My life and times in Corporate America

Office Rule #71: Avoid Office Potlucks

2007-12-10T18:38:00.000-08:00

If an office potluck meeting notice ever comes your way, heed my advice: don’t bother bringing anything. We recently had a Thanksgiving potluck in our office. (Which is basically our bosses way of saying they’re too cheap to treat us to lunch, so they will just help themselves to the fruits of our labors and don’t have to expense so much as a plastic fork.)

Fortunately, my office is full of moms and grandmas whose second favorite thing, after slaving away in a windowless cube pouring over computer print-outs, is cooking. Not so fortunate though, is that fact that for as many moms and grandmas in our midst, there are an equal number of clueless men and young people, who don’t have a strong grasp of any meal that doesn’t require microwaving. So along with all the nice, homemade goodies on display at our potluck, were the random, store-bought, plastic trays of grocery store foods. We had a 20 pound turkey, a slow-cooked ham, and a tray of store-bought sushi. (Did the Pilgrims bring sushi?) We had home made pasta salad, mashed potatoes from scratch, and a platter of frozen shrimp cocktail from Vons. Then, there were homemade brownies next to Chinese noodles from the take out place down the street.

The randomness of the food made my stomach queezy by the end. And not only are there so many types of food, there’s so much of it! Apparently, while cooking, each person thought theirs would be the only side dish. We had enough to feed our entire company. We invited random strangers in from the street. The Fedex guy who happened to deliver a package during the potluck was sent home with a doggy bag.

And of course you’re forced to try everything. If, heaven forbid, you scoot by the stale-looking pink sugar cookies with the price tag still on them, there will inevitable be someone from billing screeching at you, “Hey, didn’t you try the cookies I brought?!” So my plate became a rainbow of colors, a clash of ethnic foods, a massive pile of slop.

I paid the price by having my stomach rebel against everything for two days, and I subsisted on soup and toast before my stomach would ever trust me to eat real food again. When people asked me why I wasn’t eating much, I had to tell the strange truth: “Oh I got a little sick from Thanksgiving dinner. That spicy tuna roll didn’t go down so well.”

The Office Goes to Dland

2007-09-19T17:59:00.000-07:00

It was a tough day at work a few weeks ago. Riding Splash Mountain really takes it out of you.

A few weeks ago, my entire department got to go to Disneyland for the whole day and had lunch at the ultra exclusive Club 33 restaurant! The event was considered by our department as a “teambuilding event,” but the only type of team building I participated in was holding onto my boss’s shoulders while riding down the big plunge on Splash Mountain and shielding the girl from accounting, who sat behind me, from getting wet. But if they want to call it teambuilding, teambuilding it is. I’m not saying no to a free day at Disney. Actually, I got paid to go there, since it was a normal work day.

We carpooled up there in my new office friend’s family van, moving her carseat and other kid accessories out of the way to make room for everyone. I learned that she hadn’t told her kids she was going to Disneyland that day or they would have staged a fit. Wow, having kids doesn’t seem so tough if you’re allowed to lie to them.

We got to Disneyland just in time to ride the Pirates of the Caribbean (which is my opinion has been forever tarnished by the inclusion of Johnny Depp robots) and then found the doorway of the secret restaurant Club 33. For those of you not in the know, Club 33 is a private club in the New Orleans district which is open only to private members of the corporate elite. You would really have to know about the place in order to find it, because it consists of only a door with a plaque that stays “33.” Since no one else from our department was around, we fumbled around in the doorway for a while trying to figure out how to get in. We found a little latch with a buzzer and were then asked our name by a crackly voice. Then we were let in. That’s all I can tell. I’ve been sworn to secrecy not to reveal the secrets of Club 33.

The rest of the day at the park was so fun too! Somehow I was talked into waiting in line for 70 minutes for Splash Mountain. But during that long wait I got to now some of my coworkers.

The next morning back at work, a game of “who’s going to come in the latest” began. We were all camped out by the door laughing about stories and passing around the picture my boss bought of us going down Splash Mountain, where you can almost see my tonsils I am screaming so much.

At about 10 AM a few people were still missing from their desk. Then I got a phone call from a girl in my group.

“Heather? Is everyone there already? Um, I just woke up.”

Our surprising winner was the Senior Accountant who sat in the corner and spent most of her days at work rearranging her cat photos on her desk and tearing off pages of her cat day calendar. She had apparently had a rip-roaring good time at the magical world of Disney and met some random strangers there, who talked into spinning around on the teacups with until midnight when the park closed and the rest of us were home in bed.

I think I’m officially getting old if I’m the one yawning at Disneyland at 6 PM, telling everyone that we’d better hit the road because it was a week night. Someone please reassure me that I am still cool!

My latest fetish

2007-07-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me might know that I am famous for going through “food phases.” I become addicted to a random food to the point of exhaustion and then suddenly drop it like it’s out of style. Some of the more notable ones include:

-the great blueberry waffle phase of my freshman year of college.
-the Pokemon popsicle phase of my sophomore year, during which I once snuck an entire box of them into a movie theater and when Maria and I stood up to leave, our shoes were stuck to the movie theater floor with leaked Pokemon popsicle juice.

Well my latest food fetish is much healthier, but only marginally less sticky. While at Costco a few weeks ago, I was shopping with the boy. And after I sent him on a mission into the giant refridgerator room to find some blueberries (Hey that room is too cold for a little girl like me), I noticed that they had a huge stack of flats of white peaches in the produce section. I bought a tray of 12 peaches.

From there the addiction was born. These peaches were so giant and sweet and tasted like candy. I had to have more. So I decided I had to go back to get more.

I then become the crazy peach lady, stopping by Costco after work every other day to spy for newly delivered peaches. But they were never there. Was peach season over? Did I miss it? Will I be forced to temporarily move to another climate that is currently in the boom of peach season to live out the end of this latest food fetish?

One of these times at Costco I was stopped by someone who worked in the produce department, probably because he saw me lifting up boxes of apricots to see if any peaches were stowed beneath them and thought I was some homeless, crazy person. He told me that fresh produce was delivered every Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday. I marked my calendar accordingly. Yet I was sad to discover that even if I went to the Costco on a Saturday, Tuesday or Thursday, there were still no peaches. For weeks I was returning to the Costco in vain. Was I unknowingly at war with another peach fetished person who was raiding all the same Costco mere moments before me? (And by the way, it is nearly impossible to leave a Costco without buying something. Don’t even try it, there’s no way out!)

Finally, last Saturday, Dan and I went back to Costco. I foolishly stopped to try a sample of Hebrew National hot dogs, forgetting the whole reason I was there. What was I thinking?! To the produce department! Then I saw Dan in the distance proudly holding up a flat of peaches. Hooray! I bought two.

The Costco employees must think I’m crazy. For the peaches thing and also because my Costco ID photo on the back of the card makes me look like a pirate. Seriously, it looks like I have one tooth and usually if the cashier doesn’t laugh at it first, Dan will. Every time. Ask me to look at it sometime and you will laugh your ass off. But be sure to say “That looks nothing like you!” as you hand it back or I will think I look like a pirate.

So anyway, back to the peaches. Dan says I’m like a mother hen with her eggs because I check on the 24 little peaches in their tray every few hours. I turn them and squeeze them a little to check for any ripe ones.

So if any of you would like some peaches, I’m sure in a week or so, this latest food fetish will have run its course and I will have bushels of peaches to spare. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some peaches to check on.

Studying again

2007-05-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

OK, what's with all you people? No one has posted much on their blogs in the past month or so. Especially Claire. And after starting at a new job and having lots of time to kill during the first few days, since I'd already located the copier and the bathroom, I needed some blogs to read!
Well I will post on mine then, since I am also guilty of blog neglect.

In keeping with tradition, I have decided to post on my blog instead of study for my next CPA test. I think there has been an entry for each part I have taken, explaining how I'd rather write on my blog then study. And since I found out that I've passed the third part (yay me) I have decided to do everything exactly as I've done it before, to keep the luck rolling and the jinxing away.

So yes, I have passed three parts of the four part CPA exam! Woohoo! And all on the first try. I am very proud. And now the last part is this Thursday. It sort of snuck up on me, since I started a new job at the beginning of this month and then went on a trip to New York and DC for a week, only to return on Tuesday night to realize I had a 1,000+ page review book to learn like the back of my hand in just over a week. And I just HAD to watch all ten season finales of all my favorite shows that had been happily Tivo'd while I'd been gone. So there goes Wednesday night. Another few days of procrastinating and here I am on Sunday night of my three day weekend, only half way through the tortuous book. But I will forge ahead.

In more interesting news, my trip to NY and DC was fun! The boy came too, mostly because after I recently learned he has never been east of Arizona, I told him I couldn't date someone that unworldly and this needed to be remedied. So to New York we went. Some highlights were:

* a freak thunderstorm happened in New York on an 80 degree day, which was followed by a 55 degree day that left me looking foolish clad in only my flip flops and summer clothes that I'd packed

* I lost my favorite pair of flip flops somewhere between Grey's Papaya hot dogs on 72nd Street in Manhattan and the Marriott hotel in Washington DC. (If found, please leave a comment on their whereabouts.)

* Dan and I bickered about everything from which direction a metro train was going to how tall the guy was who sat next to us at the airport. But don't worry, we are still together.

OK so that's my blog post for the month. I'd better get back to studying, since this test, titled Financial Accounting & Reporting, appears to be a doosey.

Now you can all follow my lead and start posting again.

Suzie Blood Donor

2007-04-25T19:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I donated blood. I hadn’t donated since 2004, but still trotted along my little paper blood donor card to proudly announce that I was O-.

I have constantly been harassed by blood bank phone calls at home. Everyone’s after my O- blood. They always try to sucker me into making an appointment to donate by telling me sad little stories about kids who need blood. Then they mention I’ll get a free t-shirt. I politely say that I’m busy and go back to watching The Real World and eating Funyuns. The next time they call, they up it a t-shirt and a coupon for a free car wash. OK, now I’m listening. I’m sure the kids are cute and everything, but I was looking for maybe a free lunch and a massage? Could that be arranged?

But after negotiations between myself and Helga, the blood center caller, looked like they were going nowhere, I conceded and agreed to make an appointment just out of the goodness of my heart. And the promise of a free bag of cookies.

So I took Dan with me to my appointment. I have donated a few times before, but Dan was a newbie. I was taken into the room by the nurse who went through the medical questions and she noticed in the computer that I was O-. I think this lady was secretly as a little grandma who reads children’s books aloud at the library during story time moonlighting as a nurse, because she had a soft little voice and felt the need to dumb down everything she was saying. I told her I didn’t like the part where your finger gets pricked with a needle to test your iron. She said “Oh don’t worry sweetie, we changed it, now it’s not bad.” As she pulled out the little needle pricker. I was like “Uh, really? It changed? Because it appears to still involve a needle.” I got stuck with needle just like last time. Apparently little grandma nurse thought I was four and that I would fall for that.

But then she pointed out that since I’m O-, they were going to run a special test on my blood. She then said “If you blood is all good and clean and pretty then they can use your blood for newborn babies!”
“Really?!”
“Yes. We will just run a test to see if you have this very common virus. And if you don’t, you’re a baby donor! And next time you come, I’ll say ‘Oh it’s Miss Baby O Negative‘ and I’ll use a special baby sized bag for your blood. Isn’t that exciting?!”

It was very exciting. I skipped out of the little booth over to the donating chair, quite proud that I am single-handedly going to save the baby population. Dan came and sat in the chair next to me.
“Hey. Psst. Danny. Guess what? I’m going to save babies.”
I explained the whole story to him.
“Wait, what virus are they checking for that’s so common?”
“Huh? Oh. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You didn’t ask?”
“Um.. Danny…. Did you not hear the part about the babies?!”

Then I noticed that Dan had a giant sticker on his shirt. It said “First time blood donor.” “What the..” I yelled. “I didn’t get a sticker!” Then I noticed that nice little grandma nurse was tending to HIM and not me! I somehow got lost in the shuffle and got Olga the evil nurse. She stuck me with a needle and ditched me to go count cotton swabs or something. But Dan got the royal treatment. The nurse put an ice pack behind his head because he said he felt tired. He got juice and cookies brought to him. And he had that damn sticker.

After we were done donating, Dan stayed in his chair and relaxed. My nurse yanked the needle out of my arm (no more talk about babies) and said “Thank you.” And asked me to vacate the chair. I had to go root out my own Dixie cup of warm apple juice and all the was left were the crumbs from the cookie jar. The system is so biased.

I will let you know how many babies I save.

I've been gone for a while...

2007-03-31T18:24:00.000-07:00

Wow it has been a long time since I posted. I hope none of my readers have jumped ship. A lot of things have happened.

I passed the second part of my CPA. Yay! I’m taking the next part on Monday, so obviously I’m doing my best to procrastinate and post on my blog instead of studying.

We have a new, fancy bathroom at work. It’s a big improvement on the dungenous swamp we used to have for a women’s restroom. I used to go in there occasionally and find a giant trash can poised under a mysterious drip from the ceiling. It would be there all day, and upon further inspection, the trash can would be filled with a brown grime that I didn’t want to know about. I’m assuming a class action lawsuit will be circulating shortly regarding all the women being exposed to ebola or something. So now we have our very own freshly tiled floors, three auto-flushing toilets and two auto faucets in the sink. It’s all very auto. It’s a new auto-bathroom from the future. The bathroom is beautiful, with a new mirror and shimmering new counter tops. It is the most exciting thing that has happened to our floor. Sometimes I go in there around noon and find women sitting in there having lunch. But I’ve found that using an auto bathroom for most of the day has its drawbacks. When things are too auto at work, I tend to forget they’re not auto everywhere, which leads to me leaving the faucet running after I washed my hands and walking away.

The boy and I are doing well. He is currently secluded in his apartment glued to the TV watching the final four basketball games. He is obsessed with this bracket he is part of at work. I don’t see what these boys get so worked up about, they’ve only bet 20 bucks on the thing, I spent that much on the manicure that I already chipped. But after every game, he’ll shoot over his computer and log into his bracket and check his standings. Then he’ll shout me an update “I’m in second, but only if Georgetown wins, if not this bastard in account payable will beat me.” Then “OK now I’m in third because…” I usually tune out at this point. I hate to think how much time some math nerd spent thinking up the scoring system for these March madness brackets, because I can’t figure them out for the life of me. All I really find interesting about the basketball games is how freikin tall some of those kids are. I mean, they’re like 19 years old and some of them at 7 feet tall! How do they walk through doors? Who do they date? What kind of beds do they sleep on? These are the kind of things I am interested in. Not their points per game or their shooting average. I want to know where they buy their pants.

Suzie Grammar on gchat

2007-02-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

me: danny
you are very unchatty this morning
Sent at 10:02 AM on Thursday
Daniel: I was away from my desk
and unchatty is not a word...
Sent at 10:12 AM on Thursday
me: it is a word now
Sent at 10:29 AM on Thursday
Daniel: if you can just make up words then I can say "me and bryan"
Sent at 10:41 AM on Thursday
me: no
that will never be ok
people sound so much smarter when they say it the right way
Daniel: well being smart and sounding smart are two entirely different thing
thins
things
damng it
dang it
Sent at 11:01 AM on Thursday
me: that was classic

Headhunting

2007-02-18T09:32:00.000-08:00

Well kids, a lot happened a few weeks ago that I’ve been dying to blog about. In a brief moment of inspiration and perhaps after reading too many Dilbert comic strips, I decided a few weeks ago to follow the advice of a co-worker and hire a headhunter. I felt the time had come to start exploring job options outside of my company. Also, I will be most likely be forced to move jobs in June, as a continuation of my rotation/management training program, and I’m none too happy about the prospects of where I’ll be headed.

So I met with the little headhunter, who ended up being the same age and me. We met on a Tuesday for coffee and I told him about my career goals. By the end of that day he had emailed me six job openings that fit my interests, and by the next Tuesday I was interviewing at a small company. I didn’t really take the interview seriously. I’m not unemployed and not desperate. It took me about five minutes to find the company’s front door, because it was so small. All I can really recall is that the office was 99% guys, and that the Assistant Controller spilled coffee down his shirt during our interview (this may be related to the former issue.. I don’t think they’ve seen many girls recently.) I interviewed with three different people and then went on my merry way back to work. A few hours later, my headhunter Bill called me. They wanted to make me an offer! I decided to high-ball the salary I asked from them, and they matched it. It was all very tempting and I went through a few days of mental torture, where I asked everyone I knew, including random people on the street, what they thought I should do.

I went back to get another tour of the office to help make my decision. This time I found a girl did indeed work there: the receptionist. After giving her a once over, I decided she was not going to be the kind of girl I could go get pedicures with on my lunch break. Strike one. And unless I wanted to make nice with all the nerdy boy software engineers, I had fears I would be eating a sack lunch in the bathroom alone for the next year. Strike two. The VP then took me back to the accounting department, AKA the dungeonous, windowless cave, with meek looking individuals shaking like chihuahuas who squinted up at me from their desks as though they hadn’t seen sunlight in a few days. Maybe I’m vain and naive, but I’m a girl. I like windows and sunlight. I don’t like wearing jeans to work. On Friday, I turned the job down.

So now I’m going to stick it out at my current job for a while longer, hopefully finish my CPA in the next few months, and then apply again to other, better fitting jobs. Luckily my headhunter was fairly understanding and I’ll probably use him again. So in the next few months Corporate Suzie might not be so Corporate and may be leaving the big corporate world, for a smaller corporate world. Stay tuned.

Tim the CPA guy

2007-01-28T17:30:00.000-08:00

I have been spending all weekend parked in front of my computer listening to CD-ROM lectures for my CPA review course. It involves a guy filmed in some cheesy studio reading from the review book and telling me what to highlight. I can’t say that I’m really benefiting from it. All I am really thinking about is that the fabric backdrop behind the course instructor needs to be ironed and that he should really get that mole on his forehead looked at. But I feel like we’re buddies now. I’ve been listening to him talk for a good 10 hours total over the past few weeks, which is much longer then I usually listen to most men. He tries to make little accounting jokes, which all fail miserably. But I applaud his effort.

It's an Automatic World

2007-01-07T21:53:00.002-08:00

Today the bf gave me my first lesson in how to drive a stick shift. Ever since I met him I’ve been on his case about how lame stick shift cars are. They seem so ridiculous to me when most cars just do all the work for you and you can eat a burger and fries while driving with your knees.

I believe the first time I got in his car on our first date, I looked down and noticed the car was a manual and went “Oh. You drive a stick? Really? Aw, and I kinda liked you.” I decided to look past it and since then I have enduring almost a year of jerky, jolty rides around the city in the stick shift car. He insists it’s much more fun to drive and indefinitely cooler then my wimpy little automatic. He also made a big deal about the fact that everyone should know how to drive a stick in case of an “emergency situation.” The conversation went something like this:

“But what kind of emergency would I need to drive a stick in?”
“What if we’re on a road trip and I pass out and couldn’t drive?”
”No biggie, I can take a cab.”
”OK what if you have to move my car for some reason and I’m not there?”
“I’m sure whoever it is who wanted me to move your car would understand and let me leave it there, especially if I smile pretty.”
(Frustration increasing) “OK what if someone puts a gun to your head and makes you drive a stick then?!”
“I think I’d be too busy peeing in my pants to think about actually driving.”

But after a few months, I realized learning to drive a stick might be useful. Maybe I’ll put as a skill it on my resume next to my CPA and Masters degree.

So the actual lesson went pretty well. I went through a bad phase where I stalled like ten times in a row and I could feel the pressure in the car raising a little as the bf would close his eyes, take a deep breathe, and be like “OK. Let’s start it again. Clutch in, shift to first, eeeeease on the gas.” CLUNK . Another long sigh. “That’s OK. Try again.” He kept cringing as his precious little car stalled over and over, but he said I was a “gentle staller” and the transmission didn’t feel like it fell out of the engine when I stalled, so I guess that’s an accomplishment.

Once I got the hang of getting the car moving in first, I thought I would be good. But it turns out, when another car starts coming towards me in a parking lot that I thought was empty, instead of just driving normally, I tend to take my feet off all the pedals (there are so damn many of them down there) and close my eyes and squeal. So I guess I’ve got to get over that little hiccup. After about thirty minutes of various stalls and curse words, the bf decided that was enough for the day and reclaimed his driver’s seat with a relieved sigh. I think he’s at home right now petting his car and telling it everything’s OK and the mean lady won’t be driving it or hurting it ever again.

After my little lesson, I thought about how long it would take me to actually be able to drive that car on the road. So for now, if the bf ever passes out at the wheel, I’m sticking with my original plan of calling a cab home.

I Passed!!!

2006-12-16T08:53:00.000-08:00

So I checked online today for my test score and I got an 86! Passing is 75, so I totally over shot it. I guess that means that I can slack off on studying even more for the next parts!
I was the happiest person this morning when I found out and told everyone I knew! I’m not really sure the mail girl or the maintenance guy really knew what a CPA was, but now they know that I passed something. You’d think I was done with the whole thing because of how I was acting. But I still have three more parts to go.

Honestly I am pretty shocked I did so well. I know most people like me always say that and end up doing well. But I left that test feeling drained and at the end, I didn’t even proofread my work because I was so sure it was in vain. And now I’m researching awards I could qualify for if I get the highest CPA score! I had been especially worried after researching on the internet a little more about pass rates. They are crazy low. My new goal is to be one of the 5% of people who pass all four parts on the first try. My next one is scheduled for February 12th. I found out my friend who also took the exam that day also passed. But she only got an 80. Ha. 80. I could get an 80 in my sleep.

My co-workers were very proud of me and my test results. The senior I’m working with told me to tell our boss. I was like “What, am I supposed to waltz into his office, interrupt whatever he’s doing and be like ‘Hey, listen up. I just passed part of my CPA that you probably didn’t even know I took. So when’s the parade?’” And when I made this comment out loud, the group I was talking to got very quiet. “Um, that’s kind of what I did when I passed.” One girl said. “Yeah, I sent an email to the Vice President.” Someone else said. Oh. I’m all about bragging about my accomplishments, but I find it a little silly to ask for a gold star of approval from the big boys upstairs over passing ¼ of a big test.

The office is starting to get quiet and cold this week, because everyone seems to be taking off for their Christmas vacations. One girl is getting married and will be gone for a month. Another is taking her two weeks vacation to just sit at home and chill. And then about 10 more are actually going somewhere for Christmas. So that means next week this department is going to be a ghost town. I am quite excited at the prospect. It’s always cool to be one of the few people in the office when the VP comes down to our floor for something and he’ll be like “Where’s Matt?” and I’ll be all “Oh, he’s on a three week vacation.” “Oh, where’s Pat?” “She’s at home.” “And Bill?” “He’s skiing I think.” And I’m there working away. Total bonus points.

