King of the Cubicle

Last Days

A colleague of mine recently gave her two weeks notice. Her last day at the office was yesterday.

I hated her on her last day. I hated her because all of the stress and angst and acquiescence we still have to confront every day simply vanished for her. She was preening and prancing around the office like she had nary a care in the world.

I hated her because I remember that feeling and it was like heroin. Euphoria. Relief. Cessation of the maddening needs to care, to put up with bullshit, to be effected by the day-to-day hysteria so prevalent in a workplace environment.

I hate that bitch.

A Hole In The Middle (or is that "A-hole" In The Middle?)

SENT: Oct. 4, 2007
FROM: Cubicle, King of the
TO: Every Motherfucker Who Works Here
SUBJECT: ME! THAT'S WHO! ME!

Attention, People Who Only Care About Themselves:

Today is the one-year anniversary of the day I started working here. To commemorate the occasion, I brought donuts.

Choke on 'em, you dicks.

Sincerely,
The Angry Guy In The Cubicle That Smells Like Hand Sanitizer

I’m With Stupid

[The following story is entirely fictional. Any similarities between the names or situations and real life are entirely coincidental. Void where prohibited. See your dealer for details. All rights reserved. 10% alcohol by volume.]

The agency for which I work has been retained by an up-and-coming technology firm. The company has a respected and very recognizable name, but it is known by only one of its products (although that product kicks major ass). Our mission is to help them broaden awareness of the other things it offers. If we do our jobs well, you’ll know about it.

Given the magnitude of this opportunity, all of the senior-level creative folks were summoned to wrack their brains for a bold, unique concept around which to base this company’s large-scale attack on your wallet. We were given a week to brainstorm The Killer Idea, and we ultimately presented our concepts to the group.

This is the appropriate interval at which to tell you one of member of the creative team is way out of her league. She is a senior-level art director because she has big tits and white teeth. Sadly, her creative thinking closely mirrors her intellect, which is to say that it is hollow and piss-poor. But when volunteers were sought to present their ideas first, she chimed in enthusiastically. “I’ll go!” she said.

You’ll never guess what she presented.

A guy. A mascot. A composite of the company’s logo superimposed atop Mickey Mouse’s arms and feet.

The room went silent (kind of like it does when the shackled serial murderer enters the courtroom to hear his verdict read aloud).

To support her case, the woman produced low-quality black-and-white printouts of other mascots: Mr. Peanut, the Tidy Bowl Man, and so forth.

A mascot?! This client has the potential to change the way we live and you want to give it the Mr. Peanut treatment?! You can NOT be serious.

I decided that I would not make eye contact with any other colleagues because I was absolutely positive that doing so would result in a fit of laughter that could not be stopped once it started. But even if I HAD indulged my urge to laugh, it would have been stopped cold when the head honcho decided he kind of liked the mascot idea and would gladly present it to the client.

I cried.

Disturbing Corporate Vernacular: Circle Back

Plain English Translation: Get back to me.

Used in a Sentence Likely to Be Spoken by a Corporate Blowhard: "Tell you what. Why don't you go write that email while I call the client about fudging our deadline again. Then we can circle back and compare notes after lunch. Sound good?"

No. It does not sound good. It's sounds like you're a middle manager who likes to pepper his speech with gibberish so as to sound like you know something even though you spend all day, everyday on Facebook. Circle back on THAT, motherfucker.

What has happened to standard English? Where did the term "get back to me" go? Why are we always circling back and touching bases and pinging? Can you all circle back on that with me?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Y'all have been very patient with this site and I thank you genuinely. I'll be making a concerted effort to update regularly from now on.]

Open Letter to a Coworker

Dear Coworker,

Please have a stroke.

Sincerely,
Me

The Worst Corporate Double-Talk of All Time?

The Los Angeles Times this morning sent an email to its workforce about laying off 50-some-odd employees, but they didn't call it a layoff.

They called it an "involuntary employee separation program."

One would think that an established newspaper like the Times would at least have the nuggets to use honest, direct terminology to describe its own actions. Instead, they sunk to a new low.

More about the Times' involuntary bullshit program here.

The Winker

I recently had a meeting with Stanley, a client I’ve known for almost a decade. Stanley is an exceptionally nice guy but very much a professional. We’ve talked on a personal level from time to time – about our kids and our mutual business acquaintances – but the tone of our conversation is invariably businesslike and respectful. This, as you know, is not the way I speak in my “normal” life, but I have fun role-playing as a polite, gracious businessman on occasion.

