My desk at the office. Some items on the wall, if you are unable to see them clearly, hearse sales brochures, Funkervogt, Type O Negative and Information Society album covers, Agents Of SORP propaganda and some other pics you can actually find on the DHA site if you look hard enough.
The top view of my lovely computer. There is a little train that runs around the perimeter of my hard drive, yes it really does work. I turn it on when I get bored.
A close up of the train. Notice the ambulance waiting patiently to cross. Sometimes the ambulance gets sick of waiting and tries to race the train at the crossing. Sometimes he does not make it, and the patient in the back (Six year old boy named Jimmy who drank too much Yoohoo and antifreeze attempting to make a Slurpee at home) is horribly maimed and his badly lacerated corpse lands on picnickers nearby. Also notice that there are little tiny army troops lying in ambush behind several of the trees. This is not one of your better railroad crossings.
Me at my desk. The green, purple and gold motif you are seeing here is for Mardi Gras day at work. Mardi Gras in an office building is somewhat lacking. Absent is the booze, fights, women flashing their breasts, throngs of rowdy party goers, and music. You are pretty much left with the colors purple gold and green.
I wrote a story about my habits of sleeping under my desk at work which is something I prided myself in doing in my call center days before I started working as an office manager...
People are always saying how they like it so much better when their work is busy…
“Oh my, I can’t stand it when things are slow! When things are just crazy and 5 million people are calling in, work is backed up, there is no time for lunch and the copy machine is shitting out cats covered in Vasoline, I just LOVE it! The time goes by so quickly!”
You know, fuck that. I think you need to be at least mildly retarded to view your workday as something good when it is all fucked up with work. That’s like saying you were a Jew during the holocaust and you liked the days better when you were being experimented on because they flew by faster because they were more ‘exciting’. You have something wrong with you, something deep seeded and psychologically fucked Any normally well adjusted human being with a modicum of self respect should hold their jobs in contempt for the fact that no matter how well they pay they are still comandeering your life and making you do something you sure as hell wouldn’t do of your own volition.
What’s MY perfect workday? Let me show you…
8:35 AM - Saunter in late because I don’t value my shit job whatsoever and can only be bothered to make the most minimal effort to appear that I want to be there on time
8:40 AM - Fall asleep at desk. Years of field research and practice have yielded me a superior method on this activity. Now not to brag or anything, but when it comes to desk sleeping I definitely feel I am a cut above most other people out there who are, to be blunt, doing it completely wrong. Most fools just crash out at their desk all willy nilly as illustrated below…
Not me pal! My tried and true method makes it EASY to not only sleep at your desk, but avoid detection as well. Sound too good to be true? Well read on mofos! Basically, you want to get practiced at falling asleep while sitting up. This is essential, then put one hand on your mouse, and use your other hand to support your head. The best tactic here is to cover your right temple, so it looks like you are rubbing your head in one of those “Man this has been a heckuva day!” dipshit moves, but in fact what you are doing is obscuring the fact that your eyes are closed and you are in a deep slumber.
The importance of keeping your hand on your mouse is twofold. Primarily because if you just let it dangle there it will be a dead giveaway that you are asleep, secondly because even the smallest movement will cause your screensaver to shut down. Nothing fucks up the illusion like your boss walking by and seeing you apparently staring very intently at that gay ass Windows logo swimming around like a goldfish on your screen.
Lets take a look at sleeping on the job, THE ZACHARY HELM WAY!
Now that is one handsome sleepy time session! No one is EVER going to think I’m doing anything but working at a fever pitch, unless of course they stare for more than 2 seconds or happen to walk by twice, but still.