So this weekend will be fun. I intend to go out and celebrate my 86. Anyone care to join me?

A situation I must address...

2006-12-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

I have been on a search the past week for the perfect dress. Our company Christmas party is this Saturday, and after having put my social life and shopping life on hold for about a month to study for that damn test, I now find myself a few days out from the best party of the year without a thing to wear. And it’s pretty hard to come up with an awesome dress after the biggest shopping days of the year. I think the women came through the malls like locusts and bought everything, leaving behind only bewildered sales people and a few size 16 jungle print dresses.

On Sunday I began my search. The mall was so packed and crowded and full of strollers. I starting feeling like an old lady, complaining about the crowds and kids everywhere. If I’d had a cane, I probably would have poked people with it.

To understand why a great dress is so important, I must explain that our company holiday parties are so cool. After looking at my posts from last year, I can’t believe I didn’t blog about it before! There are various divisions to my company and they all have their own parties. My division, as I’ve previously mentioned, is what I like to call the old person division and the Christmas parties, while always with the best intentions, end up as snooze-fests with a lot of food and some old couples dancing to a crappy jazz band, which isn’t so entertaining after you’ve maxed out on your two drink maximum.

But last year, I was lucky enough to snag an invitation to the happening, young division’s holiday party. A good friend of mine invited me as his plus one and it was the party of the year. They rented out one of the biggest and best night clubs downtown in its entirety. The place had like 5 different rooms, each with a theme and matching music and food. They had an open bar all night, sushi chefs, carving stations, chocolate fountains, arcade games, fortune tellers, salsa lessons, and of course dancing. It seems like only yesterday… I remember it most vividly because my supposed “friend” who invited me starting treating the night a little too much like a date, so I ran off to the bar on my own, only to find the now boyfriend there ordering a drink. I’d met him briefly once before through a work friend, so I thought I’d go up to him and say hi. That is now known as the famous moment when he fell for me.

But I digress. This year’s party promises to be just as great. And to top it off, I found out my division is stepping it up this year and is also having a party at a night club in downtown. And with the addition of an open bar, things are looking up. I’m sure the place will still clear out by 9:30, since the oldies have to go to bed and all, but the time is listed as going until 1 AM. The only problem is that my party is on the same night as the boys! So we’re going to be splitting our time between the two and hopefully can drunkenly stumble the five blocks between parties without incident.

So anyway, the key to this whole party is having a great dress. As many of you may recall from my former myspace profile picture, last year my dress left little to the imagination and created cleavage that I never knew I had. It wasn’t until I saw pictures the next day that I realized why I got so much attention. So this year I’m trying to go a little more tasteful. After all, you dress for the job you want, right? And I do not want the job of the girl who sleeps her way to the top. That was last year’s dress.

***

Update, I have found a dress! It is cute and strapless, yet tasteful. But I think I look pretty hot in it. If I don’t get hit on by at least one executive, I’ll consider the night a total loss

The Evilest Test in all the Land

2006-12-05T20:52:00.000-08:00

I have way more respect for CPA’s now. Even if they’re idiots now, at one point in their lives they had their shit together.

The test I took last week was so crazy hard. Usually I can get by on tests by just being my smart little self and getting into the mind of the tester and figuring out those multiple choices without really knowing anything. But this time, I was in trouble. No more relying on smart and cute. This test was all technical and was not messing around. The only moment when my all those AP days finally came in handy was during the open answer section where I was asked to “define the meaning of ‘efficiency and effectiveness’ and how they relate to a company’s internal controls.” I think I used more big words then any accountant ever has before. I’m hoping they’ll read my answer and pass me just so they can let someone into the profession who will be able to proofread other accountants’ work.

The whole testing process was crazy strict. The room was all quiet and windowless and contained one pleasantly plump southern woman who was proctor for the test site. Every time she got up from her desk, she had to put her thumb on a little electronic pad at different stations so she could verify she was somewhere in the room. It was a little creepy. After checking two types of ID, she told me that my exam was 4 and a half hours long and that I could take three 5 minute breaks but I could not leave the room or take out any books or papers. This did not bode well for me as all I brought with me were books and papers.

When I signed in, I noticed I could tell what type of exam all the people in the room with me were taking by looking at their section of the sign in/out sheet. The girl in the booth next to me was taking her Cosmetology exam. The proctor girl then gave me a key to a locker where I could put everything. I couldn’t even take a sweater into the testing room, much less a pencil. She escorted me to my computer “stall” in the testing room, which was all videotaped and monitored. I felt like every time my eyes wandered from the screen, the camera would zoom in on me and the southern lady would be glaring at me through the one way glass, so I’d quickly duck my head back within my “stall” and pretended to keep working. (In actuality I was cheating of the Cosmetology girl.)

Taking breaks was an experience. All I had brought to eat was a granola bar and I’d forgotten water. But I had to eat my food in front of the monitor lady, I guess so she could be sure I didn’t have any notes taped over the wrapper. So I had to eat my granola bar while hunched ashamedly in the corner, with my eye on the clock. Then I’d walk the four feet back to the southern lady’s desk and she’d ask for my ID. Everywhere I went I had to take my ID. I was like “I haven’t left the room.” And she was all “I need to check your ID upon each exit and entrance to the exam.” And I’d have to sign in and out on a sign in sheet. Each sign out and back in was like 2 minutes apart. I thought about labeling each one:

Sign out 1: 9:54 to 9:56 – pee break.
Sign out 2: 11:02 to 11:03 – two bites of granola bar.
Sign out 3: 12:33 to 12:34 – just to bug the proctor

By 1 PM, I’d only eaten a handful of cereal and two nervous bites of the granola bar. I had to wear the noise-cancelling headphones just to drown out my growling stomach. Not the mention to drown out the noise of the tapping keys of the girl at the computer next to me, who I can only assume was writing novel about the use of non-acetone nail polished for her Cosmetology license.

I finished the test early, and upon my final sign out, the southern lady said “Well, I see there’s four parts to this test, so I assume I’ll be seeing you again soon. I’ll keep an eye out for the red head.” OK, now I really don’t like this place.

I should be out partying...

2006-11-18T21:57:00.000-08:00

Tonight is the first Saturday night in a good year or so that I’m home alone. Or home at all for that matter. Even after I started dating the boy, we have always maintained an active night life and social life. But tonight I’m home because an evil thing called the CPA exam is looming in my near future. After many co-worker’s insistences that I take it seriously, I’ve given up my Saturday night (and Friday night, and a few other nights for that matter) to stay home and study. Although, as you can see, it’s really all in vain because I am now blogging.

I took yesterday off work and I intended to get a good six hours of studying in. Instead, I woke up at 10, decided my head kind of hurt and I shouldn’t study, watched two episodes of Law & Order, called my boyfriend, took a nap, and then went over a handful of exam questions before going out to dinner. I did get in a good hour of exam questions from my study course CD-Rom, but of course that was in between g-chatting with a few people. One minute I’m reading about the advantages of statistical sampling in a financial statement audit and the next I’m talking to my friend about what she’s doing for Thanksgiving.

So now, it’s Saturday night. The boy is off at a party to watch pay-per-view boxing, and I’m home “studying.” Even my parents called me tonight, and, amidst the laughter and clinking glasses in the background, I vaguely made out that they were out at a restaurant downtown and on their way to a show. Dammit, even my parents are out! And in MY downtown! This is getting embarrassing.

The sad part is this test is only the first part of four that I need to pass in order to get my CPA. After I graduated from college, when my mind was still fresh with all the accounting knowledge from my degree, I should have buckled down and started studying to get this thing out of the way. But instead, I decided to run an active campaign for most social and popular girl at work and spent the last two years going to happy hours and dating co-workers.

But now I’m onboard with this whole serious career thing. I’m done casually dating co-workers, now I’m seriously dating one. (See how I’ve matured?) And I have been known to turn down a happy hour or two in the past weeks. (I know, my co-workers are as shocked as you are.) So now comes the time that I get serious. It’s a commitment to my career, as annoying-IT-auditor in my office always says.

So I guess now that I’ve successfully wasted another 30 minutes writing this blog and I’ve already done all my laundry, cleaned my apartment, done my nails, alphabetized my bookshelf, defrosted my fridge, and called everyone I know who is lame enough to also be home on a Saturday night (even my parents were too busy to talk to me), I guess I need to stop procrastinating and pick up my studying where I left off. Page 2. Wish me luck!

Vegas

2006-10-30T21:03:00.000-08:00

So two weeks ago I got to go to Las Vegas for work. I know, my job is cool. No one believed that I was really going there for work, so I had to take pictures of me working and email them to friends to prove I was working. But don’t get me wrong, after 6 PM when work was done, the four of us on the team all headed back to the Strip, where we were staying, and partied it up Vegas style.

I found that with a few drinks while waiting for a table, our often stingy boss will become an expense account’s worst nightmare once we sit down to dinner. We would regularly hear a lecture in the rental car ride back to our hotel before dinner about keeping it reasonable and perhaps just ordered a side salad as an entrée and getting tap water instead of a Cosmo. But within a few hours and few rum and cokes the great words of “Order up, guys!” would be slurred by our great boss, and suddenly my co-worker (who I named “Heffe”) was ordered the fillet mignon and I got a sashimi yellowtail jalapeño appetizer, the 3 amigos mini burgers with caramelized onions and garlic fries, two mojitos, followed by an appley scrumptious dessert. Our meals was random, expensive, and so Vegas.

After that our boss teetered off to bed and Heffe and our third fun member (who I named “Little P) headed off to the blackjack tables. It should be noted that I gave my co-workers these nicknames over long island iced teas at 1 AM the Sunday we flew into Vegas. The three of us were hungry and our boss had already gone to bed, so instead of intelligently getting a good night’s sleep before a long first day of work, we headed to one of the many 24 hour restaurants in our hotel and proceeded to bond and delve into each others personal lives. We learned that the three of us represented three different phases of life: Heffe was married with three kids, Little P was newly married, and I was just dating. Heffe ordered steak n eggs, Little P had a BBQ chicken pizza, and I had French onion soup. We were different in every respect, but it couldn’t have been funner.

As it rolled around to two in the morning, we slipped into the weird casino syndrome where you can’t tell what time it is. People around us were having beers, smoking, and still gambling like it was early in the evening. The same was true when we all emerged from our hotel room the next morning to meet the rental car at 7 AM. Who has a beer at a slot machine at 7 AM?

Our boss was well rested and perky and we were hiding behind sunglasses and large coffees on the ride to work. Something about being away on business turns anyone under 40 into a crazy partier who feels like they have to take advantage of having time away. Not that I’m complaining.

Every night ended up like this first one. The four of us would have dinner and our boss would have a mini heart attack when the bill came, then he would excuse himself and go to bed. Then Heffe, Little P and I would paint the town red. Unfortunately we found that early in the week, not many clubs or trendy bars are open and the show “Thunder Down Under” was not expensable under company policy.

I taught Heffe to play blackjack. Apparently he had spent his best card playing days changing diapers and not learning how to gamble. What a wimp. He soon learned that smiling nicely at the dealer was not an indication that you wanted another card, and neither was saying “Can I have another card, please?” I was like “Listen Heffe, there are no words exchange at a blackjack table, no civility or politeness. Just do your hand motions, order a beer and try not to piss off the dealer.” I ended up winning $75 in an hour, and decided that may be more then I’m being paid to work and thought my time would be better spend at the tables. At that point, Little P took away my vodka tonic and we all retired to our hotel rooms.

All in all in was a fun time. I went home with some extra spending money and only a few embarrassing stories, which all will remain in Vegas, along with my cell phone charger. Dammit!

Two New Fans of the 50th State

2006-09-19T20:28:00.000-07:00

As I wait for Kodak Easy Share to upload my zillion Maui photos to share with you all, I thought I would update my poorly neglected blog with the story of my trip. By the way, Kodak Easy Share, easy my ass. It’s gotten to photo number 8 after about ten minutes. And that’s after I spent about an hour squinting at all the photos that Kodak happily uploaded in teeny tiny format going “Is that the one where I’m making the weird face, or is that the good one? Oh, that’s not even me, that’s a tree.

So anyway, Dan and I went to Maui for a week! We just got back on Thursday night. It was a good time, mostly because we didn’t have to work and we got to hang out on beautiful Maui beaches for seven days.

We stayed in Ka’anapali, for those who are interested. It’s on the West coast of Maui and has some great beaches. We realize now that in order to make a vacation truly relaxing, it might be wise to just go for it and spend the money to stay at a real resort. We came to this sad realization after booking a hotel listed as "Mid-Priced" and we drove down the strip of beautiful hotels upon our arrival, with me in the passenger seat going “Is that ours?” “Nope.” “Oh, that one’s pretty, is that ours?” “Still no.” “Wow, that one’s got a spa and four pools, is that ours?” “Um, no. See that one with the crocked sign at the end of the road? That’s it.” Our hotel was pretty middle of road and the bed might as well of been a bunch of rags wadded up into a square shape. In fact, maybe it was.

Actually when we first checked in, I was more then a little perturbed when we opened the door to our room for the next week only to find two twin beds. Bitchy Heather came out full force and I was immediately on hold with the front desk to change rooms, tapping my foot impatiently. Dan tried to make the best of it and pointed out that not only had they given us two twin beds, but they’d accidentally left us a bottle of champagne with a card to “Mark and Cindy” congratulating them on their honeymoon. I gave up with the phone and went down to the lobby to ask for a room with a king bed. Dan knew to leave this to the professionals and stayed behind to pilfer all the bottles of lotion and shampoo.

I cut to the front of the huge check in line and got the problem sorted out. I also mentioned that there was a card and bottle of bubbly in there for some couple who wasn’t us.
“Um, no.” The front desk guy said. “I had that moved.” Me: “Um, OK well then what was it I saw?” Front desk guy: “I’m not sure, ma’am, but I had the card and champagne moved before you arrived. Thank you.” And promptly closed his station. I arrived back at the room and instructed Dan to throw the champagne in with our loot because we were claiming it and we would make a toast to Mark and Cindy. Which we did.

We rented a Jeep so we could put the top down and Dan picked the bright yellow one and we named it Sunny. I never realized how old school Jeeps are. You had to like unzip the windows, it took about 30 minutes to unravel everything and actually take the top down, and there were no power locks. This was all instant fodder for about 100 Dan/Heather fights.

We spent a few days driving up and down the West Coast and one of my favorite days was driving down a one lane dirt road, following the vague directions of our Maui guide book to a little stand in the rainforest which sold “the World’s Greatest Banana Bread.” It was pretty damn good. Another day we took a boat trip to the island of Lanai’i, where we snorkeled and saw how pineapple growing has ravaged the tiny island and has ruined the lives of many islanders. I took pictures.

We took the famous road to Hana one day, which is a three hour drive through winding roads and alongside cliffs through the lush Maui north coast. You end up in the middle of nowhere, hours from your hotel and in a town that has more free range chickens then residents. This is where I decided would be the perfect location to get really sick. My cold that had been festering for days decided to fully take effect here, and all the romantic walks and long hikes through bamboo forests past huge waterfalls were cancelled so that i could sit in the grass outside the only gas station in down to blow my nose. I felt so bad we decided just to turn around and drive back.

The ride itself was really pretty though, don't get me wrong. It was like being in Jurassic Park. maybe because we were driving down narrow deserted roads through a green rainforest with a canopy and we were in a Jeep. Dan really wanted a T-Rex to appear out on a no where and eat the Jeep in front of us. We hummed the Jurassic Park theme the whole way, and it only took about an hour before it became incredibly annoying.

We pulled over at a lot of sccenic outlooks along the Hana Highway. At one stop we were the only car as far as we could see and we took a moment to admire the beauty and solitude of the exotic place we were in. Then, a large Southern woman leapt out of a car behind us and yelled to my boyfriend, "Oh my GOSH! You look just like Jeff Gordon!!! Look, honey, he looks like that racecar driver! He's Jeff Gordon, oh my goooosh!" They took a picture of him and I hurried him to the Jeep before he signed an autograph. He hears this a lot and apparently the Hana Highway in Maui is cheif territory for major Nascar fans. And apparently we were on the same tour plan as this Nascar couple, because at every scenic stop in our guidebook, we'd open the car door and hear "Jeff Gordon! It's you again!" It's tough dating a celebrity.

Ok there was much more to this Maui trip besides us stealing champagne and me getting sick, so I'll have to post more later. Consider this Maui Part 1. Much more to come...

Working in LA

2006-07-28T16:28:00.000-07:00

Just a minute ago an intern came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. He gestured to the cubicle next to me, laughing quietly. I looked over and, I kid you not, the guy in the desk next to me is fast asleep in his chair.

OK, it’s official. I’m in the quietest office on the planet. People are falling asleep.

OK I should back up. I’m not in my regular office. Today I had the exciting adventure of commuting to Los Angeles for work. I took a long train ride with hopes of seeing the Hollywood sign, some paparazzi, and perhaps a minor celebrity, like Nicole Richie, waiting on the train platform. But no. I’ve discovered that downtown LA is kind of gross.

At the end of the work day, my boss and I wheeled our suitcases to our hotel a few blocks away. My boss proceeded to give me the I’m-older-then-you-and-I’m-a-guy speech about how dangerous downtown LA is and how I need to be careful. When he was mid-sentence in his “Be safe” speech, a homeless man sidled up next to me. The cross walk light decided at that moment to completely break and leave us stranded on the corner with this guy for about five minutes. I was whispered a variety of things, involving the words “cupcake”, “sweetness” and finally “princess” before the little walking man finally appeared and my boss yelled our “LET”S GO!” and we tore across the street before the homeless man could collect his bag of water bottles to follow me. We then charged down the next block, my boss muttering things like “Don’t worry, I would have killed that guy if he touched you.” And as he’s saying this, a weird guy jumps out in front of him and yells something to the effect of “Booyah!” in my bosses face and did a little dance. I put my head down and forged ahead. By this point we were walking so fast the little wheels on my suitcase were barely touching the ground. And even at this fast pace, a third guy came up to me and started walking along side me and asked if I needed help with my bag and seemed most adamant about helping me carry it. After bidding adieu to this final suitor, my boss and I came to another crosswalk and waited on this corner, trying to catch our breath. “Well,” he said, “We’ve gone four blocks and we’ve been harassed three times. Ready for dinner?”

The coolest part of going to LA is the hotel, which is pretty nice. I get to stay at the Bonaventure. They have elevators on the outside of the building that are all glass. And even though I can’t ride to my 30th floor room without holding onto a rail and almost peeing in my pants, it’s a pretty cool concept.

But back to my office life. I’m working in a fancy building on a floor that’s so quiet you can hear me writing with my ball point pen from across the floor. The only people in my group here are two slightly terrified looking interns and a man who is old and clearly unhappy, whom also tends to fall asleep on the job it would appear. The rest of the floor is vacant and I’m not sure why. It’s all very nice and modern. The only problem is that the temperature is apparently set on “arctic.” There was a heat wave here a while ago and now the office is so cold, I’m reduced to wrapping my coat around my legs and going to the bathroom every few hours to run my hands under hot water.

Luckily on day two here, my boss left and I got the fancy office! It was a great corner office and had floor to ceiling windows and a great view of the city. Now when interns come in and ask me questions, I can feel what it’s like to be a VP or something. I swivel around in my chair and I’m like “Yeeees?” And they sit all scared in the chair in front of me and value my opinion. It’s amazing what an office can do to your self esteem.

Then came the end of my trip and my train ride home. You may think riding a train to and from work is all sophisticated and exciting. Really it’s not. Especially when there’s a seven year old sitting next to you wearing a power rangers mask playing a harmonica…. For two hours. Apparently an entire troop of kids were returning from a day out in LA with grandma, who boarded the train with them and then promptly fell asleep for the entire ride. An I-Pod can only drown out so much until you start contemplating ever having children. One thing is for sure, I will never give mine a harmonica.

The boy and his rules (and teaching him to follow mine)

2006-07-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

Without becoming too Sex & the City on you all, I’m going to depart from my normal work gossip and I’m going to blog about my life. Which, you must admit, is much more interesting.

After dating the boy for almost six months now, I’ve started to notice so many more things about boy’s lives. For example, my boyfriend lives by very strict standards of conduct. Most of these are about guys and their friends who are guys. I’ve learned some funny things through observations of the boy and his good friends. Here are some of the more interesting ones I’ve learned thus far:

A guy will never go to another guy’s house to pick him up to arrive at a third destination. This just isn’t done. Guys drive themselves places.

Two guys can go to lunch together and not say a word to each other. They can sit down together, eat their food together, and twenty minutes later, after total silence, can look at each other and be like “Ready to go?” “Yup.” And that’s lunch.

If a guy friend can’t come to a party or something, the phone call to his guy friend will last approximately ten seconds. “Brian’s not coming.” “Why not?” “I don’t know.” “Well, is he sick? Did something happen? Didn’t you talk to him?” “Yeah I talked to him. He said ‘I can’t come.’ And I said ‘OK.’”

When a guy and a girl are dating, the guy must drive, otherwise he will become very fidgety in the passenger seat and will be totally emasculated

I’ve also noticed my boyfriend gets his hair cut way more often them me. Like every two weeks. So one Saturday he was telling me he was going to get his hair cut the next day. It’s apparently a bi-monthly, Sunday ritual. So I asked him when he last let his hair grow out. And I told him I thought he should again because I wanted to see what it looked like. He got pouty and looked all stressed, so I told him to just go another two weeks. He wasn’t buying it, so I said “You can tell me what to do with my hair for those two weeks too.”

Now, obviously, I was setting this up for him to say “No way, you’re beautiful just as you are and I always like your hair.” But no. He didn’t miss a beat and he was all “OK, wear your hair curly for two weeks.” EW!

He claims he likes my hair curly, as many people often tell me. But they don’t realize curly hair is a pain. You can’t go anywhere with a breeze above 1 MPH. You can’t touch it all day. And while it may look cute and bouncy to start with, if you lay down for like a minute, you end up with a bird’s nest.

But I obliged. Now we’re already into week two of this tortuous deal. Immediately after agreeing upon the deal, we had to make a trip to Target, so that I could get curly hair shampoo, conditioner, and styling stuff. And he had to get some kind of trimmer thing. I’m not sure what for, but he said it’s for maintaining the haircut. Just another part of the mystery of boy’s hair care that I don’t intend to figure out. We were quite a sight in the Target check out line, both all irritated to have to buy things because the other person was making us.

