My job is all shit and barf and broken fingers

May 04, 2006 - 1:10 p.m.

Today I am working at a different company, I got sent here to cover for some dude on vacation and I’m pissed. I just found the first company in this whole city that is nicer than the one I work for. Damn.

I’m in the Sears Tower, and while I don’t dig this modern architecture, this glass-and-light-wood motif, I gotta say that the work environment is primo. I‘m roughly halfway up the 110 story building, and for some reason I can’t stop staring out the window and imagining an airplane flying right towards my face. Every office is floor to ceiling windows, all the walls are glass, and so there is essentially a panoramic view of the whole city.

Firstly, I showed up and everyone is wearing expensive jeans and I am wearing a Tool’s Uniform. We don’t have “casual Fridays” or casual ANY day where I work so I showed up wearing, I dunno, “dress clothes”? Fancy collared button-up shirt and pinstriped pants. Everyone here is very casual and nice, and talky and Let’s Be Friends! Several men have flirted with me. This is the exact opposite of where I work, which is a mixture of The Marines/The Oval Office/Wall Street/Prison/Hell.

This company here is a consulting company, and I know what that means but I don’t know how to describe it in words, accurately. Let’s just say that the company is rich, the employees are rich, and they make white men all over the world even richer.

They have the coolest kitchen I’ve ever seen. It’s huge, like a cafeteria, except it’s all ambient and there are tables with booths, with high backs like in a 50s diner, so you can have private conversations. There are flowers everywhere, and the kitchen is stocked with food and drink. AND IT’S FREE. They feed everyone breakfast every morning (and I’m talking like 200 employees) with a smorgasboard of fruit, cereal, oatmeal, bagels, donuts, Starfuck’s coffee, organic teas, an espresso machine and a giant cooler with every beverage known to man, from the Pepsi family, the Coca-Cola family, every juice, every milk, soy products, 7 different kinds of bottled or flavored waters, holy shit, do they have a wet nurse on hand so I can bring in my newborn baby?

Most people are drinking Perrier, which I find vomitously pretentious, but then this dude across from me has a bottle of Jack Daniels with a pour spout on his desk so that like cancels it out.

And this ain’t no ghetto fruit, no Jewel fuit, like apples that taste like cardboard. We’re talking Chinese Pears and other exoticies unfamiliar to my eyeballs.

God. There’s a whole lot of socializing going on here. Is anyone working?

Not me.

As usual, I’m a total bitch, ignoring my co-workers, and being self-involved and writing this blog.

I’m just pisstastically thrilled that I can access my email here, unlike the fucking CIA I normally work for that blocks everything, including Dooce and “How To Knit a Nice Sweater For Your Grandma” websites.

At my desk I have a giant LCD monitor that feels like a massage to my eyeballs compared to my normal flickering 120 pound monitor. I have a DVD player (why?). I’m surrounded by things and I don’t know what they are. I’m pretty sure that thing there is a scanner. A laser color printer right next to me? I’m sitting in a chair that is like Ergonomical Heaven. It’s made of mesh with a light aluminum frame. It conforms to my body and moves every way that my body would like to move, more than just SWIVEL. Where can I get one of these?

They just fed me lunch: pizza and salad. That’s when I saw the lounge, a 1,000 sq. ft. room with a sectional sofa in front of a big screen tv, a shelf full of games, a pool table, a “bean bag chair corner,” enormous stuffed animals (??) and snap shot photos of the employees in frames around the room. What world is this?

Back at my real job, with a small staff of 9 people, 5 of them were absent today, but I still got sent over to help out at this other company, whom my boss is connected with, blah blah, long story. The following are the reasons that these 5 lazy fools gave for being absent:

1) “I got diarrhea from an Arby’s roast beef sandwich and need 40 hours to recover.”
2) “My daughter, who is in 8th grade, is sick and I need to pick her up from school, take her home, and I won’t be returning to work.”
3) “I’m going to be five hours late to work today.” [No reason given].
4) “My wife just called and said she got into a car accident so I have to go and I won’t be back for 3 days.”
5) “I’m on vacation.”

How many of these excuses are legitimate, in my mind? Number 5. Leave the man alone, he’s on vacation.

Number 1: You fuggin pansy. Here’s the thing about diarrhea, and believe me, me & diarrhea are intimately acquainted. We’ve been in a relationship for 30 years. Anyway, when you poop, there is only so much in there and then it’s done, right? Unless you eat more food, that creates more diarrhea, but here’s an idea: Stop eating. Drink Pedialyte and expect to not eat food for at least 4 hours. Maybe 12 hours. Wipe your tender ass with a cool, soothing Aloe baby wipe and park it right back in your chair and get to work.

Number 2: 8th grade? As in, 14 years old? I don’t think so ma’am. She can sit in the fucking nurse’s office until your work day is over at 5pm. They have a cot in there. What could be wrong with her, cramps? A head cold? Diarrhea (see above, bitch)? She’s not sick. She just didn’t study for her geography test. Let her study for her test on the cot there, in the corner.