You may also want to sleep under your desk if you are particularly exhausted. Of course, there is a right and a wrong way for this…observe…
Don’t be a sap. The fact is, sleeping under your desk is a great way to catch up on all the sleep you lost the night before looking up internet porn. The problem is that people tend to notice people passed out under office furniture. What they DON’T tend to notice is a desk that looks like it is brimming with industrious activity! What you want to do is pull out all the desk drawers that are in the line of sight of passerby, then take your chair and lower it . DO NOT push it under the desk, you need that room for sleeping. Instead, turn it around and face it outward, as though you got up in a hurry and didn’t push it back under the desk. Allow yourself some extra coverage by hanging a shirt or jacket over the back of the chair. Other items like trash cans can be cleverly arranged to block the view even more, or a personal favorite of mine is to hang a book or clipboard over the edge of the desk a little to provide more coverage. Let’s take another look at our friend the desk sleeper now!
I am the Vietcong of lazy bastards!
Sometimes a customer will call. Now some punk ass loser who was new at the whole sleeping at work thing would allow this to fuck it up for him, but not me. A customer on the phone is EASILY another 5 minutes of sleepy time goodness for me. See customers are basically stupid schmucks who are usually calling for one of two things, either to make a payment (which means I can put them on hold for 5 minutes while I “Pull up my payment screen” which is my code for “Finish off this dream I was having about railing Cheetara”) or they are calling to bitch.
Fucking customers always assume two VERY incorrect things when they call to whine about their menial problems. One is that I might give even the remotest hair on a ticks nutsack what their concern or problem is, the other is that their case is in some way special or that I haven’t heard it 50 times that week alone. People don’t ever seem to understand that big corporations like the ones I work for are constantly fucking up and I hear this crap all day long. So that being said, I can easily sleep through their long winded tirade on how we wronged them, how they’re going to be late with their payment for the chemotherapy and little Timmy is go into a relapse and yakkity fucking smackity.
So yeah, it’s all pretty much the same so I just sleep lightly until the point in which it sounds like they are wrapping it the fuck up, then I wake up and try to catch the tail end of whatever the hell their thesis statement on our suckitude is. If I oversleep and happen to miss that too, then I will just use the line “So basically, the main thing you are really upset about is…” then leave it hanging for that sucker to fill in the blanks for me. Works every time.
Once they’ve clued me in to the non-specific specifics of their problem, it’s time for me to inform them that I will need to place them on hold while I ‘research’ their issue. The thing is, I don’t really do any research whatsoever because I already know what I am going to tell them, and it’s a big whopping 64 ounce glass of “I can’t help you with that shit” but they don’t know that yet so I can easily put them on hold for another 5 or 10 minutes while I either sleep some more or check the internet for recent postings of OWNED pictures, which I do love so very much.
At some point I get back to them, tell them that I can’t help them, and if they get uppity then I tell them I understand their concerns, insinuate that there MIGHT be something I can do to help, and then and ask them to give me a moment while I check something for them. I don’t even bother making up a better excuse than “Well, let me go check something” because honestly they neither require nor deserve a better one. They are desperately hoping (falsely so I might add) that I am going to help them, so they will cling to any sapling of hope I extend their way and are not about to risk tempting my ire by questioning me.
At any rate, checking something is of course again a code for “Doing anything on the planet I can think of that is not related to your problem for another 5 to 10 minutes of your time”. After that it is time to get back and tell them there’s nothing I can do. If they still bitch then I give them an address where they can send a letter that no one is going to read.
11:00 AM or somewhere around that time – Wake up time. This is by far the hardest part of my workday, waking up. It means I have to come out of the general haze that I spent most of my morning in and start to come to grips with the fact that I am in some crappy office building occupied with people so fat that they actually sweat while typing because the physical exertion is THAT taxing on them. I have nothing against being overwieight, but come on. If moving your fingers in 1.5 inch incriments is causing you to bust out into a copious downpour of sweat, you need to do something about that.
At any rate, I have to wake up and start moving around. There are several things you can do when you actually decide to get motivated for your workday, one of which is work but I don’t recommend it. Work leads to submission of work to superiors. Submission leads to review, and review, if you are anywhere near as lazy or smart assed as me, leads to being told I did it wrong or that they don’t appreciate my humor, so it’s just easier to bypass this whole debacle and not do any work. If I don’t work, I’m not fucking anything up AND I am not wasting my supervisors valuable time by telling me to go fix it. By all rights I am actually saving the company money at this point! Assign it to either superior personel or someone who gives half a shit, doesn’t matter to me pal. Efficiency, it’s what I’m good at.