I’ve been so annoyed all week about the curly hair thing. But it does pose a few advantages. Since my hair’s naturally curly, all I have to do is wash it in the morning. So I get to sleep in a little more. And at work, I’ve been getting comments on it. But mostly they’re like “Oh, you changed your hair.” And I’m like “Um. Do I know you?” Apparently more people are aware of me and my hair then I thought. The boy keeps insisting it made me look glamorous. Well, that’s cute, but I’m not sold. I still keep saying that next Sunday at 6 AM, the blow dryer will be out and the curly hair will be gone.

We went to dinner a few days ago and my hair was still curly, of course. But this time, I’d taken a nap earlier and we’d decided to go get dinner at ten at night. So my curly hair was in full bird’s nest mode. We ordered our food, and when it came, the girl who brought the food stopped and said to me “Oh my gosh. I really like your hair.” And then just walked off. The boy smiled hugely across from me. Damn waiter girl. I think he has placed plants around the city.

Interesting things that happened yesterday at work...

2006-06-17T12:21:00.000-07:00

I got a spam email from amazon.com about a special sale on Pampers. What I have bought online recently that makes them think I’d be interested in Pampers? Maybe it’s that baby I bought online.

My Snapple cap informed me of “Real Fact #2”: Animals that lay eggs don’t have belly buttons. Well, duh. I did in fact take 6th grade science. Next you’re going to tell me that if an animal doesn’t breathe in and out, it will die. Come on, Snapple.

I’ve been working off-site for about two weeks now, far away from head office and far away from my new window desk. I’m at an affiliate office and it’s got a totally different vibe then my cool downtown office. Today is casual Friday and the people here really take that to the fullest extent of its meaning. Everyone’s wearing jeans and sneakers. Not to be a snob, but they all look totally unprofessional. I think I saw one guy in his pajamas. The guy who sits near me is sporting an orange t-shirt with a hole in and a gold chain. If I see a hat that says “Who Farted?” I’m packing up.

The lead auditor in my group was typing “affiliate” in an email and asked me if it’s spelled A-F-F-I-L-I-I-A-T-E. Are you serious? What word in the English language have you ever come across that has two I’s in a row? I don’t know which is dumber, you or the Snapple cap.

My New Digs

2006-05-25T21:51:00.000-07:00

I started a new job within my company today. New boss, new people, totally new work. It’ll be cool. This big move, of course, involved the ceremonial moving of desks. I packed up all my personal belongings from my drawers, which surprisingly consisted of a lot of candy, bags of microwave popcorn, and hairbrushes, and carted my whole business life over to a new location.

People, I now have a window desk. Granted it’s a window overlooking ghetto east county, but it’s a friekin window. It’s natural light and it rocks.

An IT guy came to move my computer. I was so proud of myself, new job, new and better desk… then the IT guy goes “You look like you’re 16.” Then it was all put back in perspective. Great, I look like I’m 16 and I’m trying to feel important here. It’s a constant struggle with me.
But anyway, back to my new digs and my new job. I’m on the same floor so I can still be buddies with my old co-workers. In fact, they’re taking me out to lunch today to say goodbye. These type of lunches are the highly anticipated department lunches. I picked the place to go. It’s a Brazilian steak place where they bring by meat on a stick for as long as you can take it until you are so full you can just barely get up the strength to reach onto the table and flip over the little knob to red. Meaning, “I’m so done.” Then we proceed to all stumble back to the office, drunk off food, and spend the whole afternoon groaning and feeling incredibly full. It’s great. I’ve been preparing for days and started fasting last night. Seriously, it’s a culinary experience that you can’t take lightly.

Oh, wasn’t I going to talk about my new job? I got a little distracted by the prospect of food. My new job is cool and my department is younger and hipper. It’s more independent type of work, which I think I respond to better then being baby-sat by a boss. I’ll be traveling a little bit too, which I find kind of sexy. Taking a train somewhere to go do work always makes you feel important. I’ll keep you guys updated on my progress.

My new boss I call Mr. Yogurt because I can’t figure out how to pronounce his last name. I guess I should get on that since I’ll be working with him for a while.

I was sad because Yogurt asked me to skip out on a day of this conference I was supposed to go to next week. This conference is the coolest thing, and my old boss signed me up for it months ago. I went to it last year and while it’s two days of rather heavy, boring technical information, the best part is the food. Do I seem a little obsessed with food in this blog? Well, the people that do this conference know that it gets really boring. So there are bags of Skittles and candy and stuff on all the tables. After every break I switch tables to one with the most Skittles, so I’ll never run out. And every two hours, there’s a 30 minute break where they serve some kind of awesome food. The best one last year was the “chocolate parade” where everything was chocolate: chocolate milk, chocolate cookies, chocolate brownies… oh it was heavenly.

And at the end of day one, there’s a sponsored happy hour at the hotel bar. And you guys all know my parents raised me to never turn down a happy hour. So all in all the conference is pretty cool.

My new boss wants me to go work on something with him off-site, so I can’t go to day two of the kick ass conference.

If I miss the chocolate parade there will be words…

Keeping the Faith

2006-05-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

After catching up on some of my linked blogs, I realized how interesting my friends are. So I think I’d better spice mine up again and talk about cool things I’m doing. Or at least make them up so people keep reading this blog.
On Friday, one of my old college friends and co-worker stopped by my desk. For weeks now he’s been telling me about this marathon he’s running in October and how I should join. How I suddenly strike him as a marathon runner, I’ll never know. Maybe it was the box of brownies I keep at my desk? Or the Skittles I have in my paperclip holder instead of paperclips? But he’s brought it up incessantly. I’ve known the kid for four years and now he’s on a personal mission to recruit me. My boyfriend is very suspicious of this and only allows me to socialize with him without complaint because this friend is shorter then me. And we all know I have rules about that.
So anyway, he starts emailing the information about their weekly meetings and practices with his running team. I have to stop myself from replying to each one with “I’m sorry, but this would really cut into my lying around time.”
This week he actually piqued my interest by telling me that you could also run a half marathon. OK, 13 miles of torture seems much more achievable then 26. Now I’m officially 10% interested.
But actually, I have started taking an interest in running. I’ve figured out how to run through my cursed family side stitch and have been utilizing my condo’s gym to run on the treadmill ever week. My I-Pod is also well equipped with a “Running” play list, so I’m clearly ready to run.
So my friend tells me that their first official run of the warm up season is on Saturday at 7:30. That would be 7:30 AM. I had to check to see if this time actually did exist on a Saturday morning. It did. And he wanted me to join him and his group in a three mile run at that time to figure out “pace groups.” I kindly explained to him that this ungodly running time would cut into my Friday night out and that at 7:30 AM I planned on stumbling home and falling asleep sideways on my bed with my clothes still on. So I sent him on his way.
It turns out Friday night was a particularly tame one and at 7 AM Saturday morning I woke up feeling fresh as a daisy and thought, “I think I’m going to go run.” The next thing I know I’m running around a lake 20 miles from my house and have made a “pace group” friend and was chugging through the home stretch of my third mile, without breaking a sweat.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I’m officially signed up for the half marathon in October. I’m mostly doing this to compete with Charlie and his efforts to run the San Francisco marathon that I’ve been reading about in his blog. OK, not really, but I thought I’d throw that out there.
After our final stretching and cool down sessions, all the runners gathered around and my work friend said “OK everyone, let’s all say a prayer.” Huh? A what? Oh crap. It all came rushing back to me that my friend is super Catholic. Oh crap, what have I gotten myself into? I just joined a Christian marathon training group! And they already have my registration form! After our prayer circle ended and I uncomfortable lunged for my keys to get the hell out, the leader girl said there were a few more announcement. She showed off that by joining the marathon, we got a fancy tote bag. She added that it was perfect size to fit your Bible. Seriously.
Everyone was really nice to me and they invited me to a meeting on Monday night, in which I can only imagine I would have been officially inducted into their cult. I’m going to have to bring my I-Pod next time and when they start busting out the running prayers, I’ll just cue up some Britney Spears.

Corporate Suzie in the Emergency Room

2006-04-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I discovered that NBC is not doing the real ER justice.

On a random Monday I checked myself in at the ER desk at my local hospital. I won’t go into why and it wasn’t serious, but let’s just say that a crazy rash caused my eyes to nearly swell shut for a whole weekend, and after struggling for days with various concealors and coming up with new excuses for why I couldn’t see my friends or boyfriend, I realized I had to do something. And my regular doctor was booked until 2007.

They told me to go to the ER and I said “Why? I haven’t been shot. I haven’t been running with a fork in my mouth and fallen on it. Normal people don’t go to the ER.” Oh, but they do. So my doctor talked me into going , which took about as much time as it probably would have to have seen me himself.

After I talked to the ER reception girl through the plate glass, so told me to sit down and I’d be called. So I made my way back to the swampy waiting room full of my city’s finest dead beats and weirdoes. I had barely sat down and begun taking in the strange creature sitting across from me, when my name was called! Wow, I thought. HMO’s are really something, medical care is really making strides. Then some swarthy lady broke my daze and yelled “Hey girly, over here! Window 2!” and I was directed to another booth with an inch of glass protecting a receptionist from the likes of me. Apparently I was not going to see some sexy ER doc just yet, I was merely here to answer some questions and fill out more paperwork.

After that I went and found a relatively clean seat with a good view of the TV with quality, bunny-ear antennae reception of the 12 o’clock showing of Judge Judy. I surveyed the scene. Where exactly would be the best place to put down my Coach purse? Do they have any beverages here, I’m feeling a little parched.

Most of the room seemed engrossed in the TV, so I took this opportunity to check out my fellow waiting-roomees. Most of the people in there looked fairly normal, besides being a little sad looking and smelly. They seemed to be more interested in Judge Judy then getting to see a doctor. A guy across the room was listening to an ipod and had sunglasses on. I swear he stared at me the whole time, but for all I know, he was asleep.

Then the automatic doors to the ER opened and the real interesting people came in. A man was wheeled in on a wheelchair and was promptly ditched. This guy had crazy bird hair and was wrapped in a giant blue blanket. He looked like he was homeless and he was groaning up a storm. Somehow he got wheeled over in my direction. If he barfs on my shoe, I’m so out of here. He groaned and moaned for a few more minutes and started shivering in his blanket. His torso was mostly horizontal the whole time. In my head, I started cataloging all the types of diseases I could potential catch from this guy by just sitting near him. Ew! His dirty blanket just touched my leg! OK I’m moving.

The sad part is this guy looked like seriously in pain. He clearly was here for a reason and the girl who assessed him through the glass window apparently thought he could do with another hour of sitting. Finally, someone called his name. He sort of fell over to the window of the receptionist girl, where I had been. I couldn’t believe it but they started asking him the same questions they’d asked me. They were like “Sir, please state your name.” “Sir, I’m sorry but screaming in pain is not considered stating your name.” Then they were all “Sir, please state your address.” He was all “1-4… OOW!! 3 Othello Street…” Then I think he passed out. The girl was all “OK thanks sir, please wait over there to see the nurse.”

Then, from a back room, my name was called over the crowd! Hooray, I get to see someone! In the secret back room I got to see a slightly bored looking nurse who gave me a wrist band to send me to urgent care. She hardly asked me anything. Then I got an extra, special red wristband stating my allergy to milk. Cool! I’m a double nerd! Then she said what you least like to hear in an ER... “Go back and wait in the waiting room.” So I did.

Now I was sitting on a different side of the room. I felt someone’s eyes staring at me and I turned slightly to my left and there she was, right in my face, sitting next to me. Irritating Nosey Girl. “Hi!” She said. Oh great. I’m going to make an ER friend. “What’s your red wrist band for? I don’t have a red one.” None of your beeswax, twerp! For all you know, this red wrist band could mean that I have a highly contagious strain of the plague, so maybe you should keep to yourself.

I talked to Irritating Nosey Girl for a bit, and I asked what she was in for. She said she had Strep Throat and proceeded to cough on me.

Then a little intern looking girl came into the waiting room and called two names, one of which was me! Hooray! Turns out the other name with the girl next to me. Damn. She took us down the hall and plopped us in another waiting room. Are you kidding me? This was like some practical joke where you just keep getting shuffled from waiting room to waiting room and someone behind a one way mirror is cracking up that you keep falling for it. She said this was the urgent care waiting room. There was no one else in, so it would be just me and Nosey Girl. Great.

But then the doors opened and a girl about my age stumbled in with a giant Tupperware container. She was carrying Gatorade and wearing a huge jacket and she laid down on a row of seats and started shivering. She put the Tupperware bucket beneath her and looked about ready to hurl. Wow, I thought. This girl is SO going ahead of me. She was shivering pretty bad and finally Nosey Girl said “What’s wrong with you?”

This time I was glad she was so nosey because I wanted to know. “Oh, I drank a whole bottle of brandy last night and now I’m paying for it.” She meekly said.
“How long have you been waiting?” Nosey girl continued to pry.
“Oh, I’m not waiting to see a doctor. I’m here with my friend, he’s down the hall.”

So the sickest girl in the room wasn’t even there for the doctor. She was just hanging out. This is the shantiest operation I’ve ever heard of.

Basically, my day in the ER was an experience well worth the $10 co-pay. I saw a whole other slew of crazy characters in there. But I think if I laid out the whole scene, none of you would ever go to the ER. And it’s something you should all experience for yourselves.

People at work were treating me like a leper when I came back, so I kept getting sent home while I still had my crazy face rash. I think now whenever I want to leave work early I’ll just be like at a staff meeting and be all “You know.. I feel a little itchy.. maybe a rash is coming on….”

Office Rule #127: Make the Most of Office Celebrations

2006-03-10T19:42:00.000-08:00

Next week is going to rock at work. Wow I don’t think I’ve ever said anything close to that before. One of the many reasons why is that we get our bonuses on Wednesday. That’s right, bonus time kids, the light at the end of the tunnel, the reason I’ve stuck around as long as I have. So in celebration, most departments do some kind of fun thing for everyone.

Last year we all went to a fancy restaurant and got to spend a good three hours wining and dining on the company tab. I thought that was pretty cool, until I heard how my good friend’s department took Hummer limos around downtown doing a scavenger hunt. WTF? And this year that same department gets the whole day off and is going to a bar for lunch where they get to drink alcohol! Gasp! So I eagerly awaited the meeting notice in my email to see where our fancy department outing would be. Finally it came… We were taking a one hour lunch to the casual dining experience of Chinese food that’s a block away from the company. WHAT!? I’m not about to celebrate getting a big fat check over a few cold eggrolls on a fixed price $5 lunch menu! A protest group began forming immediately. I was their ring leader. I had to work every angle I could with inappropriate manager guy, who was the lunch planner, and I managed to get our lunch knocked up to a three star restaurant and even got it extended to an hour and fifteen minutes if I promise to bake him cookies. He told me we should all be grateful because last year, the department down the hall had their year end lunch in the conference room and had baloney sandwiches from the cafeteria and there weren’t even enough to go around. I found that hilarious.

Now before you guys get all bitchy with me about how snobby I’m being for being pissed about the location of a free lunch, hold on. I know it’s a little selfish, but it’s a little disappointing when you’re walking across the street to go to your year end celebratory lunch with you department and you get water splashed on you from the party bus that just steamrolled by, carrying in it many of your co-workers from another floor, going on their way cooler outing. (They also have a fridge full of free drinks on their floor, but that’s just water under the bridge at this point.)

Somehow our little lunch ended up being scheduled on the day after we get our bonus checks, which is kind of unorthodox. It turns all our group’s bosses will be out of the office at a conference on real bonus day. So the six girls in my group all decided we’re going to take liberty with that and are leaving at noon that day and going to lunch on our own and then going to get pedicures! It’s so girly, I love it. I can’t wait to be in a pedicure chair next to my scary manly co-worker who plays women’s football. I doubt her toenails have even seen the light of day, much less any nail polish. So I’m going to be like “So… how’s… football?” And if it gets too awkward I’ll just ask her to pass me the December 2004 copy of Star magazine and will call it a day.

Jump the Couch

2006-02-22T19:18:00.000-08:00

I’ve resolved to stop using this blog as a place to bitch and moan about things in my life. I promise. I’m no longer going to send my frustrations into cyberspace and allow my readers to lose interest and just assume I’ve gotten a cat and called it a day as a single girl in the city. I came to this decision after reading through some of my old blogs and noticed I sound rather whiney. So rest assured, my dear friends, I won’t come home and dump all my problems onto my blog. I have a boyfriend for that.
Today I was at work and got rather excited because my day was broken up with a phone call from a dude at the hole in the wall furniture store that I ordered my new couch from. He told me it was ready to be delivered. As a side note, this guy sounds exactly like Adam. No, really. It’s uncanny. I don’t even think I’ve heard Adam talk that much. I’ve probably heard this couch guy talk more about dust ruffles and walnut footed sectionals then I’ve heard Adam talk about anything. I’m sure I’ll get some comment about that. But anyway, I skipped home all excited to greet the delivery boys. They hauled in my beautiful new sectional couch. Now before all you out of towners get all excited that now I finally have a nice big couch for people to crash on, the story isn’t over. They started setting it up and I noticed that the sectional was totally the wrong dimensions. It was totally not the layout I’d ordered. Turns out this Adam-sounding kid did a little drawing on the invoice to show what the couch would look like and I signed it, meaning I was bound to whatever little doodle this kid’s heart desired to draw. This is how this place works; they seriously build you a couch based on a pencil doodle. And couch guy’s doodle looked nothing like what I’d wanted. I guess I didn’t take it seriously enough because before I left I added a stick figure of me sitting on the couch.
So when the faulty couch arrived, I busted out my best I-want-to-be-a-lawyer language and got on the delivery boy’s cell phone to the doodle-drawing bandit himself to tell him this was not the couch I ordered. I had to use everything in my power to sound mean and remind myself that I was not yelling at Adam, it was the couch man. To make me feel even worse, the delivery boy was deaf and kept trying to sign to me that he thought the couch was OK. How do you tell a deaf delivery boy that you’d rather not have to jump over the back of your oddly long couch to get the kitchen? This is probably what I get from going to a furniture store that doubles as a coffee shop.
It was getting pretty heated on the phone so finally I resorted to the only method I knew would work. The sure fire, I’m-glad-to-be-a-girl tactic. I started to cry. Suddenly everything changed and before I even shed a real tear, I had a new, custom-made couch promised to me in two weeks, a formal apology, and a deaf delivery boy signing that he loved me.
So mark your calendars kids, in two weeks I will have a new, awesome sectional couch that exactly meets my specifications. As long as everything goes to plan and I don’t have to cry again.
OK I just realized this started to sound rather whiney again. And I also realized I haven’t told very many Corporate Suzie stories. But I think part of being Corporate Suzie involves starting to get a little hard-nosed and bitchy, which is how I was today to Adam, I mean couch man.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go post my old crappy couch on craigslist and hope someone will actually want to buy it. If worse comes to worse, I’ll just cry to the first person who calls about it and it’ll be sold.

Eye Pod Drama

2006-02-06T18:54:00.000-08:00

This weekend I had such I-Pod troubles and eye troubles. For those of you who haven’t been privy to my laser eye surgery drama, it’s still going on. I fully can’t see and my doctor’s a total ass. I think he just sits on his pile of millions in his fancy office with a view of the ocean and could care less about helping actual patients. Why do eye doctors always claim to be “The first doctor in the universe to perform LASIK!” They can’t possibly have all been the first, but I was suckered in, and now I’m paying for it in the form of one wonk-eye. I won’t go into but basically I’ve been to this guy’s office more times then most of my friends’ houses. I wave hi to the janitor as I walk in and I basically have my own parking lot in the building. So today I was given a million more eye drops which I now have to use every hour on the hour while I’m awake. And – this part might freak you eye woosies out – I can taste the eye drops. This is apparently totally normal. Your eye is connected to your throat, a fun-with-human-biology fact I would have rather not known. So to sum it up without boring you guys about eyeballs, I don’t like my eye doctor, I’ve actually cried in his office, and now my daddy’s going to call him and give him a talking to. For real. I’ll let you know what happens.

Now to move on to more interesting I’s. On Friday my I-pod starting whirring and clunking more then usual when it changed songs. Then all of sudden it died. I spent the past two days of free time on my computer surfing the apple website trying to fix it. I’ve done everything under the sun, next to throwing my computer out a window, which will probably happen next. My I-Pod made a little sad face at me and there actually was a listing on the apple website called “Is your I-Pod showing a sad face?” Yes, my I-Pod is very sad. I’ve uninstalled my I-Pod, reinstalled it, updated it, restored it, rocked it to sleep and given it a bath. Hmm.. maybe the bath wasn’t a good idea. But the darn thing doesn’t want to work. And it’s exactly 13 months old, which is exactly one month after the warranty expires. Damn you Steve Jobs.

So I’m a sad Mac now. Just imagine me at home with one eye closed, writing this blog, and hopelessly petting my dead I-pod, trying to convince it to come back to life for just a few hours so that I can take it the gym. I promised I would be nice to it and take all the Britney Spears songs off it if it wants.

In other news, I’m going snowboarding on Saturday. I’ve never snowboarded before and I’m kind of scared. I’ve only skied. And I stopped doing that because last time I went skiing I recall being hit from behind on my skies and taking a 20 foot tumble down the hill and almost breaking my femur. The guy who hit me got his lift ticket taken away and was escorted off the mountain. I however now have a fear of snow. This week just isn’t going my way.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to put an eye drop in.

A Two Day Course on How to Deal with Dummies (and Treasury)

2006-01-29T01:38:00.000-08:00

This week I went to a seminar on treasury management in downtown for work. (Please don’t stop reading now, I swear, this blog is not boring.) The best part was I didn’t have to be at work and it was all paid for.

I quickly had a flashback to college and realized that as soon as someone starts talking in front of me for a good amount of time, it starts to sound very soothing. I got there, opened my binder of materials, poised my pen in anticipation of learning, and immediately started nodding off. I did every possible body position to stop myself from falling asleep, and decided that propping your head up with your hand is the worst. College seems so long ago and I wish I remembered how I stayed awake back then.

Oh, but back to the actual content of the seminar. The truth is I only started zoning out during the parts I was already well educated in. Our “professor”, if you will, because that’s really the only name I can give to anyone who knows more then me about a subject and is in front of a room with a power point presentation, looked oddly familiar to me. A guy told me later that he looked like the guy from City Slickers. Yes! Thank you, that would have been helpful to hear during the first hour of a two day seminar rather then at the end, so it wouldn’t have driven me crazy.

