poorly thought out chivalry – wrong.

Everyday I ride an elevator up to the 20th floor. This elevator stops on floors 12-21, so logically, I am often standing in the back on my way down to the lobby.  An amazingly bright, worthwhile cast of characters often joins me in this claustrophobic box that takes me to and from the largest gaping hellhole where which I wallow in suicidal thoughts on the daily. Pseudo-buff (see: FAT) Guido lawyers with porcupine spiked plastic legos for hair in silk purple ties, short stubby dudes in tattered khakis who will likely spend the day plugging and unplugging computer cables while pretending to “network” something. And the people who work on my floor: personality devoid zombies who feel entitled to pass themselves off as human because they can walk on two feet instead of four. It’s a real treat.

Here’s the thing. Let me reiterate. I’m at the back of the elevator.  So let me say this. If you have to slam me into the elevator wall and/or hold me up for 14 minutes while you do some sort of idiot shuffle where your backpack ends up inside someone else’s asshole in order to let me out of the elevator first, then IT IS NOT CHIVALRY. Give it up.

First of all Guido lawyers, it is obvious to me, BROS, that while you may put on some crazy chivalry show by tripping over your shiny clown shoes while you unsuccessfully try to let me out of the revolving door first, I am well aware that you are the same dudes who roofied and raped several girls while you shat your way through the University of Indiana Fratville. And after one beer and a slightly oversized piece of chicken marsala, you would rape me too.  This is actually not chivalrous behavior at all. So your day glow orange face is idiotspeak for “heinously transparent contradiction with McDonald’s hamburger meat for a brain.”

I mean are you serious with this chivalry bullshit? Next time you find yourself sharing a street with me where there is an imminent possibility that some irritated Frenchman might dump urine out his 8th floor window then by all means, walk on the inside and make yourself the target. But last time I checked, we aren’t in a commercial for “White Diamonds” by Elizabeth Taylor or “Diamonds are forever or until I eff your best friend with the fake tatties” commercial by DeBeers. Last time I checked, I was fully able to gather the strength in my pale and measly arm to open a cab door by myself. Last time I checked, I wasn’t interested in getting a close-up sniff of your Axe-drenched stankass armpit as you hold the door and awkwardly make me crawl underneath it and eat your deodorant crumbs. Last time I checked, I was smarter/faster than you and not interested in interacting with you at all.  So I’d really appreciate it if you would let me pretend you don’t exist as is my preferred way of dealing with annoying tools such as yourselves.

*Note: You should still always warn a girl 5-7 seconds before you impregnate her tonsils.

office trends #3 – regaling others with the insufferable minutiae of your meaningless tasks – wrong.

The only reason that I currently work, or have ever worked, in an office is because I don’t want to have to eat out of a landfill while I attempt to find a suitable sugar daddy/mommy/pimp. I understand that not everyone can be as ambitious as I am in that respect, and that’s fine.  That’s great.  There are certain folks who take their jobs as Marketing Coordinators, Assistant Sales Managers, Executive Assistants, Spreadsheet Makers, Printer Ink Level Monitors, etc very seriously. They generally lack high school diplomas, complain bitterly about so-and-so’s inability to properly work the postage machine, and are usually any or all of the following: obese, lopsided, midgets, balding, guidos, fake-tanned, fake-nailed, pot-bellied, unhappily married, unhappily divorced, whores.  Basically, they are going to sit in the same stank-ass cloth office chair that reeks of their stale crotch for 35 years, and then die in it, because it’s the best they can do. And that’s fine.  But let’s get one thing straight. Actually, let’s get two things straight. Nothing you’re doing is particularly challenging/interesting/important, and I DON’T FUCKING CARE  ABOUT WHATEVER IT IS YOU DO.

Recently, I learned the term “e-mail courier“. Now there are some people in this universe who deserve to be on death row… child molesters, rapists….trust-fund babies. E-mail couriers fit right in between serial killers and old-people muggers. These are the people who spend 45 minutes writing out some bullshitastic e-mail summing up some worthless task they just completed that nobody else cares about.  Usually it’s something my golden retriever could have handled. They’re so proud of the e-mail that .000007 seconds after they hit send, they launch their fat ass out of their chair-coffin and get all up in your face. “Did you get my e-mail? Did you read it?” What? What e-mail? I haven’t checked my fucking e-mail in like a year and a half because I’m too busy praying that if I stare at my gmail hard enough, I might get an offer to work as a professional beer-taster or napper. So no, I didn’t read your blaaaah blaaaah blaaaaah crap that you’re calling an e-mail, and there is like an 84% chance I’ll never read it, so bye.

