NEVER EAT FISH IN THE OFFICE

I thought this rule merited all caps. Unless you are chowing a McDonald Fish Patty which (I suspect) is only marginally fish, do not, I repeat, DO NOT eat fish in the office.

We all have to live together for 8-10 hours per day, dealing with personalities that we would never marry, befriend, birth or tolerate under most circumstances. Having to deal with overhearing private conversations, personal smells, individual opinions is quite enough without introducing FISH into the equation.

One employee brought fish and microwaved it. Well I guess ole Goldie there had turned because the smell of rotten fish permeated the entire office for hours. My boss finally gave the woman a $20.00 and told her to eat out and please don't bring fish any more.

One Monday I dragged into the office (if it is a Monday, you can guarantee that I am dragging). Whilst sitting at my desk, I kept getting pungent whiffs of something rotten in Denmark.

I smelled my desk, my trash, I hound dogged the area, but it kept coming in whiffs and starts. I did a quick 'pit check' but no, I wasn't one of the great unwashed. After about an hour I couldn't stand it anymore and I practically shouted, "What in the HELL is that SMELL?!"

The office had been quite quiet up until that point, but suddenly the ice was broken. It seems that EVERYONE was having their personal airspace violated but they were all concerned that it was one of their neighbors and I guess no one wanted to comment on the personal hygiene of their office mates.

It turns out that Jan (remember Jan our resident nosepicker and canary killer extraordinaire?) had eaten a tuna and onion sandwitch on Friday but hadn't finished it, so she dumped it in her waste can. When she came in on Monday, her trash smelled so funky, she switched it with the trashcan at the empty desk next to mine.

I put it out in the hall, to horrify passers by.

Don't Ever Volunteer to be the Supply Guy

I used to be in charge of supplies for the office, a thankless task at best. No one notices the work unless something they want isn't in the supply closet. You just don't get any awards for keeping the staff in pencils.

I swear that every September we had a run on pencils, paper, binders, and rulers. Every Christmas my cabinets would be pillaged for scissors and tape. I mean, how many sets of scissors does an employee need? If we issue you one when you start, you should have to show us the broken scissors before you get another pair I think.

Anyway, I got smart and started hiding key supplies on my desk so that people would have to be bold and actually ask for that new pair of scissors in person.

I had to start locking my desk because they would sneak them out while I was on break. Sneaky little thieving devils.

******

Every year there was in Information Technology Conference for vendors to showcase their wares. I am pretty sure the programmers only went to escape the office and I suspect they hid at the local Starbucks for a few hours. On the other hand, the clericals loved the conference. They would come back with bags of mouse pads, pens, pencils, slinkies, stress balls, etc. It was like a shopping trip for them.

It also kept the supply closet from being raided for a few days. I wish they would have this conference in September or December rather than April.

The Nose Knows
Sam used to complain that he thought Jan hated him. Why? Because she would come into his cubicle to ask a minor question and on the way out should would lay a deadly stink bomb in his office. In his words, he would always think, What did I do to piss her off this time?

We would laugh whenever he told us this story, but I never really put much stock in it until one day Jan walked into my cubicle, asked a question and laid a paint peeler in my personal air space.

As I was hastily escaping the now poisonous air of my cube I thought, Geez, what did I do to piss her off?

Jan also had other endearing habits, chief among them was her stomach turning tendency to pick her nose. Unlike most people, she was no surreptitious picker, nor did she use a tissue. She was a two knuckle bold explorer or the nasal cavity, often initiated right in the middle of a conversation and generally ending with a green smear under her chair.

No, I am not attempting to gross you out (okay, maybe I am) and there have been others who simply couldn't believe that anyone would pick while talking to coworkers (and any other time that suited her) but it is true.

One woman refused to sit across from Jan as a result of this unfortunate habit. She said it ruined her lunch. I ended up sharing a cubicle with Jan for nearly a year, all of which I spent talking facing away from her and with my chair carefully separated from hers.

It is also important to note that Jan never farted in our shared cubicle. She always kept her olfactory attacks well outside her own workspace.

...except that one time when she laid a canary killer that drove the whole office into the hallway, but I like to think that was unintentional.

Promotion Primer for Bureaucrats

If you do a good job for the government you might get a stack of 'atta boys' some cheaply engraved plaques and an endless amount of sunshine blown straight up your butt, however you will not get a raise or a promotion.

There is a significant disconnect between effort and reward.

To promote, one has to wait for a promotional test to be announced. At the lower echelons, this generally happens annually, at the higher levels, every other year.

If you qualify for the test, you put in an application. If you application is good enough you get a testing date (usually 6 weeks later than the notice date, which takes about 4 weeks to arrive). Some tests are oral, some are written, some are two parters, meaning two tests usually given about a month apart.