The course was on treasury management, something I’ve decided I’m really interested in. In my last position (refer to previous years worth of prevalent blogs) I was bored stiff and really started to contemplate my whole existence. Was I going to debit and credit my life away in some cubicle? Accounting is all well and good and unfortunately I’m damn good at it, so it only made sense to work in it. But it’s all a little too logical and stiff to me. But now I’m in treasury and I’ve realized it’s pretty cool and I’m lucky to have had this opportunity. We’re dealing with real money and making decisions that have a great deal of weight and there’s a lot of creativity involved. Plus, it’s the background that a CFO would have to have. So watch out world.

The funniest part of the course (and trust me, there isn’t a whole lot of “funny” when you’re dealing with treasury management) was when we were learning about daily banking practices. Our professor mentioned how, as all of us knew, banks cut-off wiring activities at 6:30PM eastern time, 3:30PM pacific time. OK next slide please. But then this guy on the other side of the class (who I almost sat next too, but thankfully didn’t) raises his hand to ask a question.

Now, as background, when the class first started, we all went around and introduced ourselves. I was surprised how many people were big time, like Assistant Vice Presidents of banks and Assistant Treasurers of their companies. This guy was clearly in love with his voice and had previously announced that he was from the east coast somewhere.

So, he raised his hand. “So about the banks closing at 3:30 on the west coast. Hm.. so I guess I never really thought about it before, but you guys on the west coast here are really at a disadvantage for banking.” “Um… what?” the professor asked. But the guy continued on. “Well, say you’re a bank in San Diego and you’re trying to get a company’s business who wants to make a wire payment late in the afternoon. If they decide to wire money at like 4, the San Diego bank wouldn’t be able to do it, so then a company could just call up a bank on the east coast and they would still be open for business.” Oh my gosh, did he really just say that? The guy kept going on. “Wow, so you banks over here close at 3:30 and all the east coast banks are open another three hours. I wonder if anyone’s ever considered this.” Um, no, they haven’t because it’s total bullshit. Haven’t you ever heard of time zones? When a bank closes on the west coast, the banks close on the east coast at the same exact time. Oh Christ, this guy’s still talking. The whole class tried to convince him he was crazy in the politest way possible, but he just wasn’t having it. I don’t think he ever figured it out. Probably when he goes home, it’ll suddenly hit him and he’ll be like “Oooooh, crap.” But I got a good laugh out of it.

On the first day I sat next to my co-worker who’s just returned from maternity leave. She was in and out of the seminar taking calls from her nanny and worrying about her baby eating or not, or some crap like that. So the woman sitting on the other side of me tried to befriend me. Most people had come to this seminar from out of town, so this lady clearly knew no one. She introduced herself as being from Salt Lake City. So when she kept trying to talk to me, I was like “no thank you, I already have a Mormon friend.” But then the lunch hour rolled around. My co-worker turned to me and said, “I’m sorry, I’d say we should go to lunch together, but I have to go pump.” EW! OK, you go do that. And please never say that to me again.

Uh oh, now Mormony girl clearly knows that I’m alone for lunch. I stood up quickly, grabbed my stuff, and tried to shuffle down the aisle to get out of there before she could stop me. Damn, the fat guy from Seattle isn’t moving fast enough… go, go! But it was too late. “So, what are you doing for lunch?” she asked. So I spent the next hour making friends with this girl at lunch, who couldn’t have been more different from me. She had six kids. Yeah, six. And she mostly just wanted to hear about my dating life. Probably because she’s been married since she was 12.

At the end of the second day, I started to notice a guy loitering around me at the breaks. I called him hot guy because my co-worker and I had whispered earlier about how buff he was. At the end of the second day, my Mormon friend scampered off catch her flight, and hot guy came up to me. We started talking as I was packing up my stuff and he said he lived a few hours away. I told him he probably shouldn’t drive home during rush hour and he asked if I wanted to do something while he waited for traffic to die down. Oh, hot guy, it took you two days to finally ask me out and you do it NOW? I have places to be. But I invited him out with me to go meet my friends for a drink. They were already propping up the bar down the street from our office. So we went, and dammit, hot guy was totally charming and hilarious.

The seminar was pretty cool, all in all, and a good networking opportunity if nothing else. As usual, I was about ten years younger then most people in the room, but I always feel a little superior when I can hold my own in professional discussions with high ranking people in their 30’s. Plus, if I’m ever in need of a new Mormon friend or a guy who doesn’t understand time zones, I’m set.

Wait...

2006-01-28T19:58:00.000-08:00

I just found out that the temp in my department’s name is Lebrandi. That’s Lebrandi.

2006-01-24T20:16:00.000-08:00

On Saturday I watched four hours of Sex & the City episodes with my friend. That can really start to mess with your mind. When I finally got back to my place, after talking my friend out of trying to find two other girls to go have cosmopolitans with, I turned on the TV and right there on Bravo was a re-airing of the golden globes and they were interviewing Sarah Jessica Parker on the red carpet. She has started to infiltrate my life. Get her out of here! Otherwise I’m going to start coming home from a night out, sitting down at my computer and starting to write things like “Later that night, I got to thinking about men, women, and relationships.”
On the last DVD of the last season, they have this cheesy montage from HBO where they interview all the cast and show slow motion clips of the show. The cast was all crying and saying how life altering the show was. They even played the song “memories” at one point. I almost barfed into my cosmo.

Today a temp started at work. Not in my department, but she working for another big wig whose office is right next to me. I call him inappropriate guy. His office is at the end of the hallway that everyone walks down and he’s strategically placed his desk so that he can look up and watch girls walk down the hall while pretending to be on a phone call. OK, well maybe he is on a phone call. But he’s also snuck up behind me at the water cooler a few too many times to say hi. And then there was that incredibly awkward time that I ran into him at brunch on a certain hungover Sunday where he overheard me saying I wasn’t wearing any underwear. But that story’s for another time.
The new temp girl looks about 18. I think the alternative to this job is working at Hot Dog on a Stick. She’s only here for a week and I hope it stays that way. Her whole job is to answer the phone when it rings. Literally, that’s her whole job. I heard inappropriate guy say to her “all I need you to do this week is answer the phone. Thanks.” Then he disappeared back into his office and went back to his stance of pretending to be on the phone. So this temp is just a warm body basically. And inappropriate guy isn’t even in the office that much, so her job could be better classified as a chair warmer. I kept hearing her answer the phone and it was hilarious. “Hello, inappropriate guy’s office, this is Tasha.” This would always be followed by one of the longest and most confused “Oooooh’s” I’ve ever heard, as though the person on the other end had just asked to her do calculus. “Oooooh. OK. Wait. OK. He’s not going to be back until 1.” She would always say “wait” when she answered every call, like she had to get her thoughts together. The friekin president of the company could have called and she’d be all “This is Tasha. OK. Wait.”
That is so unprofessional. OK. Wait. I need to get back to my game of spider solitaire. I mean work.

Attention Fireman - Save My Career

2006-01-11T23:34:00.000-08:00

You know you’ve been in corporate America too long when you discover an automatic stapler in one your drawers that you never knew was yours and it truly makes your day. Anyone need anything stapled?

I’m no longer the youngest person at my company. This became blatantly apparent when I pointed out to a friend that a certain admin’s outfit was “not work appropriate.” I’d worn a skirt much shorter just a year ago. I’m older and wiser now. I’m 23.

I think my voice has finally started to sound my age. I’ve always had a tendency to sound about 4 on the phone, and more then a few times the person on the other end has asked to speak to my mommy. Even at work. Me: “Um, no, this is Heather in corporate treasury. I wanted to issue some overnight commercial paper.” Goldman Sachs: “OK little girl, put the phoney phone down and let me talk to daddy, OK?”
But yesterday I was talking to one of our traders in Connecticut and he asked me where I went to grad school! Now I in fact did go to grad school. But guys, he thought I sounded old enough to go to grad school! Not to mention smart enough. Wow. I must sound hot.

New Years 7 (I Slept In)

2006-01-03T18:19:00.000-08:00

Man. Now that was a party. I've read my friends blogs for their wrap ups about New Years and only found Charlie doing it justice. The only kid who refuses to link my blog to his.
So I'll give my own run down. This will require me to pause my Tivo. That means it's serious.

There were so many people at my house. Probably about 40 at one point. Most of them I knew, but some were what I dubbed "randoms." My parents were surprisingly cool about all the crazy people.

It felt like a friekin fun house. On one part of our patio there was a hookah going, on another there was a keg, another there was an ice luge to take shots off, absynthe shots in the corner, the hot tub which went all night (props to our propane tank and James and Drew's determination with a hairdryer to get the furnace to light) and James's eight hour I-Pod New Years playlist made the night complete.

James pulled the annual prank, and we pulled the annual falling for it. Claire mastered the blackberry mojitos and even though all the boys taunted "Those are going to make you sick!", all the girls managed to hold their own. The boys definitely won out on number of people barfing the next morning.

We drained the keg of 150 cups of Newcastle by about one in the morning. One of my favorite points in the night was when my raucous friends and I were in the hot tub and my dad wandered by and found a red cup sitting by the pool, picked it up, and threw it into the pool. We found it at the bottom the next morning and he instisted he would never have thrown a full cup of beer into the pool. It was great.

The evening was then topped off by the Great Salsa Fight of 2005, or by that point I guess it was 2006. All I know is Drew had to get a ladder to wipe salsa off the cieling of our guest house. And a lot of it ended up on James's face and he didn't even wake up.

Then there was the fire alarm going off, which Charlie quickly and deftly disarmed from its perch ten feet above the floor, without spilling a drop of his beer. Then there was me getting hit on by one of the randoms. What a night.

There was the inevitable post-party trauma, but I managed to keep clear from it, mostly by being one of the only people who didn't throw up in the morning. I woke up to a beautiful 2006 morning, with a crisp morning fog rolling down the mountain, the sounds of birds chirping, and then of someone throwing up in the bathroom. I went outside and realized what the world really smelled like, and vowed never to go back into the guest house dungeon of stinky boys, salsa, and post-party puke.

Claire made a great quotable New Years quote when she started heading to the bathroom. "Someone's in there!" someone said. Claire's response was "OK. I'll throw up over the balcony then."

The other ever-present quote of the night was Drew validating everything with "Guys, I know because I go to SLO." Apparently an education at SLO makes you both an expert in kegs and everything else you might come accross. How do you get salsa off the cieling? "Guys, trust me. I know how. I go to SLO."

On New Years Day, Alex, Patrick, Drew, Justin and I went up to the main house and started cleaning up. I'm convinced Drew was still drunk at this point. He'd brought Gatorade as his hang-over cureall and bragged about it all night, how he would drink it right before bed and would feel fine in the morning. I guess that was all shot to hell when he started mixing it with Vodka and created a new drink with Adam called "Gatorka."

We thought we cleaned everything up, until I discovered a red bra draped over a patio chair. What the...? Someone made the obligatory "Wow, this was a great party!" comment until we discovered it was Alex's and it had gotten there by very innocent means.

I found red party cups all over my house and I'm sure my parents will for years to come. Besides the one still at the bottom of the pool that my dad threw, there was one on my mom's sewing machine in her office, one in my bedroom closet, a few on the back of the toilet, a few in random potted plants, and one up a tree.

The next evening a kid even drove back to my house at like nine at night and said he lost his cell phone. I actually couldn't even remember this kid being at the party, and told him politely that everyone has to experience losing a cell phone on a drunk night out once in their lives, and sent him on his way. Whoever he was.

The next morning my friends were all convinced my parents would not let me have another party for at least ten years, considering the sheer amount of throwing up and debauchery that went on. I sort of began to think the same thing, and Newcastle being my Dad's favorite beer could only count for so much.

When the last party-goers finally sobered up enough to leave (around 5 in the evening on New Years Day), I tiptoed up to see my parents. "So, guys..." i said... "Did you have fun?" There were quiet for a minute. Then my Dad said "We should do that every year!" My parents are awesome.

The Secret Santa Curse

2005-12-28T19:46:00.000-08:00

I think I am officially cursed when it comes to Secret Santas. If you don't believe me, listen to this.

In my office, my momish office co-worker one day arrived with an armful of garish Wal-Mart stockings and hung one on each of our cubes. We were then told that if we wanted to we could all do an office Secret Santa, only the rules were a little untraditional. This sounded interesting. I was in. Instead of one goofy present that you exchange in a stuffy conference room over some stale pecan pie while exchange awkward smiles, we were going to give little things every few days and it didn't have to cost any money. Crap, I want out. An email went out explaining more of the rules and my co-worker even added "You can give whatever you want: jokes, cartoons, funny riddles." OK. My first Secret Santa will be a slip of paper that said "Knock knock. Who's there? Your Secret Santa." This is crap.

Apparently the person who drew my name took this "You don't have to spend money" rule to heart. My first present was a company paperweight commemorating our company's purchase of another company in 2004. It now sits on my desk and keeps my to-do pile at bay. OK, not so bad of a gift, right? I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Clearly he just forgot today and the next thing will be cool.

The next day I got a golf ball. After that I got a handful of bandaids. Fucking bandaids. Here's the list of things I got after that, if you can believe it, and I'm not making any of this up: a sock of Spanish coins, old halloween candy, a document holder (stolen from the office supply cabinet where I saw it earlier that day), an old mug from Michigan State with coffee grinds still in it, a large flat rock (perhaps another paperweight?), and the piece de resistance: three packets of mustard. I kid you not. I was hoping maybe a hot dog would show up later, but no. I was at a loss... was I supposed to eat the mustard? What the hell?

This all gave me flashbacks to when I participated in the Secret Santa gift exchange last year in my old department. That time it was more normal and we all brought one gift and you could steal gifts from other people. I brough Cranium, and not to brag, but it was the biggest hit of the day. Someone brought one present that was so huge, it became the topic of conversation in the office in the morning leading up to the gift exchange. It was like five feet long and three feet wide. What was in that giant present? A new co-worker?!

So when it got down to opening presents, everyone was skipping over the giant present. I couldn't understand it. The mystery had to be solved! I think because I was a naive little 22 year old and didn't have the wisdom I have now as a 23 year old, I didn't think it through enough. People weren't picking that present because they didn't want to lug whatever it was home from work! Even if it was a maid in a box or something cool. But I didn't think of that and when it was my turn I lunged for the giant present and guess what it was? A giant tupperware box. The room erupted in laughter and I had to fake laugh along with them all, all the while crying inside as I began to wonder how the fuck I was going to get this thing home. Suffice it to say, no one wanted to steal my gift from me. And I never tracked down the bastard who brought it. I dragged the giant tupperware back to my cubicle that afternoon and stuck it under my desk. Someone said I could have fit in it, and I seriously thought a few times of crawling inside it to take a cat nap. I whacked my knee of that thing for the next six months until I remembered to drive to the office and come get it after hours, to hide my shame in darkness.

So in summary, Secret Santa's and I don't mix. You'd think karma would help me out a little, because I'm always a very good and insightful Secret Santa and bring cool things. But when it's been a long day at work, and the mustard packets your Secret Santa brought you that morning start to look good, something's gone terribly wrong.

Welcome to blogging from home

2005-12-28T19:41:00.000-08:00

I got a computer for Christmas. I'm finally in the 21st century! Wireless internet, flat screen monitor, the works. So now I'm going to be blogging more consistantly and will fill this space with more corporate suzie ramblings. I was almost tempted to put a picture of me on this blog, because every time I log in it accosts me with links of how to add an image to my profile. No thanks. I'm still a little worried in the back of my mind some VP at my company has been reading this blog and a picture of me would be just the thing to nail my coffin. He might see me in the company cafeteria one morning and put two and two together and suddenly I'm headline news on CNN for getting fired over a blog.
I also noticed I don't have Microsoft Word. What the...? How am I supposed to write things? So that means for a few weeks I'm going to go all ghetto style and be blogging from WordPad or something equally as lame. So bear with me.

Hot Jury Love

2005-11-18T15:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had jury duty. I’ve avoided it my whole life up till now by using my parent’s sneaky and fool-proof tactic of throwing away all jury notices and pretending you never saw them. This served me well for years until I became an accountant and guilt overcame me. Plus, I found out that work pays for time off for jury duty. Dude, I’m there.
One perk of jury duty for me is that I live like 5 blocks from the courthouse. I live like 5 blocks from everything important: work, a 7-11, and a bar. So now I can add “courthouse” to that list, in case I’m ever annoyed about being arrested for something, I can now be like “Oh, well, it’s only down the street, I guess I’ll go for my court appearance.”

So I show up for jury duty and am ushered through metal detectors to go check in at the “jury lounge,” as though it’s some super cool place to be where you sip on tropical drinks with umbrellas in them and float in a pool on an inner tube. No, instead it’s got a staticy TV stuck on the soap opera network and about 200 smelly people. There was a woman sitting behind me who was coughing up a lung the entire time. Then a news story came on the TV that said that the first case of human avian flu had just been discovered. I subtly moved to the other side of the room, because the woman behind me clearly had it.

Like any normal 23 year old girl would do, I happened to notice a cute boy sitting near me reading Time magazine. He seemed particularly interested in the article about Dick Cheney, but I can see past that. I immediately got a strange sense that I would be talking to this kid, or that I had some connection with him. But I settled down to continue to pretend to read my CPA review book. People started getting called in groups to go to elusive court rooms on other floors. They were such herded cattle, they’d hear their name called and would wander off to where they were told. It dwindled down to a few jury rejects like myself. I swear, I think there’s some government file out there that prevents me from ever being picked for anything.

I have to admit, I did have jury duty once before. I was 18 and fresh out of high school and was pretty bummed at the prospect of having to get up before noon to do my civic duty. I literally showed up at 10:30, again, because my parents raised me to have no fear of authority. I sat there for like an hour, got dismissed on a two hour lunch, and came back at 1:30 when we were all summarily dismissed. So nothing exciting has every happened to me at jury duty.

So I honestly think there’s a file out that has all sorts of stuff about my uncle being in the M15 and all sorts of other shady things my family has done, like how many jury notices my parents have thrown out. So I was positive I wasn’t going to get called for anything and I would end up being the only person left in the cavernous jury room, only to be forced to split a peanut butter sandwich for lunch with Earl the security guard until everyone came back from their trials.

So I began planning my lunch get-away. I intended to leave for lunch and never return, citing “a stomach ache” if I were ever captured. But amazingly, I was finally called! I got so excited that I dropped my CPA review book. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever picked it up again. Oh well. CPA’s are over-rated.

But the best part is, guess who else was told to report to courtroom 38? The boy! The boy I’d been secretly spying on over the top of my book. I hope he didn’t notice I’d been on the same page for the last three hours.

So we file up to the courtroom where about 40 of us proceed to stand outside a dinky courtroom door for like twenty minutes, all looking a little lost and clearly in need of direction. Finally someone emerged from the courtroom and said we all had assigned seats and started calling off our named to be taken to our seats in the court room. Oh, it’s like grade school again! Will there be a place for my back-pack and Trapper Keeper?

So people start getting called off. My jury boy gets called and I learn his name. Then, as if destiny intervened, I was called next! So I burst through the crowd of people, and I’m like “I’m here! Right here! Heather.” So next to Jury Boy I proudly sat.

The rest of the courtroom stuff started to distract me and I started to get interested by it. There was a funny looking guy sitting at the defendant’s table with a clown-like ring of red hair who I learned was found with heroin and was pleading not guilty. Oh, sounds like a nail biter.

We then had to go around the room and say our name, occupation, the occupations of our children, our 3rd grade teacher’s name, what we had for breakfast, and the names of the thirteen original colonies. Jury boy next to me stands up and says he’s a Chief Accountant. Oh man, a boy after my own heart! It’s so meant to be!

Then it was my turn. There was one last question which was “Do you have any relatives in the legal profession?” So I stand up all haughtily and say proudly “My name is Heather. I’m an accountant. I have no children. And my sister’s in law school.” Then I go to sit down and the judge is all “What year is your sister? Has she had a clerkships or jobs in the summer?” Crap. She did something this summer. Something to do with law. And criminals. And going to work. “Um yeah I think she worked for a government attorney this summer.” The defense lawyer girl started furiously writing. Hm, that doesn’t seem good.

After hearing about every Joe Bloe in the courtrooms life history, we then get dismissed for lunch. Here’s my chance. “So you’re an accountant?” I said to jury boy next to me. “Yeah! I saw you’re studying for the CPA.” He responded. I’m so in. “yeah I am!” followed by flirty laughter on both sides. We walked out of the courtroom and silently walk in a big pack out the door. “So what are you doing for lunch?” he asked. “Oh I don’t’ know.” I said. I pretended to not know the neighborhood and looked around all confused. In reality, I had planned on walking the five blocks home, and eating some chocolate for lunch while watching the Daily Show with my feet up before returning to the courtroom. Then jury boy said, “Well, can I have lunch with you? Do you want to have lunch?” I almost fell over.

Long story short we giddily walked over to a nearby restaurant and had a nearly 3 hour meal. You get a really long lunch break at jury duty. We talked about everything: families, life, jobs, how we got here, where we’re going, the order of the universe, the transience of life, Paris Hilton’s latest hairstyle. It was great.

We kept talking as we walked back to the courtroom. He mentioned we should try to get together again. We were a little late and quickly took our seats. When suddenly I realized that we were back in jury selection and that people were probably going to start getting dismissed! It was all very quiet and somehow I found it a little rude to be whispering to the cute boy next to me about getting his number when the defense attorney was asking us questions about “our ability to be fair and reasonable.” Jury boy whispered to me that he hoped we got on the jury together and I agreed. But then the judge announced that they had narrowed the pool down to 15 people and if your name was not called, you must leave the courtroom in a quiet and orderly fashion. Oh no! And guess who’s name was called? Jury boy! And guess who’s name wasn’t? Curse you, sister in law school! I hope she knows she killed my jury romance. So Jury boy’s name was called and the rest of us start shuffling out. He stands up a little and whispers to me in an awkward moment, “It was really nice meeting you.” And before I could say a thing, I was asked to leave by the bailiff! I didn’t even get to say goodbye!

My friends now say I should have hung out outside and waited for him. No thank you, I’m not a stalker, and this is a courtroom, not gym class. But one of my guy friends, who’s always good at giving advice, even helped me by googling the kid’s name and workplace and has his number. So I could call him up. But he’s on a jury trial right now! So what do you guys think? I shouldn’t exactly be pursuing random guys right now, considering my circumstances, but I think I’m going for it.

Homeowner's Dissociation

2005-11-04T13:04:00.000-08:00

Next week is my first annual homeowner's association meeting. I’m oddly excited. I went to one a few months ago and was so exciting to be pretending to be involved in where all my exorbitant home owner fees go that I spent most of the time patting myself of the back and planning what kind of selfish things I would now allow myself to do after making the effort to go to this meeting.