At our most recent meeting, Stanley and I sat across a conference table from one another. His company was preparing to launch a new product and he’d asked me to help him craft the appropriate level of bullshit to make it sound awesome. He provided some source documentation and we discussed it feature by feature. I asked questions. Stanley answered them. Pretty standard meeting behavior.

When we got to item six, which seemed to be rather complex, Stanley said, “That’s where I think you can help us the most. We need a writer who can turn all this gobbledy-gook into plain English.” As he spoke the last part of the sentence, he smiled at me.

Then he winked.

At least I think he did. Do you ever have those moments where your eyes play tricks on you? Like when you see a huge pair of bare breasts in your peripheral vision only to discover when you turn your head that it’s just a poster for two eggs sunnyside-up at Denny’s? Happens to me all the time, and that’s why I was able to convince myself that Stanley’s wink wasn’t really a wink.

Until he did it again.

I felt a strange kind of rage about it. I can’t recall ever having been winked at, even by one of the many, many sassy little coeds who flirted with me in college. I’m sure winking at people was quite a persuasive instrument back in the day, but in my interpretation throwing a wink at someone nowadays is a good way to get your underwear rammed down your throat – WHILE YOUR WEARING THEM!

Stanley kept talking. “…so this has to reflect our commitment to sma—“

I interrupt. “Did you just wink at me?”

“What?”

“You winked at me, Stanley. You were paying me a complement and you winked at me.”

“I did?”

“Yeah. You did. And I’m a happily married man so I’d appreciate if you’d stop trying to hit on me.”

“Pffft!” Stanley says. “Don’t flatter yourself, pal. No one’s trying to hit on you.”

“So you claim!” I shout. “What other purpose could a wink possibly serve when you’re throwing it across a conference table to another man?”

“Perhaps I was trying to show you that I respect your capabilities as a writer!”

“In that case a handshake would have sufficed,” I say. “And don’t make the mistake of thinking my ‘capabilities as a writer’ mirror my ‘capabilities as a powerbottom.’”

Stanley appears flummoxed. Irate. Practically homicidal really. I presume this means the meeting is over. I pick up my papers and head for the door. But as I reach for the handle, I turn and look at Stanley. “I’ll have a first draft to you next week,” I say.

And then I winked at him.

[This entry also posted at Dad Gone Mad, just for fun.]

Disturbing Corporate Vernacular: Heavy Lifting

Plain English Translation: Hard work.

Used in a Sentence Likely to Be Spoken by a Corporate Blowhard: “Tell you what, guys. Why don’t you just stand by on this one, ‘mkay. I’ll handle most of the heavy lifting on my end.”

Since open, honest, direct terminology is as welcome in a corporate environment as a Hershey squirt in the Sparkletts bottle, some bozo came up with this term. Like all of the other zingers we’ve exposed in our Disturbing Corporate Vernacular series, Heavy Lifting is a convoluted way of saying something that's actually quite simple.

In my view, “heavy lifting” is a term suck-ups use to make it sound like they’re working harder than they actually do. If you say, “I’ll do most of the heavy lifting on this report, Steve,” it sounds as though the work is quite difficult and challenging (not unlike the popular web development terms “front end” and “back end”). Conversely, a comment like, “I’ll do most of the hard work on this one, Jim,” makes the person sound like a martyr and someone who can’t delegate. And there we have the perfect storm for turning plain, easy-to-understand English into chest-pounding and nonsense.

We were all taught in our teen years that there is a right way and a wrong way to lift heavy things. Done correctly, the lifting is done with the legs, thereby taking stress off of the muscles in out back. This strategy obviously holds no relevance for anyone who would use the term “heavy lifting” in a business environment because it’s usually uttered by inept senior management douchebags. You know the type: fat, balding, over-caffeinated, out of breath after one flight of stairs. The only legitimate heavy lifting they do is when someone brings donuts to the office and they sneak away with three glazed doughbombs.

When they say, “I’ll do the heavy lifting,” they actually mean, “I’ll make my subordinates stay late to do it and I’ll take all the credit for it in the morning.”

Correction: It’s PEE-SEE, not PC

[Submitted by my homey Travis, whom I've known since elementary school and can tell you humiliating stories about if you're interested.]