TANGENT: There were perhaps 3 occasions in my K-12 career when a parent picked me up from school and one of them was when I got kicked out of school and they asked my father to remove me. But I knew better than to have the nurse call my parents at work, because the answer would be “No” and then I’d get punished later for being a wuss. And my dad worked right across the street from my school, and we were a 5 minute drive to our house. But you can bet that he never once drove me home from school, even that time that I lost a liter of menstrual blood on my white jeans; I just walked around like that the rest of the day, with my coat tied around my waist. True story.

But what dad did do for me, in lieu of giving me rides home, was to peep in the classroom windows, looking for me while I was at school. He went jogging on his lunch break every day and ran around the grounds of my school, which was long and sprawled out, with most of the classrooms on the ground floor. He ran from classroom to classroom while kids shrieked and pointed at the creepy old man standing in the bushes. He wore sweat bands around his head and wrists, little white short-shorts that revealed his jock strap and, god help me, no shirt. Inevitably, around 12:45pm, my class would start screaming and I’d look up and see my dad with his face pressed against the window, waving at me excitedly, for no other reason than to embarrass me straight into hell.

And in a shining display of the old adage: Running: Nature’s Laxative, he once stopped in the middle of his jog and pinched a hot jogger’s loaf beneath a bush outside of a classroom. I’ve since repressed the details of this event, I don’t remember if students actually saw him straining outside, his bald head peeking above the windowsill, or if he just reported it to me later. I think it was the former.

Moral: 8th grade children are not meant to be coddled and excused from test-taking. They are meant to be humiliated and made to sit in their own blood for 6 hours while the odor of feces wafts in through the window./TANGENT

Number 3: If I ruled the world, “You’re fired.”

Number 4: Sure, it’s possible that a car accident can be very serious and you may want to jump from your desk and sprint to the accident site to hold you wife’s bloody head in your lap while she utters her last words. But here’s what I’ve learned from living in this city: Car accidents usually are not fatal. Maybe I have no idea what I am talking about, but it seems that they’re usually just fender benders, due to the fact that you can never really go faster than 15-30mph in this city, with a stop sign at every block. If it were the suburbs and someone told me that my spouse was in a car accident, I would probably faint because out there they are driving 45-70mph, and yeah, people die all the time. But here, people crash left and right, a hundred times a day, and then they walk away from it.

So it turns out that this guy’s wife totaled her car, yes, and the airbag bruised her upper torso, and she broke a couple of fingers. I say: BIG DEAL! Quit your crying! I mean I guess it could be like MUCHO PAINFUL and shit, but toss in the fact that this is the THIRD accident that this bitch has had in the last year and I’d be like: Bitch, walk your ass to the ER and take the bus home. When you get in that many accidents, you ain’t getting sympathy from anyone, because the odds of all three NOT being your fault are ZERO.

TANGENT: When I was 10 years old I broke two fingers playing football at school during recess. Index finger and thumb on my right hand, it hurt so bad I limped off the field but I did NOT cry, even though I REALLY was crying inside. Went to the nurse’s office and this is one of the 3 times a parent picked me up from school. The thumb broke to the left and the finger broke to the right and it swelled up and felt like it was on fire. I sat there and waited for my mom while it throbbed in my lap. I was back at school the next day and the only special treatment I got was that a girl in my class was assigned to write out my homework for me for a few days…until I learned to write with my left hand!/TANGENT.

So this dude and his wife….um. You need three days off to take care of her? Like doing what? You can still eat and wipe your ass with broken fingers. You’d be amazed what humans are capable of if you just TRIED, instead of using the smallest daily incidences as excuses to become physically and mentally paralyzed, only able to eat Krispy Kremes and yak on your cell phone about the horrible tragedies that continuously befall you. Take a lesson from that lady who’s always on TV, the one with no arms and no legs but she birthed children and carries them under her neck and changes their diapers with her teeth all the while making spaghetti for dinner. 50 bucks says my co-worker and his wife are sitting at home watching Judge Judy and debating about how they can possibly collect disability due to her broken fingers. He is probably filling out FMLA forms as we speak. My wife! Is disabled! Give me free money!

I had the displeasure of witnessing Guy #1 eat his Arby’s sandwich at his desk and subsequently run to the bathroom and upon returning, reported to me that he blew beef & cheddar chunks in the sink and “Left it there for someone else to clean up.” The sink? Huh? You couldn’t get to the toilet 5 inches away? Whodahell vomits into a marble sink and then leaves it there? Does he fucking think that we work at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School, and that Louie the janitor will be around shortly to dump sawdust onto his sickness? You sick fuck. And then to tell me about it, once again someone fishing for sympathy at Lake Shawna Mooney, guess he didn’t hear that it’s a salt lake, a DEAD SEA that holds no life therein. Better to try your luck at Lake Sucker, in the next cubicle.

Or I’ll really give you something to shit about.

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