Anyway, since I’m not going to be doing any work I need to find other things to do. Here are some options-
-Walk around and see if any of the good looking girls in the office are wearing g-strings that are visible when they lean forward. This is easily good for about 15 minutes of entertainment. I don’t feel too bad about doing this because if they didn’t want me checking out their underwear, they’d wear pants with some damned belts on them, but they don’t.
-Damage company property. Pretty self explanatory. If it belongs to the company and can be stomped on, dented, dinged, kicked, bent, slimed, whizzed on or flushed down a toilet, it very well might be.
- Fuck with peoples workstations. For some reason people in office buildings always regard their desk as something of a sacred and sovreign nation. They think that even though it is out in the open and completely exposed someone like me is not going to come along and fuck with it, just out of sheer respect for their personal space! I wish I could properly convey the guffaw I get out of that every time I think about it. If you have dolls, you had better bet they will be in sexually obscene positions that would make Caligula squirm uncomfortabley when you return. God help you if you didn’t lock your computer before leaving because the boss is going to be getting an email professing your homosexual love for him and a desire to engage him with a donkey when you leave. I also like to screw with the monitor settings so that the display is scrunched into a little ball, tilted to the side and stuffed into a corner. I usually like to change the language on the monitor’s menu to something like Arabic so they can’t change it back either. Make sure to zip tie both ends of the power cord so that it cannot be unplugged and reset without crawling under the desk and making yourself look like a jackass in front of the office.
- Did you know that Thank You and Fuck You sound only slightly different and are almost imperceptable when said without proper enunciation? This is by far one of my favorite games to play with people, and yes, no fooling, I do this all the time at work. Let those customers know what you think of them on a subconscious level the next time they call by seeing how many profanities you can slip in to a normal conversation! Let’s compare two possible conversations, the first of course being the approved customer friendly script…
“Thank you for calling Ace Tech. Yes? Ok Mr. Smith, yes you are behind on your payments. You showed a positive balance 2 months ago but it has since fallen behind.Yes the bill seems high, but when you consider that our services are $25 each, it can’t take long to add up. You get your paycheck this Friday? Ok, well when you cash it head over to our payment station and we will waive the late fees. Of course, no problem, at Ace Tech we consider our customers to be the greatest assets we know of! Ok, goodby Mr. Smith, thanks for calling and tell your wife we wish her well too now!
Now I don’t know about you, but this type of repartee makes me want to vomit out of orifices I don’t even have. Spice it up a little by adding some personal profanities, thinly veiled by a lack of enunciation and hurried speaking…
“Fuck you for calling Ace Tech. Yes? Ok Mr. Smith, yes you are behind on your gayments, you chode a positive balance 2 months ago but it has since fallen behind. Yes the bill seems high but when you consider that our services are $25 eat shit can’t take long to add up. You get your paycheck this Friday? Ok, well when you ca-shit head over to our payment station and we will waive the late fees. Of course, no problem, at Ace Tech we consider our customers to be the greatest ass hats we know of! Ok, goodbye Mr. Smith, thanks for calling and tell your wife she sure smells like tuna!
You know, while I am on the subject, here’s a couple of phrases and terms that seriously make my blood boil every single time I hear them at work…
“Hit the ground running” This is usually a phrase meant to convey that when your desk clock states that it is 8:00am you are already ready to start working at a lightening pace, it also insinuates that I should be getting ready to do their fucking bidding the minute they start the clock, which is funny because they sure as hell aren’t paying me overtime to come in and get geared up. So they want me to start jumping the minute I’m on the clock? Are they going to pay me the minute my work day is up? That answer is a big fat slovenly NO, they aren’t paying me for another two weeks, so they can suck it and wait until I lurch into a state mimicking forward motion when I am damned well ready.