Sometimes though, you have to pretend like you’re mildly interested in something or other – mostly just to prevent having a cardboard box for a roof. Maybe I’ll mumble something like “Oh hey did you finish that spreadsheet?” Of course what I’m hoping for is a simple “Yes I did” or “No not yet” or “Do you want some of this booze I keep in my desk?” Unfortunately, I usually get a response that goes something like:

“Yes! It took me 3 days to do. My eyes were glazing over because I just couldn’t look at those numbers anymore, but I persevered (they’ll pronounce this “per-SEV-ered”) and I got through it. What I did was I took the numbers in Row B and the total in cell R86, and I linked them to another tab. It was really complicated but luckily I took a class in Excel in 2006 so I pretty much know all of the secrets, in case you ever need help. So yeah, I just banged it out because if I didn’t bang it out then the entire budget would just fall apart and this company would collapse and burst into flames and smoke, so I finished everything, VOILA!”

Let me make something painfully clear. There is no task in the history of your absurd, useless administrative job that will ever warrant a “VOILA.” There is nothing voila-esque about a spreadsheet or using a copy machine or knowing how to spell check your Microsoft Word document. Get back to me when you land your rocket on Jupiter.

And also: I DON’T CARE HOW BUUUSSSSSYYY you are. First of all, everyone with more than a GED knows that when you frequently refer to yourself as being one thing, you are generally the exact opposite.  If you say you are a great listener, then you probably haven’t heard a word I’ve said to you all year. If you say you are writing a dope song, then what you are writing is likely neither dope nor a song. Maybe it’s a poem for the retarded class or something. If you tell me you are an amazing lover, then you are probably a terrible lover. So if you don’t ever shut your face about how busy you are, then I’m going to assume that you are not busy, have nothing to do, and have an even more meaningless job than I already thought. Usually it goes like this:

“Oh my god, I am soooooo busy! I have to make all of those copies, and then call Richard Jenkins and try to convince him to sell us bulk toner at one cent less than the price we’re paying now. Then I have to alphabetize these names and process an invoice. Then I have a few more things to process and then I have to build the Mayflower and fuck the captain and blah blah blajaahahhjDHFJHSDF”.

Shut up! Shut the fuck up! If you’re so damn busy then get the hell away from me and do whatever it is you are lying about having to do!

Jesus christ, I need to buy a Xanax factory.

office trends #2 – conference calls – so very WRONG.

One time, I got all four of my wisdom teeth pulled out at once. I spent the next 3 days drooling in a braindead Perkoset daze. Coincidentally, I was actually MORE productive during those 3 days than I or anyone else has ever been during a conference call. I’m sure whoever invented them had good (read: ego-maniacal/finding more opportunities to hear himself talk) intentions, but participating in a conference call is pretty much like attending the audio-only version of the annual moron parade.  The ratio of morons to non-morons in the world at large is so hugely skewed towards morons that 3 heads are not better than 2 heads are not better than 1 head when any and/or all of the heads are rotted out and filled with vanilla pudding and cotton candy instead of brains. And trust me, those are the heads on your conference call.

There are so many problems with conference calls that I barely know where to start.  First of all, if you happen to be an immigrant with sub-par English skills and I can’t understand you when you’re 2 inches away from my face, what the hell makes you think I’m going to have a clue what you’re talking about when you’re 8,000 miles away in your home village on the outskirts of Calcutta, wiping your ass with cow cud and fixing Dells? Newsflash- I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying, Nareesh Patel.  Your accent is NOT TRANSLATABLE over the phone, the end, shut your face.