There’s like 400 units in my complex, so I had wrongly assumed the meeting would be well attended by yuppie downtowners like me, who burst through the doors in fur coats with little cocker spaniels in matching sweaters, who would discretely find a place to sit with an open seat next to it for all their tiaras and diamonds. These are always the type of people I assume live in my building, and that’s only because of the crazy blinged out cars I see parked in our structure. We have valet parking in my building. (Ok before you start groaning, it’s mandatory because of how tight the parking is and we pay up the wazoo for it. Did I just say “up the wazoo?”) The little 18 year old valets have apparently been instructed to park all the fancy cars in the front. Maybe for the intimidation factor, maybe so you’re put in your proper place when you drive up in your Ford Focus. But the cars in the front area are crazy. There are a couple Corvettes and Porches and probably plenty of other fancy pants cars that I don’t even know the names of. You can imagine how it goes when I roll up in my dirty Civic. Whichever acne-prone valet kid comes to park my car always looks a little sad because he knows he’s going to have to go park my car on the bottom floor in the corner, just to the left of the dumpster, back where no one will see it.

But anyway, back to this Homeowner meeting. I’ll fill all you non-homeowning kids in on our cool lingo now so I don’t have to keep writing our Homeowners. All us home-owning, too-cool-for-school types call home owner associations your “HOA.” “How’s the HOA doing, Bob?” “Oh, it’s going.” Or my personal favorite: “How about the SOB who runs our HOA?” “I know. WTF is his deal?” Then you’re super cool because you’ve just used like three acronyms and sound like a total dork.

The only reason I went to the HOA meeting last time was because I somehow got blind carbon copied on an angry email from an irate neighbor of mine, who I’ve never met and don’t plan to. His use of grammar was appalling (this coming from a girl who just ended her last sentence with a preposition) and he sounded completely stupid in his list of grievances to our HOA president, who was apparently out to lunch and never responded, which only made Johnny McNeedstoTakeaGrammarCourse even madder. This guy was using run-on sentences and commas like they were going out of style. He complained about our mail room, a chipped tile outside the elevator, the girl who drives the dirty Civic (oh crap), the dogs who poops on his doormat, and, to quote, “the unfortunate number of young people who have decided upon the horrific institution of marriage in our building.” Whoa! Someone had some Bitter-O’s for breakfast. He claimed that people are receiving too many packages because there are too many married couples in the building and then our mail room looks ugly. He finished by pointedly assuring our HOA president that he will be present at that night’s meeting to talk about the issues.

When I finished reading this email, I blinked a few times, closed my jaw from the agape pose, and quickly cleared that night’s schedule so I could attend the meeting of all meetings. This meeting was going to make the other meetings look like 4th Grade student senate. This would be a smack-down meeting that I would be telling my children about. There was going to be some HOA ass-kicking tonight! And I had ring-side seats.

So I show up to the meeting, way too eager and early, only to find that it is in our North Lobby, and involved about a dozen folding chairs and about six total attendees. I was appalled. The infamous mail room (defendant #408) was right next to our meeting site, along with the elevators, the doors to the street, and a few people’s condo doors. And some mastermind on the HOA decided to plan this meeting at 5:30. So basically the entire condo walked through the meeting while coming home from work, slamming doors, getting in elevators, coming back to check their mail, walk their dogs, or pick up their pizza that was being delivered. Some guy actually walked through the meeting to go on a date and came back two hours later with the same girl, and had the awkward first date goodbye two feet away from our meeting. Most of the people were looking at our sad little gathering as though it were some type of new club that was trying to get its footing.

The HOA board looked very un-menacing and included a skinny tall guy who shook noticeably throughout the whole meeting, a woman who was shaped like a squash and a wiry little girl who looked like she could be the squash girl’s snack. One of them mentioned that our illustrious HOA president, whom I had yet to meet, was going to be late because he had class. Class? Excuse me? Is this kid in high school? Is he going to be studying for his chemistry final when we need to be negotiating on Earthquake insurance? Is he going to blow our HOA bank account on Pokemon cards and chewing gum? I have clearly been out of the HOA loop for too long.

The meeting dragged on about nothing for like an hour and I realized Johnny Email-Complainer wasn’t saying a word! I was so disappointed. I recognized who he was right away because he looked nerdy and bitter and sat in the corner.

After like 90 minutes of boringness, the president finally arrived. I think he came in on a Razor scooter and he had a backpack on when he sat down. Holy Crap, he really is like my age. Turns out he’s in law school, but still he’s like 24 at most. How weird is that? I immediately judged him and assumed he was only our HOA president so he could put it on his resume or something, but he actually was regulating during the meeting and by the end of it, I was wondering in what unit this studly young leader parks his scooter.

The meeting as a whole was pretty disappointing though. Nothing was thrown, no one threatened to move out or call in their lawyers. And all the pizza being delivered just made me hungry. The HOA president didn’t ask me out, he must be gay. Although I decided it was for the best because if I started getting the nice parking, got my windows washed more then twice a year, and the carpet outside my door was vacuumed twice a day, people might start talking.

New York

2005-10-31T16:35:00.000-08:00

So I went to New York a few weekends ago to visit my sister there at law school.
The most memorable part of the trip? Me missing my flight on the way back. Don’t even ask how I did it. I’m convinced I lost at hour because one minute I’m on the subway, rocking out to my I-Pod, with plenty of time to get to the airport, the next thing I know it’s ten minutes until my flight takes off and I’m 5 stops away.

I thought that only happened in movies. I thought it would end up being like some airport scene from a movie where I’m all sad I missed my flight and I do this big dramatic sigh, then someone comes up behind me and it’s someone from my past or something who confesses their love to me and some Stevie Wonder song starts playing as it fades into credits. But no, the only person following me was some street person trying to sell me a bootleg copy of The 40 Year Old Virgin. The saddest part is that the first thing I did, when I ran up to the gate and heard my flight had left, was cry. I haven’t cried in ages and suddenly I was crying like I was 3 and someone had just stolen my ice cream cone. Glad to know I revert to toddler status when in a crisis. And on the way out to New York, I had put my carry-on way at the front of the plane, even though I was sitting near the back, because I was late getting on and everything else was full. (I apparently am always late to flights. It’s going to be my new “thing”) And when I was getting off the flight I stood up, making sure to steal the seat copy of SkyMiles magazine, and saw some dude at the front of the plane take down my suitcase, consider it for a minute, and then take off with it. I started hopping and yelling, but since I was at the back of the plane and I tend to look like I’m 12, no one paid me any attention. Long story short for about 30 minutes I thought some New York guy had walked off with my suitcase, never to be seen again. In actual fact, some guy had walked off with my suitcase and was nice enough to bring it back an hour later. He must be from the Mid West. In those panicky few minutes, I did a quick calculation of the worth of my luggage’s contents and began mentally penning an angry letter to the airline about how my Mickey Mantle baseball card, jar of French truffles, and my Olympic gold medal were in there. And when Johnny McLostandFound at the JFK luggage center said my bag was gone forever, I cried then too. Why am I always crying at JFK? That place has far too many of my tears. It’s just not my airport.

But don’t worry, I did more then just cry at the airport in New York. Although if you looked at my camera, which I enthusiastically carted around the entire city, you wouldn’t know it. I took two pictures on my trip. One of the Friend’s apartment building in the West Village and one of my sister wearing a funny hat. And that’s it. The photo album will be amazing.

But it was a fun trip and I got to see how my sister lives and what her latest favorite computer game is that she plays while she talks to me on the phone. But I can’t write too much about that because she is my blog’s most avid reader and I already have enough trouble getting a monthly phone call from her in between rounds of Minesweep.

Suffice it to say that New York is cool. If it were for the sucky up weather, I’d be there in a second. It was apparently the wettest month ever or something. I’ve gone soft from living in such nice weather and almost kissed the ground when I returned. I also think there are too many subways in New York. Is it just me, or does anyone else notice that pretty soon the entire island will have a subway under it and eventually it will just collapse into the ground, probably right onto the train I would be on while going to JFK? I think I’m alone in thinking this.

I’ll have to write more later because sadly I’m back to the grind and I have to actually work today. This past weekend I had a crazy Halloween night out and did all sorts of crazy, blog-worthy things. Watch out.

Office Rule #72: Don't Eat in Front of Co-Workers

2005-10-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

I just realized I’ve been using the hand lotion dispenser as soap for the last six months at work. How I have not yet gotten SARS or something is beyond me.

Have I talked about my new department much? I don’t think I have, besides giving random updates on how it smells that day. Today, by the way, it’s back to cookies, but I think that’s because I’m eating some at my desk.

I’ve been in this department for quite a while, but I’m still undeniably the “new kid.” I probably still will be even if I end up running the place. It’s a really small department with only about 5 of us, which is kinda cool, but kinda weird. It’s a totally different vibe from my last place. For starters, you guys all know me, I’m all about the social contacts at work. And here’s something I can’t understand: as long as I’ve been in this department, I have yet to go to lunch with one of my co-workers! I don’t know what they do for lunch. I think they go and sit in their cars and eat or something. All I know is, none of them are very social. There’s one girl who sits right near me who kinda looks like me, only older. At first I thought she was cool and invited her out to the happy hours I’d go to with work friends (who were clearly not in this department) but she’d never come. Now I’ve decided she doesn’t look like me and I’ve stopped the outreach program.

I’d go into more detail about my four co-workers here, but I’m kinda scared someone at work is reading this and is penning an email to HR as we speak. So I’ll just sum up the more interesting ones. There’s this one girl who recently lost 100 pounds and that’s basically all I know about her. Once, we all went to a meeting that included lunch. (OK so I guess technically we’ve been to lunch together, but it was required) Now god knows I love a free meal and if my parents taught me anything it’s how to be cheap. So when there’s free food to be had, I will eat like I’m going into hibernation. I think I had two sandwiches, two helpings of salad, four bags of chips, two sodas, and the entire plate of cafeteria brownies. Hey, no one else was eating them! When I was mid-bite on my tenth brownie, my Jenny Craig co-worker started glaring at me from across the table and finally said “Do you work out?” I looked at her over the top of the Dr. Pepper I was downing. “What?” I said.

“You eat so much, how do you stay so skinny?” Suddenly the whole room went quiet and now instead of learning about accounting for derivative transactions, my dietary habits were suddenly the topic of discussion. “Yeah!” someone else yelled from the other end of the room, “How come you’re skinny!” I thought I was going to be attacked by a fat mob. So I started lying. “Um, yeah.. I work out.” “How often?” I was clearly digging myself in a hole, and if I didn’t watch out, I would quickly have a gym buddy. The truth is I don’t work out anymore. And I certainly don’t consider myself skinny. Now before this blog goes spiraling out of control talking about body image and societal pressures on girls, lets stop right here. But to sum up the story, this woman has since always had a little bit of attitude with me. Now if I’m not jogging back from lunch after having a burger, I feel guilty.

OK, I’d better post this kid so that I’m not slacking on posts. I notice some people check my blog pretty often, and I wouldn’t want to let them down! I still have to write about this other girl I work with who I initially thought was a man. It turns out this is just her day job. She also plays on a women’s professional football team. That’s a blog in itself so I’ll save that one for later.

Countdown to 20/20

2005-09-12T14:32:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I’m getting my eyes lasered. I’m not at all scared, I’m totally excited. Well, to be clear, I’m actually only getting one eye lasered. I apparently have obnoxiously large pupils which require me to get this totally different, non-instant-gratification eye surgery where it takes a while to get good vision, so I can only get one eye at a time done. It also has the added benefit of making me self conscious for the rest of my life about the size of my pupils.

I’m taking two days off work to recover. I don’t know how you actually “recover” from having your eye poked at, but I’m glad to have to time off to catch up on my sitting around and eating.
I made sure to request the time off long ago, but in this department, taking time off is like bringing the plague to work, so I had to keep reminding people. It was like “Good morning Kathy. I’m taking Thursday and Friday off.” Then, “How was your weekend, John? Remember I’m taking two days off.” I hope they get the hint, but inevitably on Thursday at around 10 I’ll get some panicked phone call at home (because I was forced to give out my home number for such emergencies) and it’ll be someone from my department, freaking out and asking how to do my job. Luckily I will probably be sound asleep with one eye recovering from being poked around with a laser.

Sidenote: Why is it that everyone tells me I’ll sleep a lot after this eye surgery? Jesus, how out of shape are these patients that sitting in a chair for 2 minutes and staring at a light wears you out? What kind of excuse is that? “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go lie down, I’m just beat. Today I had my eye touched for about a minute. Yeah I know, I can’t believe I’ve been standing unassisted for this long either.”

The other day I was in a meeting with my boss and I mentioned at the end “Don’t forget, I’m going to be gone Thursday and Friday to get my eyes lasered.” And suddenly this strikes up a conversation. “Oh yeah, I forgot about that. So do you think it’s really worth the expense to get your eyes lasered?” “Yeah,” I said, “Think about how much you spend on contacts and contact related stuff and all the time you spend with them over a lifetime!” And my boss goes, “Well, I don’t wear contacts. So how much do you think you spend in a year?” And I’m like “I dunno, maybe $300.” He then whips out his financial calculator. “OK say you’d spend $300 for another 50 years of good eye sight. Now let’s assume an interest rate of 6%....” Oh god, how much of an accounting nerd do I work for? “OK, so let’s discount those cash flows back. OK so we get a net present value of around $5000. And you say this costs about $4500?” I nod, begrudgingly. “Well then according to basic finance and all economic indictors, you can’t not do it!”

I left his office mystified that that just happened, that a financial calculator was just involved in the decision over my two day vacation. I’ve got to get out of here.

Boozing with the Bankers

2005-09-09T14:51:00.000-07:00

In an effort to make this next post not make all my readers think I don’t actually do any work, I’d like to premise this post with the fact that this month has been unusually fun at work. I don’t usually go on regattas and spend company time gambling at the races. OK, now on to the story.

A few weeks ago (it’s taken me that long to recover and finally write about it) some bankers took my boss and me out to the horse races for the day. If you must know why, I’m not going to tell you, but basically, we’re this bank’s client. Let’s just call this bank Smells Fargo. OK just kidding. But anyway, I was excited to be invited out with my boss to schmooze with the bankers for no other reason then to celebrate our companies flowering relationship with a lot of alcohol.

My boss prefaced our trip in a meeting I had with him about it by saying “Now these bankers like to party. So they’re probably going to want to get you drunk, just to warn you.” Hmm… I don’t think I’ll be a tough sell. But go on. Apparently it was going to be an afternoon of drinking and gambling with strangers. Sounds like a good Thursday.

So we head off in my bosses van, which he drives like a mad man and tells me some of his harrowing stories of the road as we barrel through freeway traffic at 90 miles an hour. I remember now from our boating trip when he drove our whole department to the dock that everyone else lunged for the back seat when we all got in his van and I wasn’t sure why. Now I know.

We screeched up to the gates of the races to greet the bankers. Now, when I think of “bankers” I think of these well-groomed, striped-shirt-wearing, schmoozy, double-tall-decaf-latte kind of guys with business cards in the breast pocket and cell phone to their ear. The guys we I met were like early 30’s, wearing flip flops and were unshaven and I think I heard one burp when he shook my hand. They apparently had just gotten off the train and looked a little embarrassed that we hadn’t gotten to memo about the “casual dress.” Actually, we had, but I hadn’t realized that board shorts were still casual.

They invited us up to a restaurant overlooking the paddock where they parade the horses around. (I’d like to mention at this point that I don’t think I ever actually saw a horse that day. Only blurry, margarita hazed shapes of horses.) We went to order drinks and there was an uncomfortable silence. I looked around coyly, wondering if it we were ordering alcohol. Then one of the bankers kicks off his flip flops and said “By the way, if anyone orders anything non-alcoholic they’re paying for it themselves!” So, OK on the alcohol then! Sounds good, you don’t have to tell me twice. I would like one large souvenir plastic cup racetrack margarita please!

Now, I’ve been to the races before and often had to save up my pennies for a good week to be able to enjoy one giant souvenir margarita. They are so crazy expensive I couldn’t even bring the giant souvenir cup home with me for fear of having anxiety attacks about my bank account balance every time I looked at it. But through the course of this afternoon, the bankers, my boss, and I must have consumed about 50 of them, a good thousand bucks worth of alcohol. Before I knew it, I was standing in a sea of discarded souvenir cups. Clearly these guys were not into the novelty of keeping the cups. (Well, for starters, we would have had to bring an extra car just to take them all home!)

So this outing was highly alcoholic and I couldn’t help it because I never was without a drink in my hand and it was never more than half empty. Various bankers would just appear and replace the drink from my hand while I was talking to someone, without me even noticing. Now, before you start judging, I didn’t get drunk. We were there a good 5 hours, and besides all the drinking, there also were plenty of racetrack foods to partake in. I fleetingly mentioned how I like kettle corn, and within minutes, one of the bankers arrives with armfuls of kettle corn. I ate about a handful.

These bankers were crazy. They kept referring to me as their “client” which, given the large quantity of alcohol and the awkwardly flirty business rapport, could connote a very dirty idea.

In the last race, all the bankers and my boss chipped in about $50 each to go in on this crazy ass ticket that they hoped would win them millions. One of the savvy betting bankers made the bet, and it was some crazy, complicated, sure-fire loser bet and I seem to recall it being that in Race 4 horse #5 had to come in carrying horse #9 on its back in order to win. Inevitably following Race 4 was an awkward moment when savvy betting banker wadded up the now worthless $500 ticket and threw a few souvenir margarita cups around in anger. Bankers have tempers I guess.

We finally left the races, with my boss driving pretty much up the shoulder of the freeway the whole way, and I got home only to be called by some of the bankers. Apparently they were continuing the partying and had called me from the drinking car on the train (or what they single-handedly turned into the drinking car) and wanted to meet up in downtown. I partook. Stories will follow.

Now you may be wondering, was there any business purpose to this event? Well, yes. I decided I want to go into banking.

A Tough Day in the Office - On a Catamaran

2005-08-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

Question of the day: How do you eat a lamb chop without a knife and fork while on the deck of a boat talking to your company’s Vice President?

This was one of the corporate etiquette lessons I was forced to learn the hard way yesterday. Guess what I did? I went on a catamaran cruise in the harbor for the whole afternoon with some fancy pants company big wigs! It was a Treasury department outing that our VP had for us. It was basically like ten directors, the VP, and me. Well, a few more low rankers like me from my department were there. Every now and then the company throws down a few grand under the pretense of a “team building event” for us all to gather together, get off work, and get wasted on a boat.

Little did I realize taking a relaxing boat trip in the afternoon meant that the morning had to be spent running around the office trying to get a full day of work into four hours. It was madness. We ran into each other, papers would go flying, emails were being sent like mad and fingers were flying over keyboards… I hardly even noticed the cookie smell this morning. What happened to this being a non-stressful event? At about 11:30 my four co-workers and I realized everyone else had left and that the boat was scheduled to depart in like 15 minutes. And we were all still standing in the hall outside my boss’s office. Crap! A sign was quickly made by my mom co-worker (who has major mom tendencies and I have to draw the line at letting her help me blow my nose) to put outside our department that said we were out for the day. (I wanted to include a line that said “Haha! Suckers! Look for us out your window sailing around the harbor!” but it didn’t go over well…) Mom co-worker even included our boss’s cell phone number on the sign for “emergencies”. I’m sorry, in what kind of emergency would someone actually have the guts to call our boss for? And if someone did call, would we pull over the boat for him? Would he take a kayak back to shore if something happened? I can safely say no one on that boat was going anywhere work related once we were aboard. We could have seen our whole building blow up in the distance and we would have laughed heartily and asked the VP to pass the crab legs.

So we screech up to the curb of the dock in my boss’s mini van and all run for the boat for some relaxation. Oh wait, am I supposed to breathe now? OK, finally, deep breath. Work is done.

We’re greeted at the dock by an oddly international cabin crew and are given an overview of the boat, including an orange rope at the front of the boat that we weren’t supposed to cross, which I spent the rest of the trip standing in front of.

The boat was a catamaran that held 30 people. There was only about half that, so they made up for by filling the boat with food and beer. Mom co-worker immediately pulled out her camera and started taking pictures. This went on for the full four hour trip. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw her face the whole time because there was always a camera in front of it. She took pictures of birds, of other boats, of the cabin crew, of the sky, of the ground when she tripped (it wasn’t me), and occasionally the odd photo of me with my hair blowing in front of my face that will inevitably end up on the company bulletin board.

Lunch was served mid-trip and we all sat eating fancy food while listening to Bob Marley play over the boat’s fancy speakers. The best part was that they served a salad while we were at sea. If you’ve never been on a boat before (philistine!), it gets incredibly windy out on deck. Girls hairdos are whipped around by the wind so much you rarely see faces, you just see hair. So props to whatever strange crewmember decided to serve loose leaf salad. I found myself during this course of the meal sitting on a chair on the deck next to the VP. I luckily had missed the salad course and had gone straight for the lamp chops. Thus enters my lamp-chop-eating dilemma. But little did I realize the VP was having his own personal struggle with his salad. I began eating my lamp chop using my hands and trying not to look like a cave man. Then I noticed that every time the VP looked away from his salad plate, a stream of lettuce would blow off it and end up all over his Ralph Lauren sweater. Or it would end up flying over the edge completely and would be floating in the ocean. This went on for quiet some time until the whole deck was basically covered with lettuce. But no one’s going to say anything, since it was VP lettuce. It’s like the pink elephant in the room that you can’t mention because, well, it’s the VP! So we just peeled lettuce leaves off our shoes politely for a few hours. I don’t think he actually ate any of the salad, but eventually looked down at his plate and assumed he was done.

We were supposed to do some kind of team building events. One game was that we would have to write down three interesting facts about ourselves and put them in a hat and someone would read them and everyone would guess who it was. You were supposed to put things like “I have six toes on my left foot.” Or “I had two helpings of dessert today.” But most people put lame things like “I’ve never been out of the country.” Or “My favorite food is pudding.”
I thought I could have fun with this and considered writing “I put a bomb on this boat.” Or “I don’t really work with you guys.” Just to freak everyone out. Then I could act all appalled, because I’m good at that, and I could be like “Who in the world would put such a thing? Mine was the one about how I once had a gerbil named Winkles!”