“Tone it down” This phrase usually means that something you are doing is making someone uncomfortable, which is usually a code for “Management”. See, management in large companies basically works like this- If you see something that is different, stands out or could possibly be a problem then just freak the fuck out and put an end to it. This could be anything from someone with different colored hair, a facial piercing, an off color desk calendar, cartoon or a knick knack on their desk, whatever. Management doesn’t recognize that these things could be distractions from the soul raping monotony and oppression of the environment people like them have created, to them it is just a problem, a silly little thing those wacky employees do, not because they have “personalities” that are not entirely centered around a life of total devotion to their shitty ass job. Management types love to do nothing but think and act professional, so they don’t really understand why anyone would want anything more out of life.
That being said, they don’t want to come over and just come out with it and tell you what is wrong, they LOVE to sugar coat it so they don’t seem like the dick holes they really are, so they say something like the following, which I have taken the liberty of adding superscripting to so you can see what they REALLY mean when they say crap like this-
“Hello Mr. Johnson! How are YOU today!? Fantastic!1 Glad to hear it. Well, I need to address something with you, it’s about your [insert one of the following here, desk, decorations, new hair color, facial piercing, outfit, etc]. Now I personally like what you have done2, I think it is very imaginative!3 But unfortunately some people have complained4 and we have to ask if you can tone it down a little, just a little5. Can you do that? Oh fantastic, thank you!6”
1. Who fucking gives a shit? 2. It looks fucking goofy. 3. Garrrr! Me GROG! Me am Human Resources Bitch, me no understand desire to express self, GROG SMASH! 4. No one complained, I noticed it and figured I’d come the fuck over and bug the crap out of you about it. 5. Completely change it to what we want because anything less is going to result in me coming over and repeating this shit until I have completely hammered down your resolve. 6. Damned straight you can do it, you’re our bitch, never forget it fucko.
Yeah, screw that. You know what I would like to see? Some manager who wasn’t a pussy and could actually come over and just come right the hell out with it by saying something like this-
“Hey Johnson? Did you eat a big bowl of Fucking Dumb for breakfast and wash it down with an aneurysm? Take that cartoon off your cubicle. Oh you don’t like it? Tough fucking shit. We own the cubicle, and for that matter, when you’re here we own you. Have a life on your own time, when you’re here we’re busy owning your ass so shut up and put on a happy face you clown. Maybe later I’ll let you do a little ass kissing if I am feeling generous to make up for your transgression”
You know, if someone said that to me, I’d think they were dicks, but you know what? I’d at least respect them. Sure you’re a dick, but you’re making no apologies and you’re not insulting me by assuming I am so stupid that I wouldn’t pick up on it if you white washed it. I can respect an asshole who is sincere, I can’t respect one that can’t even own up to it.
“Think outside the box” Well then, give me a round cubicle asshole! You always hear this one in office buildings. The thing is, even if you did come up with a great idea they would never use it, I know because I’ve been down that road. Hell, you could find a way to turn dog crap into oven fresh cinnamon buns filled with $50 bills and the only thing you’d get is some sort of response about how they will need to run it by upper management and then you’d never hear anything about it ever again.
“Take ownership” This is a classic. What this boils down to is that they want you to take total control of a situation that is fucked up, one that is so screwed it makes Jasmine St. Claire look only mildly fucked by comparison. One that NO ONE wants to deal with, and for good god damned reason. Nine times out of ten the thing management wants YOU to take ownership of is something that they screwed up and don’t feel the need to dirty their hands with by resolving it themselves. So they are pushing the values of taking responsibility while simultaneously dodging it and giving it to you. Next time someone says this to me their ass is going to take ownership of my foot and the first 13 inches of my leg. They’re going to need a dentist and the jaws of fucking life to remove that shit.
At Any rate, making all these astute observations takes a lot out of me, so it’s time for me to take a power nap, and your first guess where I am going to do it is probably correct.