Two months later (are we counting the timeline here?) a list is generated with everyone that passes being separated into ranks. Employees in the top three ranks are eligible to be hired, but of course they still must wait for a vacancy, put in an application, be interviewed and offered a job. This system works only if the job is in your same Department. Should you want to go to another department there is a whole other rat maze to get through which I am simply too tired to relate at this time.

As you can see, only the infinitely patient or psychotically optimistic can deal with such a system.

I have promoted exactly five times. I wonder what that says about me?

******

One of my earliest bosses was one of my favorites. She won me over when she told me anyone picking on her employees would get their heads ripped off by her BUT if we lied to her or screwed her over she would, "Kick your ass so hard that I will have shit on my kneecaps."

They just don't make bosses like that anymore.

Its Friday and You Really Expect Me to Think?!
My son is sick, which isn't really an excuse, but I will take it anyway.

My Mother, who generally takes care of such family emergencies, has decided that she needs to go see Singapore and Malaysia for the next week (damn her!) so I am relegated to doctor patrol and medicine procument at the Sychotic Compound this week.

Maybe next week I will write a commentary on exactly how a bureaucrat's day is spent, including coffee breaks. That should be fun.

How To Make Money The Old Fashioned Way
Back when I was working in the IT shop, we had a thief, a computer stealing thief. This guy didn't steal just any old computers, he only stole brand new computers still in the box. Of course this meant that he knew exactly when our shipments were arriving, which sort of ruled out Joe Public.

This went on for some months until we 'caught' the guy. He was escorted out in handcuffs at one point, but the department couldn't make the charges stick so he got to keep both his job and our eternal suspicion.

Over a year went by before the thievery resumed, but how? We simply could not figure out how it was happening as each computer order ended up one, two or even three PCs light.

Finally the mailroom (located in headquarters some 20 miles away) complained to our staff that it was inappropriate to expect their courier (they made two courier runs per day to our office) to move PCs for the IT shop. At first we were mystified (not knowing what the HECK he was talking about) but then it all came together.

This guy would move a PC to the mailroom (which was very close to the delivery area) tagged for headquarters. The courier would pick it up like any other package and drive it to the HQ mailroom where it would sit until our resident thief showed up to "install" it in some imaginary downtown office. Except that office was really the back of his sedan.

Short ending. Thief fired. No more government work for Genius Boy who would trash a 52k per year IT job with benefits for a few Pentiums.

******

What? Still no conclusion to the Henny Penny story? I promise, I am working on it but the whole darned thing sounds better in my noodle than it does on paper, so it needs reworking.

Stuff That Makes You Say Huh?
We have a sign in front of our building that reads:

NO SMOKING WITHIN 15 FEET

There is an ashtray right next to it.

Is this some sort of test?

******

My boss found a flyer for an employee's personal business (publishing web pages) on the copy machine. He made an annoucement at the next staff meeting, "Using Governmental equipment for private profit is against the law, and your business is doing so piss poor that you cannot afford your own copies, you should go into another line of work."

Thank goodness he never saw my party maps on the copier. Of course that was only for personal pleasure, not profit.

******

I used to work as an auditor with a woman who was an investigator. This meant that she is an actual gun toting peace officer (not to be confused with a police officer who might actually have some chance of getting shot at in the line of duty). She looked like someone dragged her straight out of Charlie's Angels (original series, not the movies) with the big hair and the full on make-up and eyebrows that made her look like someone had just given her an awful fright.

Anyway, Farrah would always take her gun with her on audit jobs, which mystified me. When was the last time that you heard of an insurance company breaking out in random violence during an audit review? So, finally I asked her why she, and she alone of the investigators always took a gun with her.

She replied that with the gun, airlines will let you preboard...and here I thought it was for no good reason. Glad I asked.

******

Once again, sorry for the hiatus. On the bright side give me a chance to accumulate these little nuggets for your wonder and amazement. Nuggets, now there is a visual.

Back to the Cube Farm
Sorry for the hiatus, I was parent sitting (my father really hates when I sit on him, but sometimes he deserves it).

I was going to write up the second half of the Henny Penny story, but I lost interest half way through, so instead I am going to put up some musings, ramblings and other assorted b.s. that I will pass for a blog entry.

I promise to finish the story later this week though.

Today is about retirements. Every office has them. We all dread them, but are obliged to attend. Worse, sometimes we get volunteered to actually plan them.

One of my coworkers is retiring in two months. It is my dubious honor to be in charge of his retirement photo album (who dreams up this stuff?) I would have tried to bow out, slipped an extra fiver into the gift fund, but I was threatened with additional, larger and more intricate duties should I pass this one up.

The concept is simple. Take pictures of all the coworkers and place them, along with index cards that have best wishes and cute anecdotes scribbled onto them, into a cute and heartfelt photo album.

