barely going to have enough surplus to cover the new carpeting, “evacuation bunker upgrades” (courtesy of Ned), and repairs to Tom’s boat.  We’ve got a little extra cash, yes, but not nearly enough to handle every Jane, Rachel, and Hal nagging us to fix the copier and whatnot.

But there’s nothing to worry about.  Everything is going to be handled perfectly.  No one besides Tom’s direct reports is going to find out about this, because they are the only ones who know.  Them and me, since I helped Ned with the numbers.  And Ginger, who eavesdropped on the meeting.  And that guy who works for Phil who wrote up the meeting notes.  I think his name is Kevin.

Oh dear.  We’re in trouble.

So over a long lunch some day last week, I sat in the coffee shop next door enjoying a panini and thinking about what to do when I suddenly decided to walk across the street to the bookstore where after just four hours of searching I found it, a book entitled How to Efficient Your Office in Four Easy Steps.  I bought it, immediately took it home, and voraciously read it.

It was apparently written in a foreign language and went through several different translations in sequence before finally being translated into English, so I had some difficulty understanding most of it, but I was able to grasp the idea behind the four main office improvements.  These are the ideas I can bring back to Doogleheimer & Schmitt, implement as quickly and as cursorily as possible, and save my bonus check.  Here they are:

1. Suggest to make most excellent cleanliness of the desk and corridor space, so that frequently the employee will be living well.
2. Smash flat the organization and destroy all extra managers.  Also exterminate other unnecessaries.
3. At the market buy always the super biggest and with your friends for most low prices.
4. Undertake quests to improve and always be angry with your achievements.

But I really need this job, and I want to make a good impression so that I’m picked up as an employee at the end of the year, so I decided to smile and gladly agree to do it.  I got the list of vendors and buckled down to make the calls.  I was working my way down the list and most of them were taking it pretty well.  In some cases, I had some latitude to explain why they weren’t selected.  For others, I’d been told just to say they weren’t and leave it at that.  So I plowed through this list of maybe fifty different vendors all of whom were going to get bad news:  The Gunderson Group, Two Nice Guys and a Wrench, Hochuckle and Drim LLC, Quigley and Co., Schmerzkraft GmbH, the whole crowd.  And everything was going fine.  It looked like I’d be able to do the whole list in one day.  That is, until I got to The Bunglefunks.

I called them up and tried to get routed to the salesperson who called.  When I got him, he insisted on bringing into his office the whole team and the champagne they had iced down, since they were expecting the news.  And that took ten minutes.  And I waited.  They finally got everyone there, and though I knew this was going to suck, I did what Tom had told Phil had told Tammy had told Fred had told me to do.

“I have the results of the vendor selection process for Doogleheimer & Schmitt branch 7, fiscal year 2010″  Some scattered and premature applause started up in the background.

“Yes?  And?”

“I’m afraid your product was not selected.”

I heard a champagne cork pop anticlimactically in the background, as well as a collective gasp in the room.  A woman somewhere began sobbing uncontrollably.  And I suddenly realized why this job got delegated to the most junior person in the entire branch.  I was about to spend the rest of my day with the Bunglefunks.

In the end it was like a three-hour group therapy session with a dozen deeply-depressed and angry patients all wielding dull machetes.  The kind of thing for which I had neither training nor any other sort of preparation whatsoever.  But the good news was that I think they made a real breakthrough toward the end, and that with a few more calls like the one we had today, we’ll really be able to get them in a place where they’re ready to start another business relationship.

Now what was I working on before this?

No, this is to explain what happened last Friday while I was out doing what I do third-best in the world.  There I was at Macy’s, at the very front (and yes, of course I mean the very front) of the line to get in at five.  I knew the optimal path through the store, and I had planned out every route and every out-of-stock contingency.  I was prepared physically and mentally.  I had stretched and was wearing my lucky shopping sweats.  And I was ready to push, pull, scratch, and bite whatever and whomever I had to in order to get to the bottom of my holiday shopping list.

So that’s where I was at 4:59 as the manager approached the door to unlock it.  The final seconds ticked away, and I wiped a rare bead of nervous sweat from my perfectly sculpted eyebrow.  Five.  The key is in the lock.  Four.  The key begins turning.  Three.  The key turns over.  Two.  The bolt slides free.  One.  The manager turns and runs for cover while I shift my weight back onto my heels for a running start.  Zero.

I’m through the door like a sneeze through cheap kleenex.  I round the first corner ahead of the pack, and I see a pile of heated blankets with built-in hoodies in my sights.  And that’s when it happens.  I feel a shove in the middle of my back, and I start to lose control.  I waver, then I wobble, then I careen.  I see a big concrete post coming at me, and I think to myself “why push me — there was a whole stack of those things?” right before everything goes black.

When I awoke, it was hours later.  The paramedics had taken me to the hospital as a precaution, and I had missed the entire sale.  Apparently I’d been pushed from behind, stumbled into the column and knocked myself out.

Later, I was sitting at home with my ankle wrapped up and a bandage on my head, and the call came from the department store.  Apparently they looked up the tape from the security camera when my “accident” occurred, but the cameras in just that part of the store had somehow been turned off at just that time and came back on a few minutes later.  And they didn’t have any video of my accident or the perpetrator. They apologized profusely, but I didn’t want to hear it.  I honestly wasn’t interested.

I knew what happened to the security cameras.  I’d been played by someone else — someone even more serious about Black Friday shopping than me.  But I know also that revenge is a dish best served with a side order of smackdown, and that the shopping season has just begun.

Whoever you are out there, you know it’s on like Donkey Kong.

So to all of us, best wishes for a wonderful day and start to the holiday season.  Thanks, and keep coming back!

– Douglas & Tony.

It seems that lately the new woman in the International Division has been finding ways to get past me and into Tom’s office where she harasses and harangues him until he is just a nervous wreck.  I tried to help Tom out by listening in via the intercom, but he somehow must have broken it, because I was not able to hear the content of their conversation and determine a way to come to his assistance.

Now I know that Gisele (bless her heart) is Bob’s mother, and that means that she is just a very special person in all our lives.   But that unfortunately does not entitle her to disrupt our peaceful and calm office ambiance by upbraiding our leader.  That being said, I decided that I needed to take things into my own hands and made a few very discrete phone calls to a handful of my most helpful friends and colleagues from the Ladies Baking and Knitting Auxiliary.  And I regret to inform you that the information they divulged to me as a result of their investigation was deeply, deeply disturbing.

It seems that Gisele is Tom’s former spouse.

Now I had known that Tom was married before.  In fact, I found out that he had been married three times before (God bless him, he must just love getting married — he can’t seem to get enough of it!).  It seems that he and Gisele were married briefly and many years ago during what I think Tom has called “a turbulent time” in his life.  Even though I personally was not alive in those turbulent times, I am sure I would have been very disoriented myself.

Regardless, this puts Tom in a very awkward spot, and though I did not manage to overhear their conversation, I can only guess that Gisele disapproves of Bob reporting to Tom, when Tom is Bob’s mother’s first husband.  I know, this entire matter is harder to follow than the breakups and make-ups on a daytime soap opera, but now you know the honest truth.

Which means that I must now swear you to secrecy, to protect Bob’s feelings and Tom’s career.  You and I are the only ones who know, so if this information were to get into the wrong hands I would of course have to explain to Tom who had divulged it.  But I know you won’t tell anyone, which is why I’m telling you.

Bless your heart.

The next thing you know I’ve got the landlord in my office asking for crazy money to fix the damage.  And I mean crazy money.  I mean like we-don’t-have-that-kind-of-money money.  So I tell them I’d talk to Corporate and get back to them.

Of course Ginger, sharp as a pin she is, was listening to the entire comversation on the intercom and already had the head of Corporate Finance on the phone.  He tells me that there’s really nothing we can do.  So since Corporate doesn’t have anything budgeted for this kind of thing, and our insurance won’t cover the whole amount the landlord is asking for, we’ve really got no options.

Except one: we can walk our lease.  So that’s what we did.  We’re not proud of it, but it’s what we had to do.

The good news is that we managed to work a deal with Wired Coffee nearby.  They’re letting us work there until we get a more permanent arrangement.  It’s not perfect — for example, I have to sit next to Chastity all day.  What am I saying?  I hope we never find a new place!

But the truth is we can’t stay here forever, so we asked Chastity to get out there and show us why she’s the top salesperson in the whole branch by finding us a new office.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.  In the meantime, I think it’s my turn to drink the coffee.  Oh well.