Also, the first 15 minutes of conference calls are inevitably wasted by either a.) waiting for someone to dial-in, b.) showing your technologically incompetent boss how to dial-in, c.) waiting for everyone to awkwardly say their name, d.) all of the above.  I once had to partake in a weekly conference call that included about 7,904 people.  The role call was longer than 600 vertically stacked black peens.  Here’s what I accomplished during these calls:

• I made arts-and-crafts projects.  My best work was a pencil holder that I welded out of an empty popcorn container. I labeled it Whitney Houston’s Office. I don’t know why.
• I organized gchats with the smattering of other non-idiots on the call in order to bash all of the idiots on the call.
• I learned the ins-and-outs of the mute button.
• I tried to figure out who was breathing like they were in the middle of a fat person’s orgy, who was eating the receiver, why my boss the human megaphone wanted to stand 80 feet away from the phone only to scream into it at such high decibels that her voice became mere static.
• I came up with emergencies to avoid the call.  Emergencies included having to pee for 100 minutes, pretending I was having a miscarriage, pretending I was dead.

Speakerphone is also totally abused.  Here’s s a fun fact for my technologically challenged [read: old] peers- there is no direct relationship between the amount of people to whom you are talking and the volume level at which you need to speak.  My old boss used to raise her voice by 40 decibels for each new person added to the conference call.  She was a natural screamer to begin with, so as soon as there were more than 4 people on the phone at once, she might as well have been shouting into a cheerleading megaphone that was umbilically attached to the telephone.  Because this call happened every week for a year, I am now 57% deaf in my right ear.

I think the biggest problem, though, is that I actually just hate working in an office. I bet burger flippers, pizza delivery people, and hookers never have to get on conference calls.

Tay? I have, like, vertigo. I am dead WRONG.

The Rachel Zoe Project is a pretty amazing project. I watch it every week because it’s so relatable and the stuff they deal with is so important. FASHUN. JORGE ARMANI. (because that’s how they say it in Mexico, which is close to California, which is where this amazing Project-ile Vomit takes place.) This week, RZRachelZoe was curled up in a dryer vent, soaked in her own mosquito sweat and almost-puke. Ever since the media totally accused her of being the mosquito responsible for spreading West Nile virus all across Hollywood and a small section of Calabasas, she had done her best to steer clear of all sickness. But it was obvious that RZRZ was not right and needed to visit the best veterinarian in LA, right quick snap. TayTay, RZRZ’s reliable but perpetually un-showered assistant, arrived just as our little mosquito was about to ferment into an irreversible insect liquid that would be, like literally useless to the FASHUN world. In what was a heroic rescue scene not unlike the daily work of the Police Women of Broward County, TayTay stuck a heap of her already-chewed Chanel chewing gum to a Gucci paper clip, tied it to a J. Mendel string, and shimmied it down the dryer vent. RZRZ mustered just enough strength to grab onto her life raft, and TayTay pulled her out of the vent and into the FASHUN studio.

“RRRRRRRRRaaaaaaaaaaaacccccchhhhhh-ah? Are you, like sssssssssiiiiiiiiiccccckkkk-ah?” TayTay asked. She hated RZRZ with every bone in her body, and was hoping for the worst.

“Tay.”

“RRRRRRaaaaaaccccchhhh-ah?”

“Like, Tay.”

“Ummmmmm…?”

“Tay. Undone. Am I.”

“RRRRRaaaachhhhh-ah?”

“I’m like, literally dying. I’m like, having an internal heart attack.”

It went on like that for a few days. Lots of drooling and inadvertent napping. A little black tar heroin here and there to keep things exciting. But when RZRZ started shitting herself, T-squared remembered there was action to be taken. So she tied a boho-70s-chic leash around her poor boss’s neck, put a lampshade on her head, and headed out to the ER.

While all of this was going on, a pivotal homosexual love affair was taking place in an inordinately spacious closet down the hall. Brattitude the Garden Gnome had been lusting after a certain pointy-noised butt-for-face man whose name rhymes with Shmodger for what seemed like centuries. He’d in the past been too scared to make a move, sticking mostly to helping his dreamlover pick out the perfect blazer/hoodie combo, the right pair of Seven-for-men jeans, the most effective cuticle softener. But the Garden Gnome was experiencing an unprecedented and likely fleeting flash of confidence, gusto, brazen fearlessness. That night, he had brought Dreamlover a pair of argyle socks, made from the softest cashmere . “Why is there only one sock?” DL asked as he reached down to shimmy the sock onto his hideous foot. At that moment, he felt a Gnome-like hand on his thigh. “That’s not exactly the foot I wanted to see the sock on,” he purred. “Model it on your…middle foot.” DL, who had been sleeping with the same little boy for what was becoming a grueling 13 year marriage, was so shocked that he dropped the sock to the ground, dropped his pants, bent over, and spread his ass wide.