The VP came back around to talk to me after the meal and games were over and we had all happily moved onto the beer course. He’d apparently heard I just bought a place in downtown and was intrigued. He asked what it’s like living in downtown and I said it was great and that I could walk everywhere. He looked a little confused. He was like “Yeah I guess there are a lot of restaurants in downtown. Is that where you go, out to restaurants?” I suppose I could have admitted what I really do in downtown. I, in fact, have hardly ever eaten at one of the restaurants in downtown. I could have told the VP about how many nights I’ve been drunk and disorderly in downtown, or which bar has the stiffest long island, or where you should go if you don’t want to pay a cover after 10, or how short of a skirt you need to wear to get into places free. But I chose to just nod along. “Yeah, I mostly go to restaurants.”

The bad CD’s eventually ran out and so did the beer. Around four o’clock the boat finally drifted back into the harbor and we all got off, decidedly pinker then when we got on. As I got off the boat and watched the VP drive off in his limo, I realized this had been the most muted and relaxed work event I’d been to. There was no hard liquor, no hook-ups, no drunken scenes. No one ended up throwing up, although I came close – note to self: never eat fifteen proscuitto wrapped shrimp skewers in a row while the boat is making a 180 degree turn in choppy waters. I had definitely now met the “real” work people, not just the young, crazy ones that I usually hang out with. This was what corporate life was supposed to be like: classy and well-catered. I could get used to this. Now, which bar did my friends they would be at for happy hour again?

Random Thoughts of the Day

2005-07-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

A thought crossed my mind today as I got bored at work and started googling people from high school: I can’t remember many people’s names from high school. And apparently nothing much happened to the ones I remember.

I think I might have mono. Last Sunday I slept for 18 hours. Then this past weekend I was sleeping in until times of the day that most people are settling down for dinner. Plus my back hurts. Maybe it’s not mono as much as being sleep deprived and a hypochondriac.

Today’s floor smell-o-meter: Pepperoni and cookies. The pepperoni’s a new one and might be from the dumb ass consultant’s desk who had pizza yesterday and didn’t realize trash is only collected twice a week. Get with the program. The cookie smell is still constant and strong. I rue the day when I stop smelling it because that just means I’ve become “one of them”.

Sarah and I are planning a covert lunch with BTT tomorrow. We are taking him (captive) to our favorite deli, ghetto deli. If he orders the number 3 we are so meant to be.

My Company Twin

2005-07-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

So lately I’ve been emailing with hot intern. Is this totally wrong? He totally started it! But I did the math and I’m only like 11 months older then him. And all this time I’ve assumed I’m the only one who thinks he’s the hot intern that he is, but over $1.75 you-call-its at a bar last night, I come to find out that my partner in crime, my Sempra counterpart Sarah totally has a crush on hot intern!
OK I should back up. Dude, I think I've found my Sempra counterpart. She's just like me. She calls people dude at inopportune moments. She loves to happy hour. She adds on to my jokes and I add on to hers. She's an intern (ok well we don't have that in common, but she's still young like me). She's way into the office drama. If I find out she's allergic to cheese, I might get scared. It’s kinda freaking me out. We met last week when I ran into another intern in the bathroom around 4 o’clock on a Friday and after politely telling me I had toilet paper stuck to my shoe she asked if I wanted to come to happy hour with her and some interns. I was up for the challenge and ended up meeting my counterpart. By the way, before this starts to sound creepy, all of the interns, except for hot intern, dammit, are older then me. Most are about 25. Why they have taken so long to get their ass in gear and start a carreer, god only knows. So my counterpart (let’s stop referring to her as that so she stops sounding like a cyborg) is named Sarah. We have become fast friends which I’m sure will inevitably burn out in a few weeks after we discover that everything we dislike about ourselves also annoys us in the other person (because we’re the same person… keep up!) and so we’ll stop hanging out. But so far we’re having fun with it.
But today it all came to a head. She was at my desk and we were planning a happy hour for Friday. We’ve heard rumors there’s a rival one happening, so we’ve dubbed our mission the “war of the happy hours.” So we were talking and she looked over my shoulder at my email account and suddenly goes “Wait…” and sees an email from hot intern, who we’ll now call BTT (you’ll see why later). So she proceeds to open it and read some of our emails and gets super jealous and now thinks BTT and I have a super hot inter-office, sex in the break room affair going on. Plus she is mad he doesn’t email her. So I insist BTT and I are just friends (which we are) and we laugh it off and she leaves. But I knew it wouldn’t stop there. About an hour later I get this email forward from BTT:

Heather,

Apparently Villanova is jealous of our emails...

-----Original Message-----From: Sarah
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 2:14 PM
To: BTT
Subject: war of the happy hours

I happen to be over at Heathers desk and I notice an email correspondence between the two of you. Needless to say, I am more then a little jealous that I have been left off of your ‘cool people at the company to email’ list. So I am making the first email move here. Even more interesting was to see that you guys email about me, and your anticipation of seeing me wasted. It could happen Friday, dare to dream the dream. I don’t really even think that I am a very crazy drunk. I do really enjoy cutting a rug on the dance floor at any opportunity. I like to think I am more humorous, if that is even possible, haha. (I know I am the only one that ever laughs at my jokes anyway)… Bill is calling me to duty now. Hasta manana.

Ciao

Sarah
---

I thought that was funny.. then I get this email from Sarah:

So BTT and I have begun our correspondence… so it is on now. Has it become the war of the happy hours to the war over BTT? Just so you know, we have better things to talk about then you in our emails, hehe. Now, when the gossip train was going around the track the word I heard on the caboose was that ‘it is on’ dance off style. The other word I heard on the track was that happy hour is at Sevilla, that is for all the I-Force team members. Tomorrow is going to be a blast. A blast and a half, to be exact.
----

Here we go. So I countered with:

Well, just so you know BTT already emailed me to say you were jealous of our emailing. So bring it.
Are you trying to tell me that I'm not an I Force member? Am I uninvited to the happy hour I co-chaired just because of my correspondence with him?
----

And she responds:

I believe that BTT has figured out that he is in the middle of this love triangle, and he is playing both sides. And I was just now laughing at the thought of you ‘bringing it’ and you can consider it brought, by me, tomorrow. Place: Sevilla. Time: happy hour (although you won’t be happy for long).

P.S. The BTT is a secret code name I devised so no one will know who we are speaking of, and the two tt’s are the end of his last name
P.P.S. I can’t believe BTT told you that I was jealous
----

Just to finish off this shoving match, I responded:

Our dance-off will leave the britney/justin post-break up tabloid dance-off in the dust, my friend. And don't you worry, I most assuredly will be happy!
I like the BTT name.. It reminds me of JTT as in jonathan taylor thomas, which is about the level of school-girl, home improvement-era crush we both have on BTT.
----

We’ll see where this goes. I’ll keep you posted.

Come on get happy (hour)

2005-06-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

It’s 5 o’clock. We all work in cubicles. It’s Friday. It’s time to get happy. That’s the general thought process that occurs on certain Fridays when a handful of burned out accountant and accounting associates, (who end up carrying our drinks around for us because they don’t have accounting degrees) all decide to go tear up downtown at a good old fashion happy hour. The way god intended it. Our happy hours can get pretty rowdy. Usually they whittle down to about four or five key players, one of whom is most obviously me (otherwise there really wouldn’t be blog material if it was like “we all had one beer, then I caught a cab. It was fun.”) We have a pretty interesting group of young people who all manage to forget that we all work together and will see each other on Monday. At our happy hours there have been: (in no particular order) physical wounds, break ups, hook ups, promotions, demotions, yelling at ones boss, name calling and being thrown out of a bar. I guess I should clarify that our happy hours really only start as happy hours. By about 8 o’clock we’re out for the night, and that’s where the trouble happens. So for about two or three hours, we’re you’re typical corporate office workers out for a drink, sipping on Cosmopolitans and discussing what a damn shame it is that George in payroll hasn’t been promoted and how nice the new carpet is on the 12th floor. But come 8 o’clock the “marrieds” and “oldies” have gone home to their spouses and the rest of us are off and running. Of course occasionally a “married” or “oldie” slips into the group, and the next thing you know your 50 year old supervisor is introducing you to a new shot called a “snow shoe”, the contents of which could probably remove paint from a car.

I was particularly excited this summer when a new intern, we’ll call him hot intern, emailed me a website link to every happy hour that goes on in the city, broken down by drink specials and cross referenced by proximity to work and range of appetizers. I was thrilled to have some new blood injected into our night life. Did I mention that this intern is hot? But the interns have the fatal flaw of always wanting to hang out at college spots. So last week we gave into them and went to the diviest club in town, where it just so happens one of our super serious, corporate interns works! She’s a server on weekends and a tax intern during the day. (Sounds like a super hero if I ever heard of one.) It’s so funny to run into her at the club. One minute you’re doing tequila shots, the next minute the girl who works in corporate taxation is asking for your drink order! Then there are the even more awkward incidents when you email her at work for a tax spreadsheet and she asks if you’d like to open a tab.

She makes this huge transformation after work to become a server at this club. The girl even wears a leather choker and hot pants. (Not work appropriate attire.. or at least our work.) I’m trying to decide which career path she’s actually pursuing. At work she’s all business, busting out the power suits and pumps, but at the club she’s wearing a shirt that says “Your boyfriend says hi.” But we’re not one to judge, especially when she gets us in free and gives us an hour of free drinks.

OK I could go into way more detail about our crazy times at bars and which ones we’re not allowed back to. Suffice it to say that at the last happy hour, one of my friends left with a cut on her arm and shoes that weren’t hers and a handsy co-worker of mine unhooked my bra on the dance floor. Please tell me my parents don’t read this. Or my boss for that matter.

Adventures on a New Floor

2005-06-06T16:03:00.000-07:00

My new floor smells like cookies. It permeates the whole floor and is constant. The cookie smell is undeniable, but none of the people who work here notice it. I wonder how long it will be until I, like all the other hapless souls on this floor, suddenly stop smelling it and then someone new is like “does someone have cookies?” and I’ll be like “Hmm... no I don’t smell anything.” But for now it feels like a Girl Scout is standing behind me. Mmm, now I want a Girl Scout cookie.

OK hold on, I’d better back up here. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m in a new department as of last week. It’s pretty exciting. It’s a totally new job with totally new people on a totally new, cookie scented floor! So you know what that means… all new people to make fun of! And let me tell you, this floor is ripe with blog material.

The first day I moved down here from my happenin, young, well-lit floor I was pretty bummed to find a dark, quiet, messy cubicle to greet me. I couldn’t bring anything cool with me, so I’m stuck with this stone aged computer that has four thousand post-its stuck around the yellowed monitor, which I’m convinced are holding the thing together. It’s the kind of computer you scoot past in the computer labs at school, the kind you might see in a museum and go “Damn! People used those?” OK so maybe I’m exaggerating. But the keyboard has a distinct layer of grime that has only been worn away on the space bar and is sure to contain some kind of hazardous bacteria. But I’m slowly getting settled and bringing my own, bouncy, full-of-light personality to this desk space. I put some photos up, as well as my flowery calendar. I got some office accessories and now there’s a place to put paperclips, instead of showering them all over the desk, which is how the previous occupant apparently stored them.

OK there’s plenty more news about my new job and floor and department and boss, but I just realized it’s getting late. I actually got to the office at 7 today, per my new boss’ request, apparently so that I could warm my office chair an hour earlier, greet a whole new set of homeless people on the walk in, and answer the phone call of my boss at 7:45 who said “Oh, were we supposed to meet at 7?” So since I got here so damn early, I’m leaving a little early too. But tune in next time for another exciting post about Heather’s adventures in her new position. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an uncanny desire to go home and make some cookies.

Mr. President

2005-04-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

The other day I rolled into work at my usual 8:15ish time, scooted past the bosses office, turned on my computer, and promptly went to pick up my friend from her desk to go down to breakfast. I feel like I’m living in a dorm again. Only this time pajamas in the cafeteria is not acceptable.

On the way to the elevator, we start telling each other about our weekends, like always. Keep in mind this is my best work friend, and we know everything there is to know about each other. She knows all my family members names, my whole life story, when I lost my first tooth, what I want to be when I grow up, blah blah blah. If she were a guy, we’d be married by now. So she knows like everything about me. Consequently, I know her full name and approximate age. I stopped listening to her after that. Listening isn’t really my thing. Talking about myself, however, is my forte.

Anyway, I started telling some story about my crazy weekend when one of the eight elevators arrived to take us to breakfast. The doors open and we walk over, and I continue my story, using phrases like “I was so wasted.” And “I can’t even remember driving home.” When we are greeted in the elevator by a short little white haired man. “Hello” he says. “Hi” we say back, in a polite way, but all the while giving this guy, who could easily double as Santa Claus, the once over to see why he’s being so friendly to strangers at eight thirty in the morning. So I continue on with my story, and started listing off the shots I took, when I realize my work friend has gone very quiet. I figured she doesn’t like to talk when a third person is listening so I taper off. Hmm.. she looks a little nervous now and is just staring straight ahead. Then I realize that the guy in the elevator behind me seems really familiar.

I glance at him again. He was just some little guy wearing khaki’s and a polo shirt and had his security badge stuffed in his shirt pocket. Is he that guy who’s always behind me in line for the omelet bar who stares at my ass? Oh no, wait, is he the guy who brought the catering cart to the conference room when we had sad-girl’s birthday party? (who incidentally also stared at my ass) Hm.. I can’t quite place him.

When we got to the cafeteria floor, we got off the elevator without the little man. My friend was still frozen in fear and when the doors closed behind us, I was like “who was that?” She turned to me, totally shocked and said “That was the President of the company! The CEO!”

OH MAN! My one moment to be totally cool and professional in front of an incredibly powerful man and I was telling a story about taking tequila shots! I realized where I’d seen that guy before – on CNN!!

Then I started to doubt it. I was like, “Come on.. he was dressed all casually! And he a security badge just like a common mail boy.” After telling this story to everyone in the office, they all replied the same thing: “Well, what do you expect him to wear? A tux? And of course he has a security badge.. how else would he get in the elevator?” I don’t know, shouldn’t he have his own, diamond encrusted elevator that goes straight from his office to his car? And possible also lifts out of the building and takes him to Wall Street if necessary, like Willy Wonka’s? And I would at least expect his security badge to be gold-plated or something.

As a side note, I quickly became the floor celebrity after having brushed shoulders with greatness. Everyone wanted to hear the story. I sent out a mass email saying ‘Come one, come all and gather ‘round. I shall tell you the tale of the day Heather and the CEO’s fates collided… 1 PM at Heather’s cube. Bring a snack.”

At least I can feel special that he said hi to me. And that I breathed the same air as him. I have to admit, if I had figured out who he was, I don’t think I would have known what to say. What would I have done, sparked up a conversation about the weather? The man probably made more money in the time it took to take that awkward elevator ride then I’ll probably make in my lifetime.

Hmm.. or maybe not. Now that I have an “in” with the CEO, maybe I’ll be climbing to the top a whole lot faster. I’ll always have that tequila shot story to break the ice with him next time I see him.

Cubicle Wars - Round Two

2005-03-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

My old boss came to my cube the other day after it was decided that I would be moving back to that department next week. This time they’re trying to challenge me again, I think mostly because it’s coming around to the time when I’m supposed to rotate departments, and I don’t think they want me telling the possible next person for my job that all I did was write blog entries and walk to the water cooler and back for 8 months.

So my boss came to my cube with the best intentions, and sat down with a large notepad and said, with her pen poised, “So tell me what it was you were doing specifically last time you were in our department.” Well, you are going to need a lot smaller of a notepad then that. In fact, here’s a post-it. No wait, half a post it. With the words “looked for things to do” on it. There. That was my whole job.

No, but actually, it was kind of embarrassing. I couldn’t for the life of me recall one tangible thing I did. I was like “Um… I did.. that one thing… with the…thing.” When I looked up at her, I expected there to be a disgusted look, like “why are you here?” but instead, she had a sort of understanding look, as though she’d let me down! Well, that’s nice to know.

Now, to clear things up, I hope all my readers out there know that I exaggerate everything in this blog. Everything. Nothing is actually true here. I don’t even work. In fact, I don’t even exist. This is all made up. OK? This disclaimer is also here because of a recent CNN article I read titled “Getting Fired for Blogs.” So let’s try to keep some perspective here, people.
OK but really, I actually am busy and important, it’s just there were definitely times a few months ago, to which my boss was referring, that I was lost in mix. You’ll find this time to be heavily populated by blog entries.

There is also a cubicle here on our floor that I refer to as Siberia cube. It’s generally regarded as the cube where careers go to die. It’s about a mile away from the rest of the department and is apparently on loan to us from another department. How exactly a department loans us a cubicle I will never know. It’s not like a roll of tape or some staples, this is actual, physical workspace smack in the middle of their department.

The word on the street, and when I say street I mean the little hallways here in the office that the cubicles form, is that I was going to be shipped off to Siberia cube! That’s right, have your boarding cards ready, this is a one-way train to Career-endersville.

The reason I say this about the cube is because it’s so far away, people tend to forget you’re alive. After a few days, they forget to invite you to lunch. After a few weeks, they forget to invite you to staff meetings. After a few months, they forget to give you paychecks and you don’t get an invited to the company Christmas party.

Plus, the other department, that apparently is so together you can take a cubicle out on loan from them like a library book, is the quietest department I’ve ever heard. You walk through our department and you can hear laughing, crying, screaming, loud phone conversations, babies crying…. But in their department, the clicking of the mouse is considered noisy. One woman got send to Siberia cube from our group and literally within hours of her move, they asked her to move back because she talked on the phone too loud.

So once I got word that Siberia cube might me my next destination, I spent a week trying to make myself be quiet. I whispered on the phone, I typed super slow to keep the tapping quiet, and I kept my breathing to a minimum. But don’t worry my friends, I’ve dodged that bullet for now and it looks like I’m staying put! See, I have this “in” in my other department. I know someone in a high place who, when I make puppy dog eyes at them, I can get to ask our boss for things for me. I’m hoping I can also get them to do my work when I move over there and possibly sign their vacation time over to me.

So that’s the latest with me. Again, remember, none of this is true and I do not exist. Are we clear?

The Cursed Apartment Strikes Again

2005-02-25T10:10:00.000-08:00

On Monday my apartment had another flood. I had to call maintenance because an inch of water appeared on my bathroom floor, and before I knew it a three foot hole was being jack hammered in my floor.

I’ve just come to expect flooding in my apartment now. If I wake up tomorrow and I was floating in the living room, I would probably hit the snooze button and go back to bed. But at least now people are starting to believe me that my apartment is cursed. Even the mean leasing office manager has suddenly turned from bitchy ice queen, we-have-no-legal-responsibility to Suzie shower-me-with-cash-and-prizes. I got this concerned call at work from her apologizing for my apartment being cursed, to which I responded, “No big deal, just don’t anger the demon any more.” She then gave me five days rent, the money in damages I’d claimed from the last apartment disaster, and later the permission to book my own hotel room for the night paid for by Cursed Apartment Management.

When I came back to my apartment the next day, I stood outside the door a minute before I went in and half expected my dining table to me stacked on top of my couch and my bed to be propped up against the wall, like it had been the day before and the office manager said “You don’t sleep like that?” when I complained about it. But instead there was brand spankin new carpet and all my furniture was neatly placed back where it was! All the things I’d had on floor were put in boxed and bags in my living room. I’m thinking of just leaving it all that way and just moving out, since everything’s already packed for me.

But now I have this awesome new fluffy carpet which I laid on for a while and ate dinner off of and very nearly slept on. So now I feel like I’m in a new house or something and have made a point to walk around every square inch of it so my foot prints will be the first ones it ever knows. However, I did find that there’s still a cemented hole in my bathroom, but I hardly bat an eye at this point and just straddle it while I’m brushing my teeth.

But the best part about this whole experience was the hotel room I got for one night. (Don’t ask me how I’ve managed to stay so positive about all of this, I think I’m maxed out my use of the words “fucking flood” and therefore now must revert to just accepting it.) But after work on Tuesday when I saw the state of my apartment, I stormed over to the leasing office, prepared to whirl in in my business coat and bust out my best bitchy lines, only to find that they were more then happy to pay for a hotel room for me. The manager on the phone said “Even if it’s like $200 just get it.” OK, thanks for that.. Can you please give me the number to the nearest five-star hotel with room-service and over-priced valet parking? Thank you..

But actually I was left to my own volition as far as finding a hotel. So after discovering that there aren’t many five-star hotels in downtown near my work and that the Downtown Westgate only charges $12.50 for a bottle of water from the mini bar, I finally found the Westin Hotel, which looked adequately fancy on its website and assured me that I would be completely gouged by the mini bar prices. Excellent.

After dropping off my dusty civic at the $25 valet, (“You can just move the Starburst wrappers off the seat, and I swear, that sticky orange stuff on the steering wheel is not from me.”) I checked into my room. Damn, was this the coolest hotel room ever! The bed was the size of my entire apartment back home. Everything was so pretty I wanted to move in. I considered calling the rental office, in between the third and fourth courses of my room service meal, and telling them that if my apartment was still going to need work, that I would be ok with staying another night or two. It would be a big inconvenience, but I could work it out. Hey wait, did they forget the chocolate covered strawberries!?

I took a shower soon after I got there, which became the first of perhaps three showers in a four hour period, because it was so cool! It had like four shower heads pointed in different directions and heated floors. And instead of my apartments sputtery shower and luke-warm temperature, this one was hot, pressured and didn’t give you the sinking feeling that you were showering in your upstairs neighbor’s toilet water.

I got take out and proceeded to eat it while sitting cross-legged on the white linen bed sheets of my enormous bed and watching reruns of the X Files on my flat screen TV. But don’t worry, I used the white, goose-down, posturpedic pillow as a table… I’m not tacky enough to eat straight off the sheets! Later I dropped a chocolate somewhere in the sheets and shrugged it off, happy that for once someone else will be scrubbing the chocolate stains out of sheets instead of me.
A few more showers later, I realized I couldn’t just stay up all night staring at my nice hotel room, so I went to bed. I was worried I’d be lost in the enormity of it, since I took up about one-sixteenth of it.

I also discovered that my valet deal included “in and out privileges”, which I fully intended to take advantage of. So when I went to get dinner, I turned in my valet ticket, made them bring the car up, then put my umbrella in it, and gave the keys back. It was awesome. I did this a few more times just for sport. But then the next morning, when I actually needed my security badge from my car to get to work, I think they caught on and the valet kid took forever.
After work I had to go get my car for the last time from the valet (I think it’d been spit on) and then the dream was over.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m back to my hum-drum life in my lame apartment and I need to go take a tepid shower. And unless I concentrate, I could very well end up falling in the hole next to the toilet.