Of course my first stop was to check in with the building security manager.  I described what was going on and asked if it could have been the custodial crew.  She said that was absolutely impossible, since they receive an incentive for returning missing items, so it had to be one of our coworkers stealing from us.  When I questioned her logic and asked why it couldn’t just be the janitors stealing the stuff, claiming to “find” it a few days later and asking for their reward, she said that her year in law enforcement taught her to trust her gut and this was what her gut was telling her.  When I asked if I could speak to her gut and ask some questions of my own, she slammed her door in my face.

So the list of missing items as it stands currently is:

* eight miscellaneous bottles of hand sanitizer, lotion, etc.

* one pink hand-knitted afghan

* an oval ceramic spanakopita pan, and

* a John Tesh Holiday CD (reported missing, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy by the owner).

It’s my job to get to the bottom of who’s doing all this, and I’m going to put my best effort into it, since this waste-of-time is keeping me from getting real work done.  Evildoers beware; I’m comin’ for ya, and you better hope that building security finds you before I do.

That said, all of us here at NBI LLC (the company behind the company behind the BlackBookBerry) wish everyone, especially those who are serving or have served in our Armed Forces, a very meaningful and thoughful Veterans’ Day.  Many blessings upon you all.

Let me explain.  You see each year around this time we must select the vendors who will supply us in the following year with everything we need from raw materials to clerical supplies, to servers and software.  And rather than allow these companies to wander in whenever they wish and shamelessly hawk their wares to us, we insist that they all come on the same day.  In fact, I believe that Phil schedules them to arrive so that competitors are in the same pitch meeting at the same time in a bidding war for our business.  That is so like him, but it’s to be expected from the slave to the machine that he is.

Regardless of the direction of these “negotiations,” the winner is often decided by whomever brings the most generous hand-outs and promotional gifts for the office staff.  Moreover, the competition among the office staff is fierce to sit in on the negotiation which will yield the most freebies.  I do not involve myself in these, yet I can often give up my seat in the sales meetings in return for an array of offers.  And though I do not wish to abuse my colleagues’ wanton greed, I was in fact able to secure for my spot in three such “interviews” the following:

* A home-cooked gourmet meal for The International Girl amd me, courtesy of Tom (who knew he was a gourmand?),

* Two weekends at Ned’s lake house (which he refers to as “The Bunker”), including free use of the ham radio,

* The option to trade cubes with Kelsi, and

* A promise from Chastity that if things don’t work out with The International Girl, she’ll be my special friend for a week.

I have no idea what that last one is and why it would be so valuable, but as soon as I mentioned it in the break room this morning, all the men in the office became despondent and seemed to think I’d gotten the best deal of all.  It just goes to show you the failure of the capitalist model — that an object must have value in order to be assigned a cost in the market.  Or perhaps I’m wrong and I can trade that last one for something else …

Anyway Brad’s been locked in his little room for days trying to get everything restored.  I asked him what was wrong (not because I wanted to know but because I wanted to look like I cared), and he said something about our domain registration and some d-bag who “sniped” it and then he just kept repeating ”All Our Base Are Belong To Them,” like he had some kind of weird Tourette’s or something.  I left him alone after that.

But finally Phil gives me some information that like makes sense to normal people.  He says that all we can do is make some kind of protest at some big company that makes all the rules about all the websites everywhere.  So of course I say I know someone there and can get us back on track.

Unfortunately that’s not entirely true.  By “know someone” it might be a little truer to say “can probably get some help from directory assistance,” and by “get us back on track,” I should probably say “can convince someone there to help us if I send them a pallet of free product.”

So I shut my door and start to work my patented Kelsi magic.  And voila, four days and $23,671 later I have a judgment in our favor and the website is back up.  Of course Brad was an absolute wet-blanket and said something about it being a “peer-reviewed victory“.  I don’t know much about that; I just hope I get the credit I’m due.  Like a big bonus check.  Or a new purse.  Either way, I’m good.

“It needs a catchy name.”

“Pardon?”

“You know, something interesting, succinct, yet mysterious.  Something that’ll catch your eye.”

“You mean like those little hooks they used to latch screen doors?”

“You know what I mean.  Now get to it.”

So I went back to my office and thought about it.  Over dinner, Chip reminded me that the Marketing department at Corporate had a Brand Creative group that could be consulted for naming things.  I sent them an email and asked for a name suggestion.  I sent them some preliminary work on the product for inspiration and waited.

Two days later, the answer came back.

“In response to your request for a ‘Brand alternative line-extension, suggestion for appellation and catch-phrase’, we have suggested the following: BALSAC.  Please process the following cross-requisition in the amount of $3000 for creative services to your branch.”

Obviously I was non-plussed.  All they’d done was take the request I submitted and made an acronym out of the words in it.  And then they’d had the audacity to charge me $3000 for it.  This kind of stuff might fly at Corporate, but not here at Branch #7 where people work for a living!  Chip and I talked it over and he came up with an observation.

“Well, they showed you how they work.  If you’re not emotionally attached to taking credit for the name, you can try this …”  It was perfect.  I resubmitted the paperwork:

“We have received your recommended name and cross-requisition.  Management-level rejection requires we resubmit and request a new alternative for our “Change-hardened inspirational product with increased cost holding.”

I received the answer back this morning.  Behold, the CHIPWICH.

It’s no good, I tell you.

Of course the problem is not an age thing — they’re plenty old enough to smoke.  It’s the extra attention we just can’t handle.  This was supposed to just be a little diversion for us.  We’d skip out and every couple of weeks for a little time away.  You know, a break from the bustle of the workaday whatever.  And then of course Jan found out about it and tried to turn it into some kind of tea party.  Well we managed to get that back in-hand, but now with the interns hunting us down it’s suddenly not fun anymore.  If we all leave anywhere close to the same time, they mob us in the parking garage and demand we take them along.  They show off their calabashes and meerschaums and corncobs when we come into the break room.  I mean it’s nice that they’re interested in being part of our club, but honestly that’s why we’re quiet about it.  We don’t just want to move the office to our smoking room every couple of weeks.

So I finally figured what to do about it.  We’ve founded an official “Junior Pipe Club” for the interns.  And we put Jan in charge of it.  That way if she wants to make it like a little tea party with smoking and they can put up with it, great.  And we don’t have to constantly harsh their groove about Pipe Club.  Plus it gives Jan an outlet for her repressed domesticity so she doesn’t keep trying to spring it on the rest of us.

You know, the folks who are just in this for a good smoke.

I was in the server room on Friday and I noticed there’s some moisture on the floor.  Now I started to check the condensers for leakage, but I couldn’t see any problem with the moisture evaporators, which means that the problem may be coming from a …. hey, you’re running a mission in Mob Wars, aren’t you?  You’re not listening to me at all.  If you don’t start paying attention, I’m going to block Facebook at the firewall!  Then where will you be, huh?  HUH?  You’ll have to get an exception for a proxy server routing, that’s where you’ll be mister smarty-pants.  And who’s gonna approve that?  Not me, that’s for sure.

Anyway, so with this moisture on the floor, we’ve got a couple of options.  I put down a dessicant to soak up what’s there, but we really need to take a look at the bigger problem.  It’s seeming like the source could be one of the return pipes in the drop ceiling or it could be … oh what is this?  You’ve got a Wordscraper application for your Slackberry, don’t you.  No, go ahead.  I don’t mind if you get your premium word bonus.  I’ll just wait while you try to convince it to accept some word you think you remember seeing in the sixth Harry Potter book.  Never mind that I’m talking about MOISTURE IN THE SERVER ROOM!  Do you even know what could happen if we don’t get right on this?  I’m talking about catastrophic data loss here, folks.  I’m talking disaster recovery scenario A-1.  I’m talking about the kind of computer apocalypse that makes the “I Love You” virus look like a … Sure, I’ll wait while you feed your fish in H2Opia.

Some days I don’t know why I even bother.

He insisted that I had remarkable fingers and thumb structure.  Of course, this is the kind of flattery my mother had warned of me of, though I imagined briefly what it would be like to be a model, showing off my hands for photographs and commercials and such.  It would be like being the Mona Lisa: the flattery and attention is pleasant, but you can never go rock-climbing.

When I went home I talked with Bob about it, and though he loves my hands, he absolutely refused to even entertain the notion that anyone might look at them in photos or in a magazine or television.  My argument that anyone walking down the street might see them (provided I was not wearing gloves) anyway did not disuade him.

So now he and I are at a slight impasse.  Though I am tempted to call the modeling agency the man represented and look into showing off my hands for a little extra money (that I might send home to my parents), I do not wish to break Bob’s heart.  Still, if he insists on not allowing me to model my hands, I may make him dial the phone for me and hold it while I talk to the agency and tell them no.  It is only fair, you see.