Back at the veterinarian’s office, RZRZ was diagnosed with vertigo. In normal folks, vertigo is just a simple imbalance of the ear, and a few days on your average penicillin-type droga will knock that shit right out. But for a mosquito like RZRZ it is apparently a fatal killer not unlike the AIDS or Hitler, and she died right there on the table. T-squared and the vet shrugged, and a vet tech was immediately summoned to perform ritualistic funeral duties, aka flush it down the toilet. T-squared thought about throwing RZRZ a lavish funeral service later on. She knew she could get Jen Garner to conduct the sermon, and Deb Messing might show up to sing badly and crack a tired Jewish joke. But now that RZRZ was dead…….. who would tell them what to wear? A new dilemma, I guess to be solved next week.

Don’t miss this amazing show, paid for in full by career-less Ashton Kutcher.

word butchering – a heinous epidemic that belongs in Oregon Trail – wrong.

There are certain words in the English language that are frequently and egregiously butchered by idiots on a regular basis.  Every single time I go to write a post about two or three of these words, I hear two or three MORE words and I start spazzing out because I can’t F-ing TAKE IT. Despite the election of Obama and an honest attempt to exile Paris Hilton to the UK, I am quickly losing faith in the general American population. And I’m not even that smart – how do the top 2 or 3% of the American IQ pool not just give up completely and commit suicide? I used to think that being a genius or a crazy nerd came at the cost of having any social skills, but now I think it’s just that the amount of totally stupid morons surrounding them at any given second is enough to cause brain implosion. It’s probably safer for them to read archived articles about Calculus theories in a dark room than to interact with the sewage rot we call society.

Here are some words that people F up regularly. If you don’t have broccoli and cheese soup for a brain, you might want to have a drink before you read this list.

1. FLUSTRATING (frustrating)
2. FUSTRATING (frustrating)
3. MIS-CHEE-VIOUS (mischievous)
4. PREVEN”TA”TIVE (preventive)
5. AXE (ask)
6. IRREGARDLESS (NOT AN F-ING WORD – this one makes me violent)
7. PRODUC, EFFEC, CORREC, etc (Product, Effect, Correct)
8. JEWRAY (jewelry… I KNOW RIGHT????)
9. ORIENTATE (orient)
10. CONVERSATE (converse)
11. EXPRESSO (including half the F-ing dipshits who work at Starbucks)
12. MAYSURE (measure. Here’s a tip. Changing the pronunciations of things to make them sound “different” does not make anyone think you are smart. In fact, it does the opposite and also makes me violent.)
13. PITCHER (picture)
14. “I could care less” – I know this is a phrase but can you just take 5 seconds to think about the fact that when you say this, you are basically saying that you could care about something less than you already do and are in fact countering your own disinterest? WRONG.
15. “Mute” point. (Moot)

Anyway I have to stop this now, because in the last 2 hours I watched The Real Housewives of New York and I watched Lo from The Hills talk about polo shirts and korean tacos on Chelsea Lately. i.e. I’m brain-dead.

stupid sentence qualifiers – wrong.

“I don’t mean to be a bitch, but _______________”.  Uh….yeah, you do.  Not only do you mean to be a bitch, but you are looking forward to it and would stick your face in it and motorboat it if you could.

OFFICE TRENDS: referring to yourself and/or others by initials – wrong.