Someday we’ll be together again, Westin Room 1217. Someday.

Cubicle Wars - Round One

2005-01-27T16:57:00.000-08:00

Office cubicles are perhaps the most depressing thing about corporate America. In actual fact, I have a bigger desk then I ever had in my life, but never before in my life have I had furry walls that you can put push pins in. It’s also weird to think that this little 50 square feet of space is like my private living quarters in the building. If I had a big enough sheet, I just might bring it in and try to create a doorway by pinning it up. But equally weird is that mere feet from you is another little private, cubicle apartment that someone else lives in for 8 hours a day. You know you can hear each others phone calls, but you pretend you can’t. You know you can hear them talking to themselves while they work, but you pretend you can’t. You know you can hear them banging their head against the desk near the end of the day, but you pretend you can’t. Mostly because you’re too busy banging your own head against the desk.

I have an interesting cubicle neighbor, who I used to just refer to as “girl with a limp”, but has now become “ghetto girl with a limp” after my work friend, who is much older and wiser and more savvy with our department gossip, told me she is very ghetto. Last week, I overhead ghetto girl on the phone, and this is the side I heard:

"Hello? …No! … No way…. Girl, are you for real? …. Well where’s he gonna go then? … No, not there, Shaniqua would never let him do that! …. Do you think? …. No, girl, no way!”

I was sitting on the other side of the furry wall with my fingers frozen over the keyboard, engrossed in her end of the conversation. I was whispering to myself “What’d he do? Where can’t he go? Why do I care?” But you can’t help but care, and listen. She’s also having some sort of dispute with some insurance company, I’m assuming it’s a ghetto one. She doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, because every time the boss who sits behind us steps away, she’s on the phone to some insurance guy, reciting her policy number to him, which I have now heard so many times that I’ve memorized it and it floats through my dreams when I’m asleep.

Hmm.. now that I think of it, I know a lot of personal information about her. I could totally steal her identity! But what would I want with a limpy, ghetto identity? Hmm… Maybe I’ll file that little thought away, in the folder titled “Things That May Come In Useful When You’re In the FBI”. Done.

It’s also strange to me that we all pretend we aren’t in close proximity to each other. I’ve worked a lot lately with this woman who’s desk is like the mirror image of mine, so there’s again just a wall between us. Sometimes she’ll come by my desk and leave some papers there. So then I’ll have to get up and walk all the way down the row and around the corner to give them back, meanwhile if there wasn’t a wall there, we would be staring into each other’s faces. I so often want to just be like “Hey! You over there… “ and then hand the thing over the top.

I’m thinking of inventing little doors for cubicles, so we can make this whole place more efficient. I will call them “Cubey Holes”. You can talk through them, hand things through them, or put your hand through them and mess up the papers on the other persons desk when they’re not there.

But back to this Patty girl who is mere inches from me. Often she will call me. CALL ME! On the phone! Our phone’s probably plug into the same jack! And she’ll be like “Hi, this is Patty.” I’m like, yeah I know, I can hear you talking without even putting the phone to my ear.. carry on.” I’m surprised she doesn’t go like “Hi, this is Patty from Corporate Accounting on the 7th floor.” Then I could be all “Oh yes, I believe I’ve spoken with you before.”

So just today she left this stack of papers on my desk, so I wanted to call her up and be like “Incoming!” and then chuck it over the top of our cubes. Hey, I would have put a paperclip on them!

It's Like A Crime Wave!

2005-01-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

I had a dream about writing my blog yesterday, so I guess that’s mean it’s due time I update this thing. When your subconscious starts pestering you, it’s time to take action. But now I realize that I haven’t updated my blog since December 7th?! That’s appalling! So much has happened since then. Christmas parties, Christmas gift exchanges, the obligatory office Christmas sweaters, the office New Years hang-overs… all sorts of fun stuff! Plus I think I have an excuse for being so busy. In the past month, the Chargers lost their chance at the super bowl and Jennifer and Brad broke up, so I have been busy grappling for a meaning to life. I’ve managed to accomplish this by continuing to not care about football and to read People magazine. Oh and plus there was some kind of wave thing in Thailand.

OK now that I’ve officially lost my football fan readers, anyone from the Thailand area, and anyone involved in humanitarian efforts, I’ll go on. (damn there goes my readership)
Today’s blog will be about the latest addition to my hum-drum corporate life – my iPod! I got one for Christmas this year, after much non-subtle hint dropping. I have named it Ike. Ike the iPod. And it now keeps me entertained for hours while I’m working away. I would consider myself to be pretty un-iPod savvy, so I took advice about how to care for little Ike whenever it was offered. One of my friends told me before I got one that the first thing I should do is get a case for it so it doesn’t get messed up. I just laughed at him and asked him what kind of a klutz he took me for. Within ten minutes of using it, I’d scratched the screen. Damn friends being right. But the only type of cases I’ve found that you can get are rubber sleeves that try to be trendy and are either neon green or have bongs printed on them. I am so not down with this. One, because I already have a bong design on my cell phone case, and two, I like Ike being white. Is that racist?

I’m also very wary of people around me in the office now. Ike is a pretty nice little piece of hardware and I’m more scared then ever about him being stolen. This is probably because of an incident a few weeks ago, which of course I will now go off on a tangent about to entertain you.

At my orientation on the first day, we were warned that personal items shouldn’t be left on your desk, no matter how long you’re gone for, because things get stolen all the time. I didn’t really listen to this part of the presentation too carefully because I’m naïve and don’t believe anyone would steal from me cause I’m cute, and also because the security officer giving us this warning said he used to be an FBI agent and I was trying to figure out how a man whose belt was hanging on for dear life was able to pass the pull-up test to get into the academy. Plus, I work in the corner of my office, so I could easily narrow down the list of suspects to girl-with-a-limp or my boss. But even so, I’m not about to take any chances. Not any more at least.

One day, when I was ready to leave for my usual stroll to the deli across the street with my office friend, I was shocked to find that my favorite sunglasses were gone! I hadn’t heeded the warnings of Johnny Security Guard at my orientation, and I’d made it a habit to leave my sunglasses right next to my computer whenever I left for the day! I was so pissed and wasted no time spreading nasty rumors around the office about how some cleaning person clearly stole my sunglasses. I turned everyone in the office to my side and they all banded with me in my plight against the cleaning crew. I even tried to get it added to the weekly staff meeting’s agenda.

Topic of Discussion 1: Year-End Close and Financial Reporting Implications.
Topic of Discussion 2: Heather’s Sunglasses Have Gone Missing.

But it didn’t go over well and we moved on to something else, which I didn’t listen to. I think it was something about deadlines.

So after spending weeks looking for a cleaning lady sporting a pair of Chanel sunglasses, I opened my filing cabinet and found my sunglasses sitting there. Now I can’t wear them anymore because people might recognize them from the wanted posters I put up around the office, which had on it a woman wearing a maid’s uniform wearing my sunglasses. After all, I don’t want to look like a fool.

OK now I’ve noticed this blog has strayed from it’s stated topic of discussion, Ike the iPod. But that’s OK because he’s been neglected while I’ve been writing this post. Oh yeah, and so has my work. So I’d better get back to one of them.

This is only a drill... now run for it!

2004-12-07T16:38:00.000-08:00

There’s always something strange going on in this office. If it’s not the lights going out, it’s a fire drill, which is what we had today. This morning, when I was immersed in my morning bagel and Snapple, a crackly voice came over the loudspeaker, which instantly made me stop chewing and think, “We have a loudspeaker?” The person started telling us that we were having a fire drill, in a strange way that made it sound like making this announcement was simply #200 on his to do list. It sounded like he was talking in between bites of a bagel (seriously, the bagels here are good) and was like “This is only a drill. (bite…chew) there has been a reported threat to the building. (chew) The building has been compromised.. but remember… (bite… chew… long pause) this is only a drill.”

So, as one does during a fake drill like this, everyone just carried on working. After a few minutes we all closed our games of Minesweeper and started collecting around people’s cubicles. “So… should we go?” So I walked over to my newly made Sempra friend’s cube, only to find that she was strapping on a reflective orange vest and grabbing a whistle! It turns out my new friend is our department’s safety monitor. In related news, I can no longer be her friend because that’s just too nerdy. I am accepting applications for a new work friend. Sole requirement: be under 30.

So now I was walking down the hall with my safety monitor friend, and the crowds parted for us on the way to the stairs. It’s amazing how much respect an orange vest gets. I told her to wear it all the time. We got to the stair well, expecting to run to freedom and have a fun, 15 minute respite in the adjacent parking lot. But when we opened the stairwell door, there was an army of people marching down it. You couldn’t even stick your foot into the flow of people. Keep in mind, this was a good 15 minutes after the drill announcement. We had to wait about ten more minutes for an opening in the stampede to even get in the stairwell! Had this been a real emergency, you would all have already paid your respects at my funeral by now and would be hitting the bar.

I should also mention that there’s a 7 months pregnant lady in our department. I call her pregnant lady, for obvious reasons. She had been asked repeatedly if she wanted to come down with us, or if she’d rather wait here and be put on a special list to ride down on a fireman’s back instead. But she insisted she was fine. So we all watched her every step of the way. Two people in front of her, two people behind, telling her “Left foot! Right foot! Turn!” When we finally got to the bottom of the stairs, we all thought we were home free, so her walking crew all took off and ran to the parking lot to laugh at the people in orange vests. Little did we know, the two steps down to the sidewalk were the real killers of this story. Pregnant lady tripped! But don’t worry folks, she’s fine.. she just fell on her knee.. granted her sunglasses flew to the other side of the street, but she stood right up and was more embarrassed than anything.

When we all finally made it to the parking lot, we were informed we’d violated about seven fire drill safely regulations. We were supposed to cross the street, and then cross back. Because in a crisis, everyone is that logical. We apologized to the nearest safety monitor and promised to make a donation to orange children everywhere. Then came the daunting task of taking roll call. At first I thought it was going to be the entire company roll call, which given the 1500 people who worked there and the staggering number of graduate degrees present, would have taken about 18 months. But then I noticed a safety monitor holding up a little paper that said “7th Floor”.. ahh, home! So we only had to take roll for our floor. Unfortunately, the most up to date emergency roll call list was from approximately 1998. So it started like “Roberta Adams? Roberta Adams?” “Um, she quit about a year and a half ago..” “Oh, ok.. Joseph Brolin… Joseph? Has anyone seen Joseph?” “No, not since he died two years ago.” It went on like this forever, until finally one of the smarter orange vests decided to tell them that our entire floor was out sick and forget it.

Another peril of the drill was the our ingenious escape route that ended us up in a parking lot forgot to take into account that people might actually be parking there. So amid all the chaos was some soccer mom in a PT Cruiser honking at all of us to get through, so we’d all scatter and then reform, only to have some other person’s car come through, probably an employee who was late and was wondering why the whole company was in his way.

After about 20 minutes of standing around and discussing what we’d all actually do if this were a real drill (I would slide down the stair banister in terror, even trampling pregnant lady if necessary) we finally were given the OK by the head orange vest to go back in. So then all 1500 employees waited for about 2 elevators to get back to work.

The whole drill was brilliantly executed and it all bodes very well for a real emergency. Based on past experience, if we ever do have a real drill, I will be the one passed out in a heap in front of the filing cabinet that I will inevitably run into in my flight of terror.. and no one will ever find me because they’ll be too busy looking for Jim McOldie who’s currently retired and living on a lake in Maine with his two cats. So please, if the situation arises, please tell them to keep looking for the little girl who loved her job, and while she was willing to die for the company she loved, it just wasn’t her time. (Hey, as long as I get out alive…)

Lights Out

2004-11-23T11:09:00.000-08:00

Today at work the weirdest thing happened. (for those of you more up to date on my personal life, no, it was not the incident involving me falling down in the middle of the cafeteria at breakfast or me being asked out by the beady-eyed 30-something who runs the security desk and me promptly rejecting… ) It happened just a few hours ago. I was diligently working on.. oh who am I kidding, I was reading Eonline.com’s fascinating article about Lindsay Lohan’s recent break-up and the massive, world-wide repercussions it might have, and right when I was scrolling past the picture of her and saying to myself “I SO do not look like her!” all of the lights in the building went out. I immediately freaked out, but I seemed to be the only one. I started hopping around in my cubicle going “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!” while all I heard from my co-workers was the subtle clicking of mice and shuffling of papers.

I started to think I was missing something, which is often the case in this office. Then I noticed I had a new email, and as I opened it to see if it said the world was ending and this was why we had a power cut, I realized, “wait.. how can I be on my computer if there was a power cut?” So the email was from Joe McNobody from the maintenance department saying that some generator in Nowheresville, Mexico had happily decided it had had enough of it’s work day, and for no apparent reason had shut itself off. So the whole county had been told to conserve energy.. and being the energy company, we were the first to comply. Ironic? I’m now sitting here in the dark looking at bank accounts for electric companies. This is too weird.

And I later found we were really the only ones in the whole county who actual conserved any energy. I think all the other tall buildings down here in downtown were pointing and laughing at our dark building and the fact that we actually took there conservation warning seriously, saying things like “the ENERGY company is dark! Haha!”

So apparently all of my co-workers had read this email a few minutes earlier and were completely prepared. They acted like this happens every day, whereas I thought it was Armageddon. I can’t believe they’re actually making us work in the dark, so I’ve decided not to. If anyone says anything I’ll be like, hello? It’s dark! But now I think it’s kinda cool being in an office in the dark. Power cuts are kinda fun, and voluntary ones are even funner! The lights have now been out for two whole days! People get kinda weird in the dark though… I just overheard my old-lady co-worker break into a verse of “Strangers in the Night.”

The only annoying thing is that our company also felt that having 8 elevators was just too damned efficient and helpful, so they decided to cut that number in half to conserve more of this energy stuff. So about a thousand people end up loitering in the lobby around 7:59 every morning, waiting for the one elevator that actually seems to work to come down from the executive floor, where it is inevitably being used to deliver eggs benedict to our CEO to eat in his well-lit office.

It was getting pretty testy down there in the lobby… Our building has some underground parking, so you can go either up or down from the lobby. Often an elevator will appear that’s only going down.. and there’s a rather difficult process involving looking at the lighted arrow outside the elevator to see if this is the case. Apparently, working in the dark has made certain people in the office go completely insane, because one of these elevators appeared this morning, and about 20 of the massive crush of people waiting for an “up” elevator got into the down one! It was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while… all these seemingly intelligent people press the buttons for all their floors, and then, since no one pressed any for below the lobby, the elevator just sat there. I couldn’t help but laugh at them.. they all stood there, clutching their briefcases and staring up at the floor ticker above the door (the usual elevator stance) only the doors didn’t close and it didn’t move. So instead, the whole lobby got a nice show and a quick lesson in “who in the office gets really dumb in a crisis,” They eventually all got out one by one and went to the back of the line in shame.

The only great thing that happened because of the lights being out (besides the many watts of electivity that we probably saved, which may have kept a few poor families from freezing to death at night .. whatever) is that I got to go home early! At like 3:45 the sun started setting and my boss came by and said, “you can go home.. it’s too dark.” I was so excited! So I beat all the traffic and got home super early, which left me plenty of time to try and figure out how I could tamper with more generators and keep the lights in our office off for good.

This makes my thinking bones hurt

2004-11-16T14:20:00.000-08:00

The latest news on me and the gym: Thanks to my yoga inclined friend Alex, I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of that strange body part that my pilates instructor keeps mentioning. All this time, I thought she was saying “sit-baums”, as in a fancy name for some part of your body. It’s somewhere on your lower back and I thought it was actually quite a fancy, German-sounding name for a body part I generally use to lounge on while watching TV. But I wasn’t completely sold, so I went to my friend for some clarification.
It turns out that it’s actually called your “sit bones”, meaning the bones you sit on! I was horrified! Eww! I don’t like thinking about my bones during class! You can’t be listening to Enya and drifting off to a land of contentment and then be reminded that the only way you’re able to do this pose is thanks to the calcium deposits your sitting on! And couldn’t they have thought of a more sophisticated name to give a body part? I mean, sit bones? What grade did they have graduate from to come up with that one? You sit on it… it’s a bone.. therefore, it’s a “sit bone”? I mean, should I start calling my fingers my “pointer bones” and my feet my “stand-on bones”? And then maybe our legs could be our “walking sticks”. So from now on in pilates, I will continue to sit on my “sit baums” and imagine that some European immigrant who landed a job at the body part naming factory came up with that interesting name. That will be my silent protest. Well, silent except for this blog, which I will now post in defiance by using my pointer bone to press “publish”.

Suzie Recruiter

2004-11-11T16:07:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I had the exciting task of going back to my alma mater to be a recruiter for the next round of eager young accounting students. A fact most people are probably unaware of is that accounting students during recruiting season are completely crazy. And a year ago I was one of them. You’ve got to understand, accounting students are the super-competitive, irritating business types that you see on The Apprentice, only they’re smart and calculating too, because their accountants. Therefore, recruiting season on our campus is full of gossiping, back-stabbing, and mental breakdowns. Seriously, it’s crazy, and I’m impressed that I survived with my dignity, not to mention a job.

But this year it’s all different for me. I get to put on my fancy name badge and stand behind a table with our company’s banner and try to make my job sound as cool as possible. I suddenly have so much power and I was mentally hiring and firing people at will. Hmm.. that kid over there used to live in my dorm and definitely puked in the hall once. He’s out. And that girl there just took the last brownie, she is so done. But actually I think I’m a good recruiter. I’ve been in their shoes and I know what it’s like to be scared and not know what the heck the company does that you are supposed to want to work for. So I tried to sell our program as best I could, all the while with this kid staring back at me like a deer in the headlights, mostly thinking about the test they have in statistics tomorrow. Every now and then I would call over my friend who was recruiting with me to tell some kid I was talking to about the internship he had. Big mistake. I seemed to be the only one trying to relate to these kids. I would be like, “So tell him what it was you did when you were an intern..” and he would say something like, “I worked in SES with the Director of Commodities… mostly doing work with compliance for Sarbanes Oxley for the LES division. And that new SEC legislation really helped us with the LIBOR, you know?” OK, even I have no idea what you just said. He would totally confuse them. They would stare back at him and then blink a few times and then be like, “I can add 2 and 3. Do you do much of that?” So I tried to make our job sound as simple as possible.. I’d be like “I work in a big building and play with numbers and go ‘type, type, click, click’ and then go home. OK? Does that sound like something you want to do?” Then I would force my newly printed business card on them and send them on their way.

What really made me nervous about the whole thing was the little pep talk that our head recruiter gave us before the kids came. He was giving us tips on what to look for and suddenly I became very aware that I had these kids futures in my hands. But I was now very curious to hear what it was that this company looked for when hiring, mostly because I wanted to know why the hell they picked me. He told us that we’re looking for someone that has really good grades and job experience, but who has to be much more than book smart. He said we should look for someone with a “winning personality” and someone who’s a joy to talk to. And that’s me? Aw, shucks. I kept waiting for the part where he was like, “But, if you can’t find anyone like that, our basic policy is to hire someone who’s name rhymes with ‘weather’.”

I came back from the event feeling like I really had convinced no one that a job here was good. I only really liked two people, one of whom I couldn’t read their name on their nametag because it was stuck on their jacket in such a way that it would have made me a pervert to look at it for too long, and the other one who I remembered being called “Phillip” only to find that there was no one named Phillip there that day. So I got back to my desk the next day and resigned myself back to my job of typing and clicking, when I suddenly saw an email from one of the students I talked to! It was from a girl thanking me for talking to her about our program. Wow, that took some genuine thought and effort and really made an impression on me! This girls on her game! Too bad she used Helvetica font. I hate that. She’s out.

Kerry should have won for not dying

2004-11-05T16:57:00.000-08:00

So the elections over and Kerry lost. After crawling out from under the covers a few hours ago, I’ve realized that much of the news media has overlooked the real story of the campaigns – how did Kerry survive campaigning?!

I mean, he’s OLD! For those not in the know, he’s 61! And he’s probably lived solely off ketchup for the last 20 years. He’s not a sprightly young thing that can afford to jet-set around the country and never sleep. Not only does he have to stay awake all the time, he has to give speeches and stuff and always be on. If it were me I’d be like, “Um.. yeah, I really want to answer your question about my plan for the economy, but I’m really tired. If I just went over here in the corner for a minute and took a nap, could you ask me again later?”

I bet by the time third debate rolled around, if I were killing myself on the campaign trail like he was, I would have some nasty cold and irrevocable dark circles under my eyes, and every now and then I’d have to use my 2 minute response time to hack up a lung or two. There’s no way a normal person could have kept it together like that! Not to mention I wouldn’t look all tan and groomed like our boy Kerry. He must be so pumped full of caffeine that now that he’s lost the election, we won’t see him for a while because he’ll be deflating and coming down from a year long medicated high.

On the day before the election, Kerry flew to six different states to campaign. Six states! In ONE day! In a related story, I had trouble getting to both the grocery store and the dry cleaners.

Considering I rarely get out of my pajamas until Saturday evening, I think a run for the White House just isn’t in the cards for me. I stay in my pajamas as much as possible. I’ve been known to wear my pajamas to work under my real clothes.

Not that I really needed convincing, but I don’t think I could be a big campaigning politician. I like my sleep, I like my pajamas, and I like to pretend that my Tivo not recording Will & Grace is one of life’s real hardships.

24 Minute Fitness

2004-10-27T16:02:00.000-07:00

Last week I ventured back to the gym that I enthusiastically joined a month ago. When I say “joined”, I really mean being dragged along with a friend, signing up for membership, trying out the ellipse machine for about 10 minutes and then going home to watch TV. Thus, I have joined the gym. A big motivator, actually, is that fact that my company pays for a lot of the membership. I basically pay like $10 a month for a really good gym. So after flashing around my gym membership to my friends a few times, I realized that in order to pull off being a “gym-goer”, I actually had to start going to the gym.

There’s also a very weird culture at the gym. You really have to know you’re way around, and how to walk the walk and talk the talk. When I walk in to the gym, I feel like a person who walks into a Chinese restaurant and orders a hot dog. I just don’t fit in. Plus, the place is like a meat market. Little did I know that you don’t go to a nice gym dressed in pajama-esque clothes and with no make-up and your smelly old sneakers. No, going to the gym is very much about showing off.

There seem to be two types of people at my gym. People in the know and the rest of us. People in the know totally know what they’re doing and look very calm and collected in the gym, while the rest of us nerds walk around bonking into each other while searching for the bathroom. People in the know prance in and know exactly what to do with their little ID card to get them in the door in record time and on to the treadmill. They also seem to always be carrying a Nalgene bottle and a dish towel. I haven’t figured out what the dish towel is for yet, but you apparently must have one if you want to look like you know what you’re doing. These people also know how to work to machines easily.