I drove my Civic down to the Civic Center (which is the kind of irony that makes me want to punch someone in the face) and lugged our branch’s conference and trade-show supplies into the hall.  It’s not a complicated set-up: just a banner with our corporate logo and some brochures and stuff.

As I stood there for probably half-an-hour with no one approaching the booth, I got pretty discouraged.  And angry.  I could have been at the office surfing the web and shopping online and instead I was stuck here and couldn’t leave because Tom said he’d stop by at a random time to make sure I’d showed up and hadn’t pawned the job off on someone else.

I was just about to go all street-rat crazy when someone came up to my table and actually engaged me in conversation.

“So, what does Doogleheimer & Schmitt do?”

At that moment, I realized I had a choice.  I could tell the truth, which was bland, pointless, and offered me nothing in return.  Or I could lie, which promised no end of entertainment if I worked it right.  ”We’re a graphic design firm.”

“Oh, okay,” said my visitor, walking away.

Others started coming up and asking me the same question.

“We’re a vanity-press publishing company.”

This was starting to get really fun.  I put all my mental effort between visitors into thinking of the most unusual things for us to claim as our business:

“We’re do outsourced security clearance investigations for the FBI.”

“We specialize in burying time capsules.”

“We sell equipment for hot extrusion manufacturing.”

“We arrange nannies for childless couples”

“We’re a paper wholesaler.”

Unfortunately every good time has to end, as did mine when Tom (aka Field Marshall Buzzkill) finally showed up and asked what the hell I was doing.  Apparently his nametag had the company logo on it and folks were coming up to him and asking about all the various made-up activities of what they though Doogleheimer & Schmitt does.  Perhaps the first time ever, Tom had an entirely plausible reason to be utterly clueless.

I had to make some apologies to smooth things over with him.  I think it was mostly when I gave him $20 and told him to go buy himself lunch that Tom relented.  When the job fair was over and I was packing things up, I reflected happily on all the joy I’d spread throughout the day.  Not for anyone else, just for myself.  And honestly that’s all I really came here for anyway.

Of course Jane saw right through this.  ”Is this a competency test?” she asked.

“No, it’s an aptitude confirmation.”  She’d clearly been coached on how to answer this by the folks at Corporate.

“But we’re graded, right?”  Jan nodded.  ”And we don’t get our raises if we fail it right?”  Jan started to shift on her feet a little bit.  There were some uncomfortable murmurs around the room.  I had to admit I was beginning to sweat this test that was going to determine whether I got my raise or not instead of how much I had lifted the office spirits and morale over the last twelve months through my playful pranks.

Well the meeting devolved pretty quickly from there into a shouting match.  The two sides were Jan, who insisted that the tests were valuable to detemine who should get rewarded in the upcoming year based on their potential and aptitude, and everyone else, who thought that idea pretty much sucked and that we should do things the way we always have (which is to have Tom’s direct reports fight it out for the money in the bonus pool and then dole it out to the rest of us arbitrarily).

Unfortunately, as she usually does, Jan won the argument.  Apparently the woman can yell really freakishly loud.  We all filed out of the conference room and started making up study groups to review pivot tables and process cycles and scatter plots.  It’s not a pretty sight around here today.

So I’m about to sit down and take this test.  Wish me luck — I’m gonna need it I’m afraid.  The good news is that if I pass, I’m in like Flynn.  If I fail … well, let’s just say I’ve got a prank planned out for precisely that scenario.

So for me, the big surprise isn’t how much my bonus is going to be or how big a raise I’m getting.  It’s what new frontier of improvement awaits me.  Last year it was caring more about my fellow employees.  So I did it.  I figured out a way to care about them all more.  And I even proved it.  I walked into Tom’s office about this time last year and showed him the metrics, how I’d become 71% more caring to my coworkers.  And Tom was impressed.

I have no idea what Tom needs me to be next year, but I’m looking forward to a Phil-sized challenge ahead of me!  Let’s DO THIS!

And while that might work for certain people in certain departments (I’m looking at you, Marketing, and also at you, International Division), it’s utterly unrealistic to those of us who didn’t sleep through Accounting 101 in college and actually have to make the numbers add up right or else the finance Grinch will come for us in the night.

So when Tom met with his direct reports and asked for preliminary budget request numbers, I knew some folks were in for a real shock.  And it’s not because I don’t like giving people what they want (that’s more Jan’s department).  It’s really because we don’t all seem to have the same sense of fiscal responsibility that makes budget season a little more like New Year’s Day and a little less like Christmas.  You know what I mean?

So After I got Tom’s boat out of hock from the salvage company (after he accidentlally sunk it by listening to that idiot “efficiency expert”, Ken), he sank a huge amount of money into fixing it back up.  And then he of course could’t go and enjoy it normal-wise like the rest of the world.  Oh no.  He challenged the head of our main competitor, Nussey, Zucker, and Milch to a boat race with both our offices watching.

Now of course I was thinkin’ that idiocy like this deserves to be on videotape, and who better than me than to record this for posterity.  So when they shook hands at the dock, got in their boats, and took off when Chastity dropped some lacy thing of hers, I knew this was prime leverage material in the making.  What I didn’t count on was how it would all end up.

Now Tom didn’t crash or explode or anything.  He was even giving the other guy a real run for his money.  That Sally even pulled out in front at the very end, nosed across the finish line to win the race, and accepted a bottle of Dom as his prize.  Then things started to go all wrong.

He couldn’t let it be and started flappin’ his gums about the spirit of friendly competition and how the real winners were our two great companies.  And that’s when it happened.

I guess he wanted to make a freakin’ grand gesture about how unimportant stuff is when the real important thing was our spirit of cooperation.  And to demonstrate his point, he threw the bottle up and over his shoulder.  I know, man!  That’s Dom he’s tossin’ around like it’s Wild Turkey or somethin’!  Of course he couldn’t see where it was headed, but he could see our faces as we watched it arc upwards like a fly ball to short left center field, and then down again.  He didn’t bother turnin’ around.  He just heard the crash where it hit the other guy’s boat and punched a hole right through the fiberglass deck.  Yeah, I know.  Apparently those champagne bottles are pretty tough.

Well the party broke up right after that.  Oh sorry, no pun intended of course.  But Tom’s bummin’ again about his boat because now he has to loan his boat to his friend until he scrapes enough money together to pay for the repairs.  Me, I’m hopin’ this’ll be the last of the boat-related incidents this year.  Partially because I’m tired of driving back and forth to the marina.  But also because I’m tired of finding ways to get Tom out of his various and sundry boat troubles.

And of course in my role as the company’s compliance officer, it is my job to train others in the proper manner for conducting various office tasks and procedures.  I reward successful adaptation and punish deviance.  Honestly, it’s an assignment for which I feel uniquely qualified.

That said, it is not without its challenges.  My coworkers are frequently lazy, recalcitrant, and need proper guidance (I hesitate to use the term training) in order to be the kind of high-functioning and effective personnel that they can be.  Still, even when my dogs do not want to get in line and do their training, I have to resort to my various techniques.  Techniques, I recognized, that have equal validity with my coworkers.

Now I can’t divulge all the details as to precisely how I accomplish these results, but suffice it to say that it’s a masterful blend of positive reinforcement, clicker training, carefully placed electrically charged mats, and food-based rewards.  I just filed my interim report with Doogleheimer & Schmitt Corporate and have accomplished the following:

• * Kitty no longer chews pencils destructively, wasting valuable clerical supplies,
• * Brad will now wait patiently for the end of the day before leaving the server room to go to the bathroom,
• * Tammy eats her food slowly rather than gulping it down quickly, which increases its nutritional value, and
• * Tom will now hang up the phone no matter who he’s talking to if I say the words “peanut butter.”

All-in-all, it’s been an effective assignment so far.  I’m deeply curious as to what I can accomplish in the next phase of my work with the branch staff.

At work, Phil never seems to miss an opportunity to fire us all up, though I never see him around at the bitter end of whatever crazy endeavor he’s foisted off on us, when we’re slugging it out trying to just survive to the agonizing, exhausted completion of some pointless Hamburger Hill of corporate achievement.  I’m not bitter, just realistic.

So when he offered to host an office tailgate party in the parking lot before giving us all tickets to the game, I thought: (1) what’s the catch here, (2) screw the catch, it’s free beer and brats and I can wear my fall fleecey pullover, and (3) who’s paying for all this?