I am proud to say I no longer work in a cubicle.  That is unless you count the four walls of my home office. Most of my cubicle moments came more from managing people than they did from being a worker bee. And the combination of these moments not only drove me to continue drinking, but also drove me to the ranks of the self employed!   

My tales occurred while managing a group of 35 people ranging from professional level employees through the temp that answered incoming calls. I should preface that I moved out to an aquarium on the production floor which I preferred from the office I was assigned because when people come at you with dumb questions (as a wise person once said, “There are no dumb questions, only dumb people who ask questions”) or personal problems, or things you just can’t imagine happening, I was always instinctively reaching for the escape hatch button hidden under my desk that would whisk me away. Needless to say, that button never got installed and I would be trapped having to deal with OFFICE POLITICS!!!   

The Aquarium, better known as the high walled glass cubicle, looked out over my kingdom and allowed me to interact and work with my group … at least that was my story to my boss when in reality, it allowed me to see things coming that would let me plot my escape. To hell with the escape button … I actually had a door I could run out behind me! But since evolution hasn’t yet put a set of eyes on top of my head and the side of my head, I would either have my eyes looking down at paperwork or staring into my computer screen and I never saw some things coming, including some really bad things.

This includes the gentleman who announced that he was going to have his gender reassigned and that we should call him by his new legal name, or by his nickname, “Kat”. “Kat” started using the women’s restroom before his assignment was “due” if you will, and needless to say, the women in my department were none too thrilled, as it was explained in gory descriptive detail, that “Kat” came into the restroom today and “stood up to pee again so we could all hear that deep rumbling pissing sound guys make instead of the hiss that girls make.” I remember comments like this when I was in college but it wasn’t anything I learned in any of my classes. It was in social settings when my friends would announce that if I was too chicken shit to do {insert dumb ass move here}, I must have to squat to pee.   

My HR director’s advice and approach was to make this MY problem to address. “Travis, we will identify one restroom as a multi use restroom and this is the restroom that must be used by the employee”.  Facilities put up the placard with the universal symbol of male/female use. I told my employee that in the interest of maintaining a comfortable working environment for all, this was the restroom that needed to be used.   

I’m pleased to say that my college training in this subject came into a viable business application as pointed out by some of my friends and colleagues in the office: “Hey Trav, did that sign on the shitter get put up for you because you were too dickless to tell “Kat” to stay the hell out of the chick’s bathroom?”

Disturbing Corporate Vernacular: Off Line

There are probably some people who won’t be interested in this entry so maybe we should take it “off line.”

PHOOEY!

I have no idea from whose ass the term was pulled, but I will say this: no corporate term has ever incited more homicidal ideation in my boney little chest than this sumbitch right here. If you’re someone who drags his or her sorry ass to a lot of corporate meetings, I’d hazard a guess that we see eye-to-eye on this one.

You’re in a meeting with eight or nine coworkers and the discussion in the room relates to the color blue. How can our company drive higher profitability by leveraging the color blue? Bob over there says we should make the sign outside the building blue. Mary wants us all to wear blue socks. Charlie The Mouth-Breather With No Neck is forecasting that our net, year-over-year, Q4, margin something or other will balloon by over 29 amortized basis points if we all start answering the phones like this: “It’s a blue day at Dipshit Industries. How may I be of blue service to you?”

I’m in the corner of the room, saying nothing. I look over at Bill and we simultaneously roll our eyes at the rampant idiocy in the room. He leans in to talk to me.

“What’s with the blue fetish?” he says. “Haven’t these losers ever heard of red?”

“Seriously,” I say. “Blue’s nice and all, but everyone knows red’s where it’s at.”

“Red, green, yellow – any of the primary colors would work,” he whispers.

Just then, Mary interrupts us. “Uh, guys? If you have something to discuss that relate involve this conversation, can you please take it off line?”

“Off line?” I say with my brow furrowed. “We were never on line.”

Mary looks perplexed. “Are you telling me you don’t know what ‘off line’ means?”

“No, but I am challenging you to describe how it works in the context you just used. How can we get off of something we were never on? You might as well have asked me to remove my skirt.”

“Look,” Mary says, “I can see what you’re trying to do here. We’ll discuss this later.”

“OK,” I say. “Will that be off line or on?”