The problem is that the guy is a total non-entity. A nice enough fellow I guess, but mostly I know him as an affable do nothing, so I am in a quandry as to how to fill out that evil little index card. Gone are the days when I could scribble something trite and illegible with my signature...now it has to actually say something...enough to fill up a recipe sized index card.

I had some ideas:

HAD A GREAT TIME HANGING OUT AT THE OFFICE PARTIES WITH YOU...BY THE WAY, WHAT DO YOU DO AGAIN?

HAVE A HAPPY RETIREMENT, NOW YOU DON'T HAVE TO COMMUTE FOR 30 MINUTES JUST TO SURF THE INTERNET.

Okay, so I can't write those things, but I can dream can't I?

This guy plays golf, which might be something I could glom onto, the trouble is that I have never truly appreciated a sport that consists of trying to get a tiny little ball into a tiny little hole far far way. Sounds like the definition of frustration to me. Give me a good game of Hockey over Golf any day. At least there is the chance that a good brawl will break out.

Adventures in Accounting
I used to sit next to a lady who looked amazingly like a broody hen. This image was reinforced by her laugh, which sounded a lot like clucking and her mouth, a tiny little bow, that had an almost beak-like appearance.

Some coworkers can be safely ignored. Others can be befriended, but Henny Penny fell into neither category.

As a mildly disgruntled low wage accounting widget, she amused herself by complaining about things, all things. There was no aspect of the work environment too trivial to merit attention and comment. If it wasn't the temperature, it was the lighting or the desk spacing, or the tepidness of the water in the drinking fountain.

What was really maddening was that she never 'did' anything about the conditions she professed to abhor, probably because she was having far too much fun complaining about them.

If a gum wrapper was left lying on the hallway floor she would comment on it, repeatedly. She would comment on its inappropriate location, its inherent untidiness, the possible characteristics of the person who dropped the wrapper in question and she would always close with the phrase, "Someone should do something about it."

I can only guess that she never thought of herself as 'someone' because never, not once, not in a single instance in my 2.5 years sitting next to her did she ever stoop to pick up the wrapper.

Some people will be tempted to jump in at this point and comment that I should have suggested she pick up the wrapper or perhaps I should pick up the wrapper myself. Now those voting for me to confront my coworker have obviously never sat next to a complaining, chicken clucking, Henny Penny before or you would know how deeply such a suggestion would have offended her and how she would give me the silent treatment (not so bad) or how the future complaining would be focused solely upon myself.

As for the people thinking I should pick up the wrapper myself. This might seem an obvious solution that would end the immediate problem at hand, it fails in three major respects:

1. It simply leaves Henny Penny free to start in on the next area of complaint.
2. It ends her fun. (Remember, she enjoys complaining.)
3. It would make me her personal butt monkey, slave to all her future whims and endlessly assaulted with requests.

No, I got my revenge in other ways. Devious and ultimately satisfying ways, which I will relate when I get back from my vacation.

A Walk Down Memory Lane
I wasn't always this way...a floater in the toilet bowl of the workplace. I used to be a hard worker. I gave 110 percent. In fact I worked myself up from the lowest level of service to one of the highest you can achieve without actually bossing other people around. I did this without the benefit of higher education or a decent wardrobe, which is no mean accomplishment.

I still do everything they ask of me. I still finish my assignments on time. I have an excellent attendance record and I have over a month's worth of vacation on the books.

So, what has changed? Well, fundamentally I see my job as completely futile and unnecessary where as historically I had only seen it as partially futile and unnecessary.

Civil Service has severed the tenuous connection between performance and pay. Politics in bureaucracy as eliminated any semblance of logic in the decision making process. Upper management are inevitably appointees that are better at smooching someone's backside that running an organization.

Sometimes I wonder why government works at all.

Okay, so that wasn't very funny...hmmm, how to lighten the mood. Maybe I can dredge up an anecdote:

Our facilities person got a phone call from the bathroom (from a cell phone, I know what you are thinking!) asking for a roll of toilet paper because the poor guy was in an embarrassing situation. Bum out with not even a butt gasket to come to the rescue. Now a woman could possibly dredge a few scraps of tissue smeared with lipstick from her purse to help matters out, but men have nowhere to hide emergency butt wiping supplies.

Our facilities person hurried to the supply closet and got a roll of toilet paper for the poor fellow, but he failed to specify *which* bathroom he was stuck in. We were in four buildings with two men's bathrooms in each building, meaning that the hunt was on.

Poor Lisa, toilet paper in hand, spent twenty minutes going from bathroom to bathroom, knocking on the door and trying to hand out toilet paper. She never did find the guy. Maybe someone gave him a hand over while she was searching for him. I like to think so, because the alternative is just too nasty to contemplate.