Fortunately for us all, my interest in (2) above won out over my concerns, so I didn’t harsh Phil’s groove and instead turned up right when it started.  At first I thought I had the time wrong, but that would be the first time in my life that had ever happened, so I quickly discounted that.  I took a walk around the block, not wanting to be the first person there, but when I got back Phil was still all alone, dutilfuy running back and forth between the grill, the cooler, the picnic tables, and the stereo.  He was working so hard it made me a little dizzy to watch him.   Still I was too uncomfortable just watching him, so I finally walked up and said hi.

“Ralph, my man,.  Glad you’re here.  Let me grab you a brat.  Or maybe some wings.  You might be a breast man, though.   Chicken breast?  They’re hot.  Right off the grill.  Beer?  Hang on, I’ll get you a plate.”  And like a summer rainstorm, he was gone as soon as he’d arrived.

We sat and talked for a while about the game, the team, the office whatnot.  Eventually I had to ask the most obviously question of all.  ”Um, so where’s the rest of the office, Phil?”

“Oh, Tom had something come up with his boat, Ned said there was a huge zombie convention and he’d come by if it didn’t go late, Jan is breaking in a new pipe, Jane told me to go screw myself, Kevin is visiting a sick relative, Hal is apprently making some kind of arrangements about the spread or the vig or something, Carlotta is helping him, Ken said it’d be more efficient to watch the game from his own living room, and Kitty said that her boyfriend got a new door and he needed her to polish the knob for him.”

“But that’s the entire office.  So is no one else coming?”

“You got it, champ.”  He smiled at me with that huge bright smile that had obviously paid for some orthodontist’s boat.  I scowled.  I hadn’t intended to spend my valuable pre-game time sitting with Phil and his Tony Robbins-enhanced conversation, free beer and brats notwithstanding.

There was a long pause where neither of us talked.  It stretched out to like three or four minutes, while I finished my food.

“Hey, you’re runnin’ low there.  Let me get you another brat and a beer, buddy,” said Phil jumping up.

“No, it’s no problem.  I was just thining I need to get going.”

“Oh, but you can’t go, man!  I haven’t even gotten the games out!”

“There are games?”  I said incredulously.  Phil stood there holding the spatula looking at me.  ”I’m trying too hard, aren’t I?”  I nodded silently.  There was nothing I could say.  His shoulders dropped a little and he seemed to let go of a tremendous burden.  He grabbed two brats off the grill and put them in buns.  He sat down next to me and handed me one.

We ate in silence for a while and before we knew it, we could hear the announcer on the radio talking about the start of the game.  ”So I guess you’ll be getting out to the game, right?” he asked, a little dejected.

“Nah, I said.  I thought I’d sit a while and listen to it here.”  And there we were, two guys enjoying the tailgate and listening to the game.

“Hey, tell me about Tony Robbins.”

With that, his eyes lit up and his characteristic spark reappeared.  He sprang up, tipped over the grill onto the ground (spilling red-hot coals everywhere), and began taking off his shoes.

“Tell you what, let me show you about Tony Robbins … And hey, nice pullover.  Know where I can get one of those?”

Looks like I’ve been a little hasty about Phil.

The bad news is that she’s completely disruptive to the office environment.  By that I mean that she’s breaking a variety of office rules designed to ensure my comfort as I work.  Among them are:

• * No use of the office equipment to conduct personal business on company time.  I would assume that this includes calls to her husband at Guitar Center over the lunch hour to describe their plans for each other late that evening in excruciating and nauseating detail.
• * No offensive perfumes, fragrances, colognes, or other body scents.  I have allergies, and wherever she walks, an insufferable cloud of clove cigarette smoke follows her.  I know the 60′s were a special time for all of us, but honestly, it’s time to let them go.
• * No inappropriate attire in the office.  Now this one I hardly care about at all, though it’s certainly no help when I’m working with a client and she bends over in one of her black leotards with her beret cocked rakishly on her head, with the curls of her pageboy haircut sticking out.  I can’t seem to hold their attention.  I wonder why …

Even though I brought my concerns to Jan, she would hear none of it.  Apparently being one of the top sales leaders in the company grants one a certain invulnerability to the reasonable complaints of one’s coworkers.  Harumph.  There’s no use talking to Tom, since he’d simply tell me to have Jan look into it.  And when I went back to Jan to say Tom had said to reconsider the matter, she made me fill out a written complaint form, then used it to wrap up her leftover half-a-sandwich from lunch when she though I wasn’t looking.

So here I find myself, sitting across the hall from an aging beatnik smelling like the Marrakesh bazaar.  I’m not sure quite what I did to deserve this, but perhaps I’m repaying some bad karma somehow.  That would be just my luck.

I couldn’t help but feel a certain disappointment though, since my young daughter (who is about one year old) constantly frustrated my attempts to entertain her.

• * I took her to the children’s zoo, but rather than petting the goats, pigs, llamas, alpacas, owls, or horsies, she was really only happy when she was picking up rocks off the ground.
• * I took her to the stingray exhibit, but she had more fun playing in the water fountain.
• * And I took her to the bird exhibit, but the only time she smiled was when she found a loose feather on the floor, put it in her hair, and then pretended to swoop around the entire zoo for the rest of the day.

So I’m not entirely sure how to handle this.  She babbled (in her own oblique way) that it was the best day ever, and though I’d love to take her back to the zoo again soon, a careful review of the day’s events reveals that I can duplicate my darling offspring’s experience with a handful of rocks on the floor, the kitchen faucet, and a feather from the front yard.  No zoo trip needed.

My wife insists that my plans to open my own zoo for 1-year olds with a set of attractions similar to those mentioned above are flawed at best, but I think I have a good idea here.  I know this time I’ll be right and she’ll be wrong.

So next thing I know I’m in his office and I’m getting this verbal lashing for this thing I maybe did or that thing someone accuses me of.  And I’m no idiot.  I admit nothing.  Still, there’s a “preponderance of evidence,” Tom claims, and now I have to go to a special rehabilitation training off-site for three days.  It started yesterday.

I walked in and on the board, the “facilitator” had written “Prank-ger Management”.  It was nearly lame enough for me to walk out right then and there and somehow play a prank on Tom to make it look like I’d actually gone to the class.  But I decided that wasn’t the spirit of his recommendation, so I stuck it out.

Over the last two days the fifteen of us in the class learned about the motivations of pranksters, the ways in which they try to cover up their true gifts by misdirecting them in destructive channels, and all that assorted hooey.  The best part was today when we had our roundtable.  I think our facilitator expected that we’d talk about our pranks in a kindof way to help us let go of our repressed guilt and need to be punished.  What it turned into was something completely different.  Let me give you a little transcript (yes, I recorded it — you’ll know why in a minute):

“… and then I got some friends and we high-centered his car.”

“Cool!  Did you know that we found a way to rig the vending machine to give out five cents less change than it should.”

“That’s awesome, you’ll have to show me how to do that!  But let me tell you about the time we raised the office temperature by a half-degree per day until it was so hot that when we switched it back to the normal …”

“… but we paid the telephone guy twenty bucks to re-route all the phone lines, so that none of the assigned numbers rang in the right office.”

“How did you get them put back in order?”

“Oh it was easy, but first tell me how you got your boss’s office floor covered with sod instead of carpet.”

So you can see why I recorded it.  This is great, great stuff.  I’ve learned so much already that I can barely wait to get back to the office on Monday and tell Tom how much I appreciate him sending me to the class.  Or maybe I can find a way to show him how much I appreciate it …

Anyway, we get there, and my kids immediately want to eat at the first place they set their eyes on.  That’s a typical rookie mistake, and I’m going to spare them an evening of heartache by explaing how you have to handle the state fair food vendors selection – you have to do a circuit and survey all the vendors, then you decide where you want to eat.  Or in our case, my wife decides where she wants us all to eat as a family.  So of course we do this, and as we finish our dinner of something utterly unmemorable (or at least it was at the time — I certainly spent a lot of time thinking about my dinner about six hours later back at the hotel), and then start looking for dessert.  And that’s when I see it:

Deep-fried butter.

I’m honestly both shocked and enthralled at the same time, as though watching a hideous bus wreck ahead of me on the highway.  I wonder if this is indeed the pinnacle of human culinary achievement.  Perhaps the only thing worse for you than this would be arterial placque injected straight into your veins.  But this is what we’ve got here at the fair.

So we step into line (and there is quite a line for this), and the guy ahead of us seems to have the skinny.  I was thinking that it would be like a stick of butter battered up and fried, but it’s not.  It’s apparently a very buttery sweet dough that’s deep fried and coated in powdered sugar.  It’s like the softest, most buttery dough you’ve ever had, he said.  So my tastebuds are anticipating this already when I notice something unusual.