Office behavior has been violating my brain, eyes, ears and patience since I discovered my first and last Murphy Brown re-run on UPN 9 in 3rd grade.  Even as an 8 year old I knew that the combined number of mental and social disorders living in that sloppy office sitcom mess was enough to give me permanent brain damage, so I swore on my Peaches ‘n Cream Barbie doll, who was at the time being date-raped on a nightly basis by Malibu Ken in the plastic/wicker elevator I had installed in his Dream House, that I would never to watch it again (except when I had to white-knuckle it through the last 2 minutes in order to guarantee I did not miss a hot second of Perfect Strangers.  The theme song was my favorite part!) But that episode of Murphy Brown + countless Mary Tyler Moore re-runs + several days spent in my high school’s in-school-suspension office did nothing to prepare me for the maniacal horror show that is the real-life office environment.  I’m telling you, some people can pack more ridiculous crap into one hour at work than Aretha Franklin can pack into a toilet in an entire day after binging on Big Macs.

Obviously there’s lots of wrong infesting offices across the greater 48 (and I’m deliberately saving a certain island state that starts with an “H” and ends with an “awaii” for later, because those ridiculous, Mahalo-spewing, black clothes-hating, slow-to-comprehend-anything-more-complicated-than-1+1 retards deserve their own novel). But when I got my first job after college, I started getting really confused by the e-mails I was getting.  They were littered with nonsensical capital letters, generally in sets of 3, that were totally indecipherable! I thought maybe I was going dyslexic or retarded or getting one of those brain diseases I learned about in Abnormal Psychology 101, like apraxia or syphilis. It was really weird!  A typical e-mail looked something like this:

********************************************************************

To: RedThnapper

CC: whole office

Subject: CBE letter due to RSF, CME

All,

Attached is a document titled “Contract.LMP.doc”.  RedThnapper, can you pdf this to EDR, PJJ R2D2 and my vagina?

Thanks,

R2D2

********************************************

Wth, man.  Here I am with a whole 4 year college degree from NYUrGay, and I can’t comprehend these two-sentence e-mails?  After 2 or 3 hours trying to figure out this code on my own, I forwarded it to the co-worker who seemed to be the least ridiculous/emotionally unstable and least likely to be afflicted with a serious personality disorder.  She explained to me that those cryptic letters were all just sets of initials for people in the company, and after I got to know more people better I would figure out who was who and start loving the initials. WRONG! UNTRUE!   

Call me a dicksucking ho, but 4 years and 2 companies later, this shit still crops up on a regular basis, infecting my inbox with corny office lingo AIDS and forcing me to puke in my mouth thrice daily.  I STILL think this is the MOST RETARDED THING EVER and is basically the equivalent of me writing 14 inside jokes in your 8th grade yearbook that I only bothered writing in the first place so I could prove to like, your mom, that I was part of a cool inner circle and I knew stuff other people didn’t.  Listen up, that inner circle wasn’t cool in 8th grade and it sure as hell isn’t cool when you’re 50 years old and on the other side of puberty, hot flashes and dry-V/saggy camel balls and everything.  

It’s like, first of all, not only are you referring to yourself in third person, you’re referring to yourself in third person SHORTHAND that is more confusing than if you just stuck with conventional jackassestry and used names and appropriate pronouns. For example, there could be 4 people with the initials SJP – maybe 2 are men, 1 is a woman and 1 is a horse, and if you just give me the initials, I’m not even getting gender clues!  We had two SJPs once (initials have been changed to protect the special ed), and one of them was a loopy boss-type whose ridiculosity was out of control (OOC?) but amusing; the other was a co-worker who was less interesting than my toilet plunger and also dumber – how am I supposed to accurately make fun of them in writing if I can only use initials?

Second of all – I need to put this out there, loud and clear.  LISTEN UP PEOPLE AGES 40+. LISTEN THE F UP RIGHT F-ING NOW. “PDF” are three letters that stand for the phrase “PORTABLE DOCUMENT FORMAT.” In other words, the abbreviation PDF as a whole is a NOUN, and broken up can maybe be part-adjective/part-noun.  It is a DOCUMENT EXTENSION that comes at the END of a particular type of DIGITAL FILE and THAT IS ALL IT IS.  IN OTHER F-ING WORDS – IT IS NOT A VERB.  No, I cannot “pdf something to you.”  You cannot “pdf something to me.”  We cannot rent a corvette and go pdf-ing with the top down. I don’t get why so many people say this and I want to take mugshots of every one of them, and then scan them onto my computer, file them under “dangerous offender” and send the pdfs around the office and to the Smoking Gun.  

Whatever, that pdf thing got me really pissed off.  Peath out.