There’s a man standing beside the line handing out business cards.  As we approach him, I notice it’s Dr. Hertzenschmertz, my cardiologist.  I want to hide out of shame for what I’m about to eat, but there’s nowhere to go.  Soon we’re right in front of him. But he’s not lecturing or shaming people or anything like that.  He’s handing out business cards.  We shake hands and have a light-hearted laugh about the circumstance, and he explains that he’s expecting plenty of business from this.  The booth owners let him stand out front as long as he’s not too obnoxious about the deleterious health effects of the deep-fried butter, and he gets a venue to solicit potential clients.

“You should be taking appointments, too,” I add.

“Well I would, Tom, but my Slackberry doesn’t get reception down here.”  I nod; it’s a familiar problem we used to have with them before we standardized the entire office on the BlackBookBerry.

“Here, doc.  Try my BlackBookBerry.”  He takes it from me and immediately begins making notes and taking appointment requests from the folks around me.  As we approach the front of the line, I take one last look back at the doc, who is feverishly scribbling down patient information and insurance numbers, but looks up for a moment and gives me a wink.  Somehow I bet I’ll be seeing him again soon.

So when I got here and saw what kind of a mess I had to straighten up, I knew that this was just another challenge I was going to overcome, like all the others in my life.  And soon enough, everything would fall into line and be all tickety boo.  That’s just an old phrase my grandmother taught me when I would visit her.  She would have me help her clean her house until everything was all tickety boo.  And then she’d pour us each a refreshment.  I’d get sweet tea with lemon, and she’d have a glass of vermouth with a twist.

Anyway, you cannot imagine the resistance I’ve encountered here to making even the smallest office realignments.  Whenever I find something that is out-of-alignment with our office rules and principles, I make a small note in my BlackBookBerry about it and then engage the responsible party to bring it back into alignment, or to eliminate the cause of the mis-alignment if necessary.

I’ve been having a tough time of it.  I’ve taken to my grandmother’s old remedy most evenings when I get home.

But I refuse to give up, because my grandmother never quit.  She never let the dust win in the Great Battle of Tickety Boo!  So if you see me scribbling in my book and walking toward you for a brief chat, get ready to be realigned.  Because from now on, I’m all business!

Well Tom called her into his office finally to discuss “a matter of professionalism,” as he said.  And of course I had to listen in on the phone extension, because Tom wants me to make sure that I hear everything that goes on so that he doesn’t forget anything and get in trouble with YOU KNOW WHO.  So even though it pains me so to do it, I’ve been listening in on his phone calls since I took over for Katie a year or so ago.

I will not bore you with the uninteresting and confidential details, but suffice it to say that Tom laid it all on the line for Jan and said that she had to straighten up and fly right or he’d be speaking to YOU KNOW WHO and she would very quickly find herself looking for other means of gainful employ.  Now I hated to hear this, because Jan is sometimes such a ray of sunshine in my life, like those days every once-in-a-while when she comes in and forgets to insult my hair or shoes or my intelligence by talking slowly and loudly, as though I come from a different country.  I come from Georgia, which is indeed different, but not that different.

But the rest of the time, Jan’s just such a meanie.  I suppose she had this comin’ to her.  Shows you why my momma always said, “If you can’t say somethin’ nice about someone else, sit right down here next to me.”

Anyway none of that matters, because he finally signed the paperwork, and I’m getting a new intern. I’ve started doing interviews.  Rachel wanted to sit in on them and ensure the proper procedures were being followed, but she was such a buzzkill.  She was always asking boring questions like what their qualifications were and what they intended to get out of the internship and such.  I, on the other hand, had great questions.  Incisive questions.  Meaningful questions.  Yes, of course I’ll share them with you:

1. Why do you think you’re attractive enough to work at Doogleheimer & Schmitt?
2. Who do you know?  Be specific, and the richer and cooler, the better.
3. Are you prepared to do meaningless, boring, and demeaning tasks in order to make me look good?  If so, why haven’t you gotten me a cup of coffee yet?
4. Meadowlark Lemon — cute, handsome, or gorgeous?
5. Do you know a good tobaccanist?

So, armed with this blistering array of insight-generating probes, I’m ready to take on all the interns this place can draw.  Oh, got to go — I think I hear the line forming outside my office door now.  Wish me luck!

I arrived as early as possible, so I could observe Tom handling the last of the party preparations.  To really understand how much he’d done ahead of time, I had to make sure and arrive about a two hours early. That way I’d be sure to beat any other early-arrivers there and be on-hand to note how much they helped Tom out with his preparations.

Once the party was in full-swing (and by that, I mean that Chastity had arrived and was sunning herself ostentatiously in a bikini that I can only classify as “scandalous,” Tom brought out pitchers of homemade sangria.  The way one empty pitcher was replaced by another repeatedly throughout the afternoon, I suspected that he had a tap installed in his kitchen that was dispensing it from an enormous vat in his basement.  Now I personally don’t touch the stuff (I’m strictly a scotch man myself), so I took advantage of this regrettable opporuntity to watch the pool party devolve from a polite affair comprised of general office humor, sports-related banter, and good-natured ribbing to a debauched spectacle consisting of little more than Phil challenging people to punch him in the stomach to demonstrate his abdominal strength, Hal insisting that he could have done the whole thing cheaper if we’d let him hold the party at his friend Dino’s house, and Rachel being thrown in the pool after refusing to flash Kevin.

It was just after Phil picked up Tom’s patio table, held it over his head shouting “I’m King of the World!”, and then ceremoniously threw it off the deck so that it rolled down the hill and smashed into the side of the neighbor’s house, that Tom decided that the party had gone on long enough.  Cabs were called, drunken co-workers were sent home, and I stayed back to give Tom a bit of a hand cleaning up.  He clearly needed it.

After we’d tidied most of the damage and patched things up with the down-the-hill-neighbor, we went inside, sat on his couch, and rested a bit.  Tom put his head in his hands and asked (perhaps rhetorically) why this kind of thing kept happening to him.  I fought back the temptation to make mental note of this incident for his next 360-review, and instead tried to explain that he tried too hard sometimes and that he needed to let things just be.

“I need to just let go?  And let them be?”

I nodded, feeling a little like a cross between Yoda and Mr. Rogers.

“You’re right.  I’ll try harder to do just that.”

I sighed.  Perhaps some of that sangria would help after all …

Okay, it’s not quite that bad.  But reality television is without question the moral cesspool of the modern age, the absolute nadir of human achievement (yes, worse than Ishtar).  Which is why it’s so difficult to admit this, but … <sniff> … I love More to Love on Fox on Tuesday nights.  Chip and I are tuning in every week to watch it.  Admittedly he doesn’t seem to like it very much, but I can’t get enough.  First of all, Luke is a hunka hunka.  And those girls are just to die for.  Every one of them is a curvy, gorgeous slice of loveliness with a side of sassy sauce.  And I every time Kristian cries or Mandy worries or Laura talks like a filthy sailor on leave, I just get all warm and fuzzy inside.

And the dresses are just gorgeous.  And the spas.  And when those girls talk about how much they appreciate themselves for the first time, I jump up on the couch and shout “You go girlfriend!” while pumping my fists in the air and doing the cabbage patch.

So even though if it were up to me, I’d send Fox television and Rupert Murdoch straight to blazes, I have to tip my highball glass to them for an outstanding show that has redeemed them for a few short weeks on my list of those things that the world is better without.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an episode recap to write on the forums and a flame war to initiate.  Who do you think is going to be our good man’s perfect bride?

So I wander down to shipping.  Hal knows me, so he asks, “Jane, what’s up girl?”

And I know enough that he and I don’t bother with small talk.  ”What are you planning to do to call in that debt to Jan for getting rid of Leslie?”

He points over to the corner, where this tiny (and I mean short) girl is pulling the canvas off a brand new, gleaming chrome-and-copper combination espresso machine and roaster.  ”It’s already in play, babe.  Meet my sister Carlotta.”

“Your sister, for real?”

“No joke.  Can’t you see the resemblance?”  Carlotta walked over to Hal and stood beside him.

Now Hal is black, and this girl is white.  He is tall and she is short.  They don’t look alike at all.

“Um, no.”

“Yeah, I can’t see it either.  Anyway, Carlotta, Jane.  Jane, Carlotta.”

She held out a hand daintily, which I took gingerly.  ”Charmed.  Come get a coffee tomorrow, and I’ll give ya a good deal.”

I waved my hand.  ”I don’t drink coffee.  But thanks anyway”

“Don’t drink coffee?  Hal, you hear this, she doesn’t drink coffee.”  With that she turned and went back to unwrapping the espresso machine.  The whole time she was muttering about me not drinking coffee.

Hal jumped in at this point, “You don’t tell Jan about this yet.  I wanna make sure I got the timing all right.”

I told him that I’d keep his little secret.  As I was walking out, I overheard one last loud comment from the tiny girl in the corner.  ”NO COFFEE!  Can you f***ing believe it?!”

I snapped.  I couldn’t take this anymore, and I turned and yelled back, “No coffee, you not-black, not-tall Hal’s sister!  I drink TEA!”  There was dead silence in the shipping department.  Hal looked at me and then at Carlotta.

“It’s no problem girl.  Why didn’t you say so?  I got tea too.  You come by tomorrow and I’ll set you up.”  I nodded at her, and she nodded back at me.  This will probably be the start of a great working relationship.  That or I’m gonna have to kill her.

It started the day before yesterday, when I was curling my hair at my desk before this big client meeting.  I was all dressed to impress and just needed to give my locks just that little extra bounce.  It’s my signature style, that bounce, you know?  So there I was.  And apparently I also had a fan on and my little coffee mug warmer going and I might also have had a few extra power strips plugged into the wall.  None of this matters, though.  The point is that the power went out and I could not finsh curling my hair.

So Phil and Brad do whatever it is they do.  Maybe they called someone; I don’t know.  But they come around and tell everyone that somehow there was like this cascade of circuit breaker failures, and though they could get the power back on in a couple of hours, the air conditioning for the whole office was blown out.  And to top it all off, apparently the landlord wasn’t going to be able to get to it for like three days because of some clause in our contract and some trouble we had a year or so ago.

So the rest of the day it was rough, but I left after lunch and it was all fine.  This morning though it was so hot.  And not the good kind of hot, like standing in line behind Brad Pitt at the Aspen Bulgari store right on Galena Street.  Not, it’s the kind like .. like there’s no air conditioning in the building.  Of course Chastity is prancing around in a bikini, saying that it helps her radiate excess hotness more effectively.  But when I see Chip and Dale walk by in their little man-shorts, I feel like I need to take another long lunch.

Well soon enough, everyone is walking around the office in their unmentionables, and in case I need to repeat this, Brad Pitt does not work here.  So I’m treated to a nonstop parade of the most regrettable-looking bodies imaginable.  I was seriously tempted to go home sick, because I was sick.  Sick of looking at Rachel and Tom and Ned and Ginger and Brad and everyone else who couldn’t help themselves but stop by my office to ask me some question about accounts or invoices or something.  As if that were important!  Duh!  I have feelings too, you know!

So the good news is that I got the rest of the week off to recuperate from my mental trauma at having to watch this gnarly office scene that looked like the Victoria’s Secret Lingerie Show done by Jerry Springer.  The even better news is that Tom’s giving us all the afternoon off on Friday for a pool party at his house as a reward for being so nice to each other while we waited for the AC to get fixed.  Whoopee.  Maybe I’ll get asked to judge the bikini contest.

But old Neddy’s used to people ignoring his admonitions.  It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.  They never listen.  So when Fred and Tammy arrived at work and walked in the front door with that look in their eye (no, not that look, the other one — they one that means they’re going to play a prank), I knew they were up to no good, and it wasn’t going to end well for some poor soul who’d just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So I’m sitting reviewing the quarterly statement to Doogleheimer & Schmitt Corporate all morning, half expecting to hear a crash or a scream or the fire alarm or something.  I’ve even got my emergency “Bug-Out Bag” right next to my desk, in case they do something that causes us to have to evacuate the office.  But nothing happens.  It’s okay.  Ned knows that preparedness is not a guarantee of need.  So I go about my work.  I eat my lunch (and let’s just say that a 3-year old MRE that I have to eat because I’m rotating the new ones in and the old ones out does not an appetizing luncheon repast make).

About 2:30, it happens.  Chip comes in and tells me that the financial software’s crashed and he’s completely out-of-the-water until the servers get rebooted.  To make matters worse, Brad’s on vacation today.  So I check the office vacation list, and Brad’s backup is … Fred.  I know how’s it’s going to play out — he’s engineered the whole dastardly thing.  So Chip and I go to his office and confront him.

“Fred, we know you and Tammy sabotaged the financial software so Chip would get his reports in late to Corporate.”

“Why would I do that?  I had nothing to do with it.  See, I just got it running again.  I did just what Brad said in his instructions to reboot it.”

“Forget what Brad wrote.  We know you’ve been planning this for weeks.  Maybe Brad was in on it, too.”

“Man, it’s not a joke.  I’m done with all that stuff.  I’m just trying to do my job here!”

“Oh, you’re not getting away with it, for sure.  Tom’s already on the phone to Corporate, and Jan’s going to be calling you any minute.  You’re in a world of trouble now, my friend”  And with that, Chip and I left.  To be honest, I think Fred looked pretty freaked out as we left his cube.

Of course Tom and Jan were completely in on this with me and Chip, and we all agreed this was the only thing that’d cure Fred and Tammy of this string of pranks they kept pulling.  I later saw him in Tammy’s cube and they both seemed to be really upset.  They were talking really low to each other and I think Fred had been crying.  Big baby.  Anyway I’m sure we got our point across, and we won’t be having any more pranks disrupting the office routine anymore.  That’s a safe assumption, right?

“Hey, um, you.  This is Gisele.  She’s going to be working in your division starting today.”

I was not surprised by this.  In America I believe this is abnormal, but where I am from these kinds of unforseen disruptions are expected.  I have learned to roll with the flow.  I motioned for her to sit.

“Gisele, what kind of experience do you have working in International Operations?”

“Well, I started my career with Greenpeace, and was their Director of Activism.  Then I joined PETA as the Section Leader Concerning Fur in Western Europe.  After that I decided to change my career focus and assisted the State Department for a time.”

I sensed an opportunity to seek confirming details.  ”What did you do for the State Department, precisely?”

She batted her eyes.  ”I can’t divulge any details.  You can say that I worked in troubleshooting.”

All I could say in reply was, “Please continue.”

“After that I took some time off to raise my son Bob, whom you know.  When he was old enough to write to his senators, I went to work for the Sierra Club arranging logging protests throughout Scandanavia and into the Baltic.  I spent two years in that role before transitioning over to UNICEF as their liasion to the former Soviet bloc states.  That was an unusual assignment, to say the least.  More recently, I have been teaching poetry at Springfield Community College.”

Sensing she had reached the end of her qualifications I asked, “Do you believe you would be effective leading European Operations for our branch?”  She did not even reply, but fixed me with a cold, hard stare.  Sensing defeat, I offered my hand.  ”Congratulations, Gisele.  Welcome to the department.”

We shook hands, and I escorted her to the door.  She left and I watched as she strode confidently down the hall to Tom’s office.  She walked in unannounced and closed the door behind her.  Moments later, I heard a brief, girlish scream.  I got up to investigate, but Ginger waved me away with a warning gesture.

I believe that a strange new chapter is beginning for us here at Doogleheimer & Schmitt.

So before I left for the weekend I called Jan into my office so she could review some new policies that were beling delivered from Corporate.  She said she couldn’t because she’d be out all weekend also visting her sick mother.  Fine, I said.  I ended up getting Rachel to handle it instead (which probably means Kevin did it, come to think of it).  Regardless, it didn’t matter; I needed it done and Jan was going to be out.  Case closed, folks.

So off I go, and my daughter and her friends squeal all weekend long, from the moment we boarded the plane to Dallas all the way to the seemingly endless line to get the autograph of some kid who makes more in a month than I make in three years.  But like a good soldier, I put on a good face for the girls.  After all this was their big weekend.  I kept my composure the entire time.

That was, until I saw Jan ahead of us in the line.  She was way, way ahead of us, but because of how the line curled around, I could tell it was her.  And I was furious — she’d told me she was going to see her sick mother!  But I knew that I couldn’t afford to get angry here.  I couldn’t afford to ruin my daughter’s birthday treat by making a scene.  But I had to make Jan understand how wrong what she had done truly was.

So I called Ginger back at the office on my cell and had her connect me to Jan via her cell phone.

“Jan this is Ginger from the office, hold for an important call.”

“Hey Jan, this is Tom!”

“Oh, hi Tom.  What’s up.”

“Oh, just wanted to see how things are with your mother?”

“They’re doing okay.  She’s feeling a little better.”

“Did she get the flowers I sent from the staff?”

“Oh, yeah, they were lovely.  Thank you.  That was so thoughtful.”  I left a meaningful pause for effect.

“Yeah, there were no flowers.  We’re behind you in the line at TwiCon.”

“You are … oh … damn.”  She turned to look and I waved.

“Yeah.  Any chance you wanna switch places with us in line?”

There was a long pause on her end.  I waved again just to be mean.  ”Sure, Tom.  I’d be happy to.”

And that’s how my daughters got some stupid kid’s signature on their t-shirts, and how Jan learned why not to lie to Tom.  Turns out we all got something that was good for us: my daughter thinks I’m the best dad in the world and Jan got taken down a peg, which I think she might desperately have needed.  How could this weekend have been any better, really?

Sooo my phone rings, and I’m totally like answering it and doing a sudoku and handling this purchase order all at the same time.  But it’s my boyfriend, and he needs me to take him to the courthouse.  Apparently he got this jury duty thing and he has to be there.  But it’s completely no big deal because he’ll get sent home because they always tell more people to come than show up.  They really should put “RSVP” on those letters.  That would totally help them plan things better.

So I tell Ginger that I’m going out for a mani/pedi and I’ll be back like really soon.  But when I get my boyfriend there, he’s all reminding me that there’s this warrant out for him because he got all these traffic tickets, which is completely not his fault.  They don’t realize that he’s got this uber-rare disorder that makes him not see street signs.  I’m not kidding.  He told me the name of it and everything.  Anyway, he said he might need me to pick him up late, in case he gets assigned to one of the court-things.

Well I didn’t want to lie to Ginger, so I stopped by the salon on the way home and got that mani/pedi I was talking about.  When I finally got back to the office, I realized I’d missed lunch and I was definately going to have to put “Perfect Day” on repeat once I got back from lunch.  On the way back into the office, I ran into Jane, who is like the biggest buzzkill.  And she asked where I’d been all morning, so I told her about my boyfriend getting called for jury duty and everything and how he might have to stay late, and how we were both hoping they didn’t look too closely into his parking ticket thing.

“So let me get this straight.  Your boyfriend’s got a warrant out for his arrest because of unpaid parking tickets?”

“Uh, huh,” I nodded.

“And he’s down at the courthouse right now?”

“Uh huh.”

“And he told you that he might be late?”

I just nodded this time, ’cause I didn’t want to sound like an idiot.  Jane just looked at me that way she always does and walked away.  That’s just the way she is.  I bet she’s got a good heart, even if she’s kind of dumb sometimes.

“Bob, it’s excellent that you’ve begun a bohemian-style living arrangement with a young counter-cultural such as yourself.  But I’ve got an important thing to tell you.”  I gulped and nodded, while The International Girl stomped out of the room in a huff.  Gisele continued.

“Your father and I have found ourselves forced to participate in the capitalist enterprise by returning to the mainstream workforce.  While he is giving bongo and poetry lessons at the local Guitar Center, I have yet to find a suitable place of employ.  I understand that you are hiring at Doogleheimer & Schmitt, is that not correct?”

It turns out that her information was indeed correct, though I’d never guess how she knew that.  Tom had just discussed the situation with his direct reports in his staff meeting last Friday, and yet my mother already knew what no one else in the office had been told yet.  She continued unabated in her verbal prying.

“I know that you can’t confirm this, of course.  I’m simply asking that you consult with your colleagues and find out if my skills would be appropriate at your firm.  You can remind them that I am fluent in several languages, even a few that are still spoken, and have contacts among numerous organizations throughout western Europe.  I remain certain that these would be tremendously valuable for an organization such as yours attempting to widen its client base beyond these shores of merciless and indefatigable consumerism.”

I had to admit that she had a point, given that The International Girl had shared a bit of gossip she had overheard recently at the Corporate office regarding our plans to get the jump on Nussey, Zucker, and Milch by beating them into the European market.  As though she had read my mind, she continued on, like a steam roller over a line of Yugos.

“I don’t expect a commitment or anything.  Just please ask Tom and give him a copy of my resume.  Tell him that I talked to you personally and asked you to apply in my place.”  She handed over a copy of the most impressive resume I’d ever seen for someone who’s never had a corporate job in her life.  At the same time, it was a little uncomfortable.  I was lost in my thoughts, and so I barely noticed when in a whirl of clove cigarette smoke, she was gone.

The International Girl came back in and berated me for half-an-hour for letting my mother call her counter-cultural and refer to our living together as a “bohemian arrangement”.  And on top of this, I now have to go tell my boss that my mom told me to tell him to give her a job.  Could this possibly get any worse?

“Good morning, officer.  What seems to be the trouble?”

“Good morning.  Can I see that item on the seat next to you?”  He pointed to my BlackBookBerry with his truncheon.  I reached over and handed it to him.  ”You were operating this device while driving, do you know that, sir?”

I nodded.  ”Is there a problem with that?”

“Sir, there’s a law agianst using certain devices while operating a motor vehicle.”

“What device?  It’s a notebook!”

“Sir, can you use this device to send messages wirelessly?”  I said of course.  He continued, “And can you use it to transfer data securely?”  I had to admit that you can do that with a BlackBookBerry.  ”And it has a silent ring feature?”  I shrugged my shoulders, defeated.  ”Sir, you cannot be using the device while operating a motor vehicle.”

He tore a slip of paper off his pad.  ”Now I’m just giving you a warning, but if it happens again, you’re gonna get a fine.  Is that clear, sir?”

“Very clear, officer.”

“Good.  Now you drive safely, sir.”  And with that, he handed back my BlackBookBerry and I drove the rest of the way to work with my BlackBookBerry in the back seat.  So just as a reminder, don’t let this happen to you.  Use your BlackBookBerry responsibly.  Or maybe find a handsfree thing or something.

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– Douglas & Tony

So with that matter unresovled, we escalated to pranks we could do to each other but haven’t yet.  And this of course went nowhere productive.  Living together, we have profound opportunities to perpetrate devastating pranks.  The conversation bore witness to our ingenuity, if not our ruthlessness:

“You know I could wash your darks and lights together.”

“And I could put sugar in your gas tank.”

“Oh yeah?  I could put Nair in your shampoo!”

“Well I could put Ex-Lax in your chocolate sauce!”

“I could tell your parents we’re living together!”

“You wouldn’t!”

A hush fell over the room.  Unfortunately we both knew the answer to that.  So we decided that we were like two sworn enemies, standing waist-deep in balloons-filled-with-shaving-cream, one with five pins and the other with three.  We had to declare a truce and focus our prankish predilections on those who most truly deserve them:  our colleagues.  We knew that we’d make an awesome, nay … prank-tacular team!

So this is our manifesto — it’s on, boys and girls.  And bring your “A-Game,” cause you know Tammy and I aren’t taking any prisoners.

So when no one responded to her little game to nominate people to get the axe, she started coming around to all of us department heads asking all kinds of questions like what our workload is and how busy we are and when we last hired someone.  I mean I’m no chump.  I know where this is going.  So I pull her aside and I set her straight.

“You need to fire someone, right?”  She nodded.  ”Okay, fire Leslie.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”  I didn’t mention that Leslie and I had talked about this a couple of weeks ago, and I’d gotten her an interview with my old pal Dino’s business.  He needed a talented protege, and I mentioned that she’d learned everything about running an operation directly from the master.  She’s getting a huge pay bump plus the opportunity to see the whole cannoli in action.  Plus I get a little something for me — keep listening folks.

“Well then that solves that problem,” Jan said.   She turned away and was about to leave, barely able to keep her excitement to herself about “solving” the headcount problem (as though I hadn’t done all the work).

“There’s just one thing, Jan.  You owe me.”  She looked at me a little strange, maybe thinking to herself that if she waits long enough I’ll forget or she’ll wiggle out of it somehow.  That’s fine.  She can go ahead and think that.  Like that’d ever happen.

So Leslie’s last day is tomorrow.  I’m gettin’ Vito to bring me in a great going-away gift basket for her, plus I’m letting her take the espresso maker with.  She was the only one who could make that thing work anyway.  Besides, I’ve already got a line on a newer model that Leroy is going to score me a great deal on for when I get Leslie’s replacement hired.  Heh heh.

“You know that you are the one who has to make the change in your life,” I told them.  ”You’re the one to make the difference, the one to take what’s bad and make it right.  If you want to make this office a better place, you know who you’ve got to start with?”

Jane raised her hand and interrupted me.  ”Hey, this is starting to sound a little familiar.” I shifted nervously in front of the room.

“Jane, how could that be?  That’s impossible.  This is my motivational speech.”

“No, I think it is.  You were going to talk about change starting with yourself, with … essentially … the man in the mirror.”  I felt the blood drain from my face, and I think my heart stopped beating briefly.  Uncomfortable murmurs came from a few disbelieving co-workers, but I was not going to let Jane derail my motivational message.

“You know, jane, no message I have could be any clearer.  I’m asking you to take a look at yourself and make a change.”

“Dude, did you just get this off the Internet?  This is just a jumble of lyrics from Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror.”  People were nodding their heads, and I knew I was in trouble.  I had to change gears fast and try to get them back.

“You know, jane’s making a bunch of comments about this speech like she was my editor.  But Jane was not my editor.  She’s just a girl and …”

“Okay that’s it.  I’m outta here,” she said.  Several others began to leave.  I tried to reel them back in with lines from later in my speech:

“Jane, you gotta be startin’ something here?  I don’t understand the way you think!”

“C’mon, folks, it doesn’t matter who’s wrong and who’s right!”

“You’re treating this like it’s really just a waste of time!”

Finally everyone left the room and I was alone.  I tried not to be bummed out, but I couldn’t help thinking about how much the rest of the office had missed out by leaving early after I’d worked so hard on the speech.  And it was going to be a great speech — a real thriller.

• $15.05 for two pounds of “imported perique tobacco” [John]
• $35.98 for dry cleaning [Tammy]
• $345.35 for ten cases of Red Bull [Phil]
• $44.56 for “assorted zombie prevention and suppression materials” [Ned]
• $139.81 for ten pounds of aged Sumatra extra-bold coffee [Hal]
• $2.98 for a box of emery boards [Ginger]
• $33.00 for a custom self-inking rubber stamp with large bold capital letters spelling “YOU’RE FIRED!”  [guess who?]

Well of course they played all our favorites, and we were simply in heaven — helped along the way by the flask full of shiraz that Dale smuggled in.  Nevertheless, our backstage passes seem paltry in comparison to what Fate had in store for us that evening.

Early in the second set, I noticed a tall cougary woman minxing it up near the front row.  She looked so very familiar, but I couldn’t place her.  Dale and I tried for ten minutes to think of where we’d seen her before, and simply couldn’t.  She wasn’t from any of our places: not Crate & Barrel, not Over the Rainbow or The Bottom Dollar, and certainly not from church.

That’s when it struck us — it was Rachel from work.  Of course you remember that she’s the little number sent in from Doogleheimer & Schmitt Corporate to clean up all our audit problems.  We barely recognized her without her schoolmarm outfit and dominatrix glasses.  Still there she was in a tube top and denim miniskirt, trying to get Jordan’s attention like a little hussy.

We pulled out our wallets and bribed our way closer to the stage, seat-by-seat.  A mere three-hundred dollars got us within a row of her, and I decided to shout her name.  Dale wanted to make sure we got a picture to document her presence at the NKOTB concert.

She turned to face me as I yelled to her and Dale snapped the picture on his iPhone.  Unfortunately, that was the exact moment that she chose to lift her shirt and flash Jordan Knight.  I’m not sure she figured out who we were, but she turned back to the stage and gave a little shimmy for Jordan before covering up.

Well we know when we’ve gotten everything out of a situation we reasonable can, and though I desperately wanted to stay until the end and stalk the tour bus, Dale insisted we head home and email the picture of Rachel and her rack to everyone we know.  On the way home, we talked it over and decided that the picture would serve us better as insurance against her typical meaningless impediments to real productivity around the office.  I sighed at another gratification delayed by the hope for future disaster averted.

Ah, the sacrifices I make.

Idiot.

So after a month of this, I’m taking matters into my own hands.  Vito tells me he knows a guy at the salvage yard and can have them break Tom’s boat out and make it look like it was never there.  And normally I’d be like “sign me up, man.”  But this time I can’t.  Tom’s too fragile to leave hanging like that, and knowing him he’d point the cops to me not because he suspects me but because he’s too soft to blame any of the girls.

What does old Hal do?  Of course I divert some funds out of Shipping to pay the salvage fee and get his boat out of hock.  I tell them to tell Tom that it was some kind of administrative mistake and they he’s entitled to one free boat salvage every five years — by law.  Now all I gotta do is make sure he goes five years without becoming a U-Boat commander again.

So now we’ve got the old Tom back, which is to say he’s still making life crazy for us and getting in the way and all.  Only he’s not this pathetic sad sack about it.  Geez.  I’m still thinking about getting him an outboard motor that runs entirely on Paxil … maybe the fumes will keep things normal for us here at the office … just in case.

When I say that hey knew the details, I don’t mean that they knew that we were both playing pranks on each other.  What I mean is that they knew it was Fred who got me deported to China.

So I was sitting at home (alone) last night.  I had a bottle of Merlot, a good cry, and a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s Mission to Marzipan.  And I felt a bunch better.  Emotionally that is.  Physically I was sick.  Then I had a good puke and then I was good all around.

But in addition to feeling better, I realized that I had a choice.  My life is full of choices, and this was just one more crossroads for me.  Do I forgive my boyfriend for just taking the last step in an escalating prank war that I admittedly started (and finished for that matter), or make sure that he knows who’s who by getting the payback that I’m due?

I decided that I’d wait and see.  I’d wait until he really messed up and missed an important day, like my birthday or my mom’s birthday or the anniversary of the day we first went out or the day we nearly got caught messing around in the lunchroom or the day HR told us to cool it or we’d both be in real trouble.  As soon as he forgets one of those days, it’s gonna rain down on him like … well like a rain full of pranks.

That’s the kind of maturity in my relationship that I can be proud of.

Of course Tom wanted me to make sure to give her a big Branch 19 welcome and make sure she feels right at home once she got here.  Now I wasn’t looking at the clock at the exact moment she arrived, but I do believe that she walked in our door precisely between 7:59 and 8:00 this morning.  Now if that’s not precision, I don’t know what is!

Well of course I introduce Rachel around to everyone (that’s her name, sugar plum!), and if anyone was all business I suppose that darling Rachel was.  She even helped me to see three corporate standards I was violating by how I had my desk arranged, when I was taking bathroom breaks, and how I was answering incoming phone calls.  And she was so matter-of-fact about it — she said it was nothing — just her job to point things like that out to us all.  And then of course she said a few things about us being renegades and lackadaisical and some other things that didn’t sound very polite if you were to ask me.  And of course my momma always told me that if I don’t have anything nice to say about someone I should just say nothing at all.  Perhaps her momma forgot to tell her that little bit of social etiquette.  But anyway now that she was here, she’d be able to just get us back on the right track so none of all that good tax money’d never go missin’ again.

Of course if you have something good to say and something bad to say about someone, there’s no rule about saying them both.  You just remember that.

Well that Rachel settled down to her job pointin’ out everyone’s faults just right away.  I don’t think anyone hadn’t heard from her by noon.  Bless her heart — she’s as mean as a horsefly in August but she sure can park her car just straight as a pin in that parking spot.  Oh, I’m sure she’ll soften up once she gets over her first-day jitters.  Don’tcha think?

So we relented.  We decided to let Jan stay, but we made her face the music nonetheless.  We told her that her idiotic “Hat Day” had gotten us kicked out of our meeting place and that meant she had to find us a new one.  She was indignant, but we explained it was that or go find herself new smoking buddies.

So a month or so goes by with not a word from her.  That’s two meeting dates, for those of you at home keeping score.  Finally this week she sends out a meeting invite with just an address on it.  We ask, “Hey, this isn’t someone’s house, right?”  Oh no, she tells us.  She’s got it all cleared with the folks who own the place.  And then yesterday we all take off for Pipe Club.  And as we roll up to the place Jan told us to meet, we realize where it is.

It’s the local Junior League.

We go in and Jan leads us to this gorgeous library with deep leather chairs and old mahogany paneling on the walls.  This room is gorgeous.  I mean it’s perfect for Pipe Club.  She sets us out ashtrays and we light our pipes.  We have a lovely conversation about Junior Leagues and young people’s charitable organizations generally.  We smoke, we relax, and then we go back to work.

I asked her today how she managed to swing that place for our meeting — I’d never have guessed they’d be hospitable to us.  She averted her eyes and explained that she was on the Board and pulled some strings.

“No way,”  I said.  ”Couldn’t have been that easy.”

She fidgeted a little before adding, “Well, I found a paragraph in the will of the woman who donated the mansion to the Junior League, and it said that the library could be designated for use without restriction by organizations that meet with the Director’s approval.”

“How could our Pipe Club possibly meet with the Director’s approval?”

“It doesn’t.  You miss the point.”

I thought for a few moments.  ”Who donated the mansion to the Junior League?”

Jan smiled slyly.  ”Loretta Doogleheimer.”

Then we both smiled and nodded.  Seems we’ve found our new smoking parlor for Pipe Club.  Well done, old girl.  Well done indeed.