I usually find a machine that looks the least like a torture device, then I stand on it (usually when I’m supposed to be sitting on it) and sort of wait. Isn’t it supposed to do something? There are all sorts of buttons and knobs, but how am I supposed to know what to do with them? I often press the button “Quick Start” because that sounds so easy. It’s deceptive, however. After pressing this button, it then wants you to enter your weight. How rude! That could be really embarrassing for some people! I mean, after every digit it makes a huge beep noise! Talk about broadcasting insecurities to the whole gym. So after that, it asks you all sorts of other questions that you never thought to consider. “What’s my peak desired heat rate?” Um, what’s a normal heart rate? Like two hundred? After answering a few of these questions, I begin to doubt my motives at the gym. Is this what normal people really think about when they embark on a workout? “Well, I’d better damn well achieve my desired heart rate or this is all for squat!”

After all this button pressing, I think I’m ready to start. So I start to pedal. Upon my first push of the pedal, all sorts of beeps and bleets start happening and the pedals stop. What the heck? Aren’t bike pedally machines meant for pedaling? Oh my gosh, IS THIS a bike pedal machine?! (I’m always afraid that I’ll be sitting on a machine the wrong way, like on a machine for abs, only with my feet up in the air because I think it’s for hamstrings) This pedaling is way too complicated and now I’ve angered the ProWorkout5000. What is going on?! I have a Master’s degree and this bike machine is getting the better of me.

Luckily, my gym has classes you can take for free (otherwise I would really never go). So I spent weeks considering which to take. “OK, aerobics… that sounds good. Oh wait, that’s on a Wednesday night at 6.. hmm. That might be a little tight.. I had plans with a box of cookies and the Daily Show. Oh, OK, instead I’m going to take “Low Impact 24 Cycle”. Whatever that is. Yeah, it looks like “Raven” is teaching that class at 7 on Tuesday. That works better. Oh, but wait. I was going to take a nap on my couch that day. So that won’t work.”
It went on like this for weeks. When I suddenly realized that my month’s membership was in days of expiring, and I had yet to go back since I signed up! I was sure as hell not about to let those corporate goons at the gym take another ten dollars out of my bank account without me going at least once more to look like a fool trying to figure out the weight machines.

So I went to take a pilates class. It was pretty fun actually. Now, I don’t mean the exercising part was fun. That was hard. I don’t consider anything fun that leaves you aching the next day in places that shouldn’t ache (like the archs of your feet and your elbows). The fun part was watching all the other nerds in the class displaying their weird gym behavior.

During this class, I concluded that some people really should not wear stretchy pants. In fact, most people should really not wear stretchy pants. One of whom is in the class with me every week and I call her chubby-girl. I know, I can hear the moans already. (I can hear Triathlon Jake right now, “Heath! Don’t call people chubby at the gym! You’re so mean!”) So call me what you want, but hear me out. Chubby-girl comes religiously ever week. She sits in the back corner and lies on her back and basically her purpose in coming is to watch the instructor describe the next move, and then decide it’s too hard. Every now and then I look back at her, when I’m struggling to do some insane move where I’m holding my right foot straight up in the air and my entire body weight is on my pinky toe, and she’s still lying on her back. I really haven’t seen her try anything, except for the stupid neck warm up that only involves you moving your head from side to side. And then at the end of every class, we’ll all start rolling up our mats to leave, and she’ll still be on her back. Then, after a few minutes (while I’m hiding behind the stack of free weights watching her and laughing to myself) she’ll reach for her bottle of water with so much huffing and puffing you think she’d just run in a marathon. After about half an hour, she’ll finally get up and leave to go home, where she will presumably recover from the intense workout for the rest of the week until the pilates class rolls around again.

I also think my pilates instructor makes up muscle groups. She often refers to the “cleegboid” muscle, and everyone nods along and gets into position. I must have missed the crucial day of class when we were told where this muscle group was and why I want to work on it.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress in the gym. (You know I can’t go anywhere without finding someone or something to make fun of.. .it’s how my mind works)

Congradulations, you're our 500th customer!!

2004-10-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

Corporatesuzie is proud to announce that her blog has reached the coveted status of having been visited 500 times! (Note blog counter at the bottom of the page) Oh my gosh, this is so exciting… Wow, this is so unexpected.. um, I’d like to thank my family, who unfortunately read this blog often and ask me too many questions about it. I’d also like to thank my company’s computer, even after the harsh words I’ve exchanged with it’s spell-checker (damn red, squiggly lines!). And I’d of course like to thank my Fortune 500 company employer, for giving me all the inane tasks that give me material for this blog and for having faith in me and for consistently praising me for doing nothing whatsoever. Also thank you to my rather odd co-workers, without whom corporatesuzie wouldn’t be so riled up.

And now on to the real heros.. thank you to all my loyal readers! Well, hopefully I do in fact have loyal readers. For all I know, that blog counter could have just reached 500 based on me loading and reloading my own blog to make sure my post is in the right place and admiring my own grasp of technology.

And as a special thanks, I’d like to thank the visitor who nudged me over the edge with their visit. According to my stat counter, at 9:14:19 PM Pacific Time on Thursday, October 21st, the following person became the 500th person to visit my blog!

dyn-160-39-221-121.dyn.columbia.edu

Hmm.. who’s that? I’ve seen this IP address a lot, and at first I thought it was my sister who’s at Columbia Law school.. but there’s another address that’s for her law school that’s different than this one. When I look at the location of this person, they appear to be from a place called Sammamish, Washington, which sounds like the sort of place you have Big Foot sightings. So, whoever you are (no really, who are you?) thanks for tipping the scales! Your prize is a lifetime subscription to the fascinating life of corporatesuzie.

After doing a little research, this is quite an achievement for a rookie blogger like me. After hitting the “next blog” button a few times, I found that no other blog (in my highly scientific sampling of 3 other blogs that actually are dorky enough to have counters) have 500 hits! That’s right.. there’s one about a girl in a wheelchair who collects turtles and she only has 109 hits… haha! What a loser! Yeeeees! I beat the girl in a wheelchair!!! Who’s up for a party?!

Big Screen Dreams

2004-10-20T16:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday on a whim I went to Best Buy and decided I was gonna bite the bullet and get a new, big TV! I've spent too many days wandering around electronic stores, wanting a new TV but terrified that I'd get ripped off. I was sure that I’d pick out some TV and as soon as I drove away with bungees holding my new big TV down, the dorky high-school sales person would start laughing to himself about how dumb I was to buy THAT one!

So I got a Philips one (name brand only.. I wasn't gonna get stuck with some unknown brand like Fluxtor or something jazzy sounding that's total crap) and so I proudly wheeled the massive box out to my car and suddenly realized as I approached my weenie Civic that there was no earthly way this gigantic TV was going to fit in my car. Imagine my face going from a pleased grin to a sad scowl in the middle of the Best Buy parking lot. OK, now that sales person really MUST be laughing as he watched me try to deal with this one. I opened my trunk and wheeled the massive box really close to my car and then just sort of stood next to. There were lots of people in the parking lot and I was hoping one would look over and see my cleverly positioned visual reference of the giant TV box, the open tiny trunk, and then me, which was meant to evoke a reaction of “THAT box? In THAT trunk? And THAT little girl? There’s no way!!! I must help her!” So I just stood there for a while, and no one came to my rescue! So I had to go back into Best Buy like someone who totally hadn’t planned their purchase and ask for some help. They paged someone named Domino to help me and I went out to stand my car and wait expectantly.

A few minutes later some thuggy looking guy in street clothes wandered over and said, “Is this your car?” I gave him my best raised eyebrow look of contempt and I was like “Um yes buddy, and kindly step away. While my car is not that exciting and can’t hold a box larger than a bread-box, it’s very cute and loyal and I love it, so kindly leave me alone.” He sort of stood there for another minute and I was about to say “OK, now shoo! Go rob a liquor store or something!” And suddenly I realized this was Domino. Oh crap. Luckily he had no hard feelings, probably because he didn’t understand what I’d said, and he tossed the TV in my car with ease like it was a crumb on his sleeve that he was flicking off.

So I proudly hopped back into my trusty steed and sped of into the sunset and quickly came to my next hurdle. About a mile from home I suddenly thought “How am I gonna get this TV into my apartment?!” I realized I have one possession with wheels that might help me out, so my next plan is the push my giant new TV into my apartment using a dinky IKEA TV stand made for the size TV that you have in your kitchen that you watch the today show on while brushing your teeth. The plan was marvelous. I wheeled the cart to my car and started to lift the TV onto it. Wow. A big TV is really heavy. After a few minutes I started to question all my hours of time spent at the gym and was beginning to wish I could call up Domino for some help. Just then, as if on cue, it started to pour with rain. OK, this is miserable. “Curse thee, Best Buy!!” I shouted, fist clenched, to the heavens. Now with renewed strength and fiery hatred for strong people, I heaved the TV onto the stand and wheeled it down the rainy path for my apartment. I was careful however, to not hit an unexpected speed bump and send the new TV flying into a heap of broken parts, to which I would have collapsed in tears and admitted defeat.

I then heaved the TV into my living room and proudly sat back to admire my brand new, wet TV. It’s beautiful. Sometimes I don’t even turn it on, I just stare at it and admire it. Maybe I’m just proud that I proved that a single, little girl can do anything if she really really wants the people’s head’s on the next episode of The Apprentice to be actual size. It’s amazing how much you can love a hunk of machinery that almost killed you.

October 19, 2004 - Rain, rain, go away... no wait, stay!

2004-10-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

It rained today... can you believe it? We went a record 182 days without rain so far this year and apparently God thought that was too damn staggering a statistic (although I doubt God would use the word damn) and so he decided to open the heavens in a torrential downpour of defiance… right when I was walking along the street en route to the bank.

I purposely set out when it wasn’t raining and braved the outdoors sans umbrella. Within moments I was drenched like a drowned rat and had to seek refuge in an eerily empty coffee shop, which I must say upon further inspection is clinging to life by the skin of it’s overpriced biscotti. The guy behind the counter seemed shocked to suddenly have this wet little girl appear in his doorway and stared at me for a good minute. I stared back at him. Crap. I’m gonna have to buy something. So I wiped the rain water from my forehead and pretended I had just sauntered in to grab a cup of coffee on my way to important, non-wet activities. (Yeah, this was totally a planned trip to my local coffee shop… oh, is it raining? Huh, well look at that, it is.) I’m sure plenty of high powered business types have wrung their hair out on his doormat. I casually walked up to counter and tried not to make eye contact and pretended I was studying the menu on the wall. Eventually I had to order something, after he had to ask me to move since I was creating a puddle.

I still had to make it back to work though, so now I was sleeting down the street with a some unknown coffee drink in my hand, trying not to slip on the metal grates and having this whole ordeal end in splattered Heather covered in gooey, unwanted coffee. I finally made it inside, to the elevator, and to my floor, upon which I wanted to stop and stand in the foyer and just yell “waaaah!” I was wet and mad. But I’m over it now.. I’ve been using the coffee station napkins as towels to mop up the little puddles I seem to leave everywhere.

Looking out the window right now, the rain is actually going sideways. Sideways! This isn’t normal. All I’m saying is if it’s still sideways-raining when it’s 5 o’clock and time for me to walk to my car, I’d rather hang out downstairs in the mailroom and share a cup of tea with Bob the mail guy and wait, rather than have rainwater squirted into my eyes and ears by this record breaking rain storm.

However, I would like to get home. Weather like this doesn’t come very often, and once I’ve cursed my way through it while walking to my car and cursed my way through it while driving in my car, I would like to curl up and enjoy it when I’m home. Weather like this can be great. Blustery weather like this can make you feel like lighting a fire and drinking hot cocoa. Plus, it gives you an excuse to use words like blustery.

Somehow, working during this kind of weather seems strange. I feel like we shouldn’t be working, it’s raining outside! I think I’m proving myself once again to be the youngest person on the floor… I keep waiting for someone to come over the loud speaker and say "Rainy day schedule!" and everyone cheers and we all start a rousing game of Heads-Up 7-Up.

Heather's Daily Digression - October 18, 2004

2004-10-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

Today I was called into the manager's office. Scary? No way. Maybe if this had happened a few months ago where at every turn I was terrified of being fired, I would have been scared. But not now. I’m settling back into my position as the “ain’t goin no where” girl. I ain’t going no where. So I went into my bosses office and put my feet up on her desk, and waited to hear what she wanted to say.

It turns out they want to move me to a new department! Actually, it’s the same department, just a different “group” and totally new work! They felt I wasn’t being challenged enough and even apologized for not teaching me enough yet! (See what I mean? I ain’t going no where..) My boss added that, since I’m in the “rotation program” for new graduates, she wants to “rotate” me. Yeah. Ok. That’s cute. But I’m not a bike wheel... I’m an accountant. But whatever, I’m moving on up! Well, kind of. This “major move” involves shifting cubicles approximately ten feet to the left.

So sadly there aren’t gonna be any long goodbyes and emphatic packing of frames into cardboard boxes. There will be no good-bye lunches or tearful hugs. There will be no catered brunches in the conference room where we go around the room and all say our favorite thing that Heather has brought to this department. No. Instead, I’ll gather what belongings I have in a burlap sack and move to the far less desirable, much more manager prone, new cubicle. (Hey, I’d better be able to take my chair with me!)

It’s an exciting move for me, but I bet no one else will even notice. It’ll be more like someone walks by my old desk and says “Hey, where’s that red head girl?” And I’ll say (from ten feet to the left) “Over here” and they’ll say “Oh, Ok.” And carry on with their day. And if I’m feeling really bold I’ll add “And I’m not a red head!!!” And then duck back into my new cubicle.

The only thing that’s really changing is my email signature. (For those less savvy, the email signature is what the nerdiest in the biz put at the bottom of all emails. We’re required to have one that tells our title and stuff. So then when you write some bitch out email to another department for not having their stuff done in time, you can be all “You need to get your act together! Have those reconciliations on my desk!” And they totally hate you.. then they keep reading and at the bottom, in a friendly, purple font, it says “Sincerely, Heather” and then they like you again)

So anyway, my signature right now reflects my feelings on my department.
It’s currently:

Heather
“Go-Fetch” Girl
Poopy Department
7th Floor
Awesomest cubicle ever

And now it’s going to be

Heather
Totally Important Girl
Serious and Challenging Department
7th Floor
Poopiest cubicle ever

After hearing about this new move and the fact that they thought I wasn’t being “challenged enough” I started to think they were reading my mind. Then when they said sorry for not teaching me enough I started to think they were reading my blog! Seriously, they addressed all my ranting about my current job and made them better! What if they ARE reading my blog? No way. However, I did become a little more suspicious when my boss said, as I was leaving, “I’m sure guy-with-an-accent will miss you!” Oh no!

Heather's Daily Digression - October 14, 2004

2004-10-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

It’s always a little weird to see co-workers outside of work. It seems unnatural to see someone you work with outside of their natural habitat…that being work. I would like to think that I’m the only one with a life outside work. Everyone else is just in the office all day and then come night time, they roll out a sleeping bag on the office floor and go to sleep. I don’t like the idea of my co-workers lurking around on the street where they might run into me. That opens up the possibility of an awkward run-in with me.

Today I was walking back from lunch and I saw my old-lady co-worker walking towards me. So I stopped and said and enthusiastic “Hi!” But she just kept on walking. I sort of turned and watched her walk past me. “Hi?” I said again… OK, either she totally just blew me off (but what reason would old-lady-office-worker have to dislike me?) or she just didn’t see me and I can just keep walking and pretend this never happened. So that’s what I did. We shall never speak of this again.

Staff Meetings - The Story of My Life

2004-09-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

Today we had another staff meeting. I love staff meetings because they give me a chance to get away from my desk and there’s always some kind of unidentified cafeteria food that they call “catering”. I’m right next to the conference room, so I usually get first wind of any really good fruit spread and first pick of the drinks.

One of my favorite co-workers is the one I work the most with. He’s from Guadalajara or some place like that and talks with an accent. I call him guy-with-an-accent. But I have a strong suspicion that he might be gay. Which is actually great, because when you work closely with someone of the opposite sex, it’s good not to have any tension at all. He’s also one of the snazziest dress people I know too. He always looks like he’s walked straight out of a J Crew ad and has completely mastered the three quarter sleeve roll-up better than any man I know. He actually dresses better than me, which sometime makes me mad because I have not only tried to become the least productive person in the office, I also aspire to become the best dressed. And I was well on my way for a while, probably because I’m the youngest person and one of the few office workers who can fit into clothes from Banana Republic. So people would walk by me and say “You look nice today,” and I’d feel great, but then they’d walk a little further and I’d hear “Whoa! Guy-with-an-accent, that’s a fabulous shirt!” Damn him. I think I’m gonna put chewing gum in his chair.

Much of our office is fashionable challenged. One woman in particular, whose role and title I haven’t quite figured out yet, but who has a really nice office and always manages to squirm into my lunches out with the manager for no apparent reason. Really, on my “welcome lunch” she just sort of appeared at the stool next to me and my manager at a restaurant and ate lunch with us, but didn’t introduce herself or say a word. But anyway, she’s generally regarded as the craziest dressed person. She has some weird fashion sense where she goes for really bright colors that don’t really match. Every now and then she’ll manage an outfit that slightly matches and as I pass her in the halls I’ll think “Yes! We have a winner! Someone finally turned on the lights while they were getting dressed!” And in those moments I can’t help but be a little proud of her. But today, at a presentation about liquefied natural gas (insert joke here), I sat behind her. I suddenly noticed that she was wearing a jacket that was apparently too small, because she had a giant rip down the back seam! I thought about pulling her aside and letting her know, and perhaps adding, “and while we’re at it, you do know that bright green and fuchsia don’t match, right?” But then the thought crossed my mind that maybe this was all part of her weird fashion “look” and that it would be totally rude to imply that a rip in a jacket wasn’t cool. However, I’m a little excited by the fact that when she gets home tonight and takes the jacket off, she’ll have to figure out how many people saw her like this.

But back to guy-with-an-accent. Last month was his turn to be the guest speaker at our monthly meeting. See, at every monthly meeting, after the usually office house cleaning and discussion of who’s doing their work and who isn’t (during which I keep a low profile) someone is picked to tell their life story. Literally. They get like 10 minutes to tell everything that’s happened to them up till now. It’s usually like “I was born with a calculator in my hand and became an accountant here, then moved here and became a different kind of accountant…“ It goes on like this for days. So last month was guy-with-an-accent’s turn. Everyone was all excited to hear about his life and, for me, most importantly, to hear the answer to the nagging question “what’s with the accent?” He started to tell us about how he got some nerd accounting job in America and that’s what got him his citizenship and there was apparently dancing in the street in his hometown or some shit like that. I also came to learn that in Mexico, you have like 14 names. You take your mom’s maiden name, your dad’s last name, and about four others for good measure. Our manager insisted that he recite his full name to us. I could have hit her with my stale dinner roll. He proceeded to take the next 15 minutes to say every Hispanic name I’ve ever heard, and by the time he was to Juanita, I tuned out. I think he was just making them up as he went along. But my co-workers were mesmerized, as though they were looking at some strange animal in the zoo that they couldn’t quite understand and desperately want to just poke with a stick.

So anyway, after that marathon, we all filed back out of the conference room and the biography ended there. Or so I thought. All around the office people were buzzing with conversation about guy-with-the-accent’s amazing life story. They made it sound like he’d swum into San Diego harbor on a raft made of popsicle sticks, wearing a barrel or something. Hmm... not many struggling immigrants I know shop at the Armani Exchange and have Louis Vuitton wallets. People were getting very worked up about it, dropping by his cubicle to give him a pat on the back and try to speak to him in his native tongue. “Hola guy-with-accent! Como esta?” But sure, I guess his story was awe-inspiring. If awe-inspiring means managing to distract me from the fly buzzing around the room for a few minutes. But actually I’m really beginning to like guy-with-an-accent. He’s become my friend who I can exchange puzzled looks with during a meeting, or pass funny notes to about the person who’s talking. I can do all this with someone who I can happily consider my well-dressed, gay office friend.

So today’s “featured speaker” is the laugh-loud girl. I’ve mentioned her in my previous blogs. She seems very exciting about revealing her life to the whole office over cafeteria food. But more power to her. She’s been wandering around the office giving people a preview, telling everyone “It’s not going to be too exciting because I’m leaving out ages 17-25!” She then proceeds to cackle loudly. Now, I’m sure in your day, laughs-loud-girl, you had a grand old time and met many the odd fellow, winning him over with your ungodly laugh. However, I have trouble believing that anyone with your penchant for animal print blouses, white nylons, and inexplicably frizzy hair would ever have a “wild” story to tell. So I’m betting this one’s gonna be a snooze fest.

I can’t wait until the day I get to tell my story at a meeting. I think I’m gonna make stuff up. Cause really, it wouldn’t be very exciting to hear “I was born, not to long ago, grew up, played it safe, and now I’m here sharing cold cafeteria food with you people! Pass the rice pilaf, please?” People are so intrigued with other peoples lives that I think it’d be fun to just have fun with it. Then I’d have people stopping by my cube afterwards being like “I had no idea you traveled the world with a champion water-skiing team! And how you spent the summer before college de-clawing blind koalas? That’s just great Heather!”

Wise thoughts on Wisdom Teeth

2004-09-07T13:36:00.000-07:00

Last Friday I got my wisdom teeth out. I had a trippy experience with the anesthesia for about an hour, and then was sent home for a pain-filled weekend of fun. Here are some of the troubles I encountered with my swollen cheeks:

I’m popping Advil’s like tic tacs. I laugh in the face of the warning label on the back, recommending a max of six per day. Ha! I have six for a snack. I usually stir about 12 into my morning oatmeal, and then pop a few more on the drive to work. I can grab and take a handful of Advil from my bedside table without even opening my eyes in the morning. I take handfuls of Advil in the shower. I take Advil while I’m getting dressed (one between pulling on each sleeve.) Then, during the morning meeting I’m slipping them into my mouth from my pocket. I even doodle little Advil people on my notepad. (It’s all I think about.. and in case you’re wondering, the Advil man looks kind of like the Blood Mobile Man, a drop of blood with a face and a cape) I have a bowl of “party mix” on my desk that is only Advil (in assorted types: gel tabs, circles, and ovals).
The Wal-Mart family pack of Advil can’t begin to meet my needs. I’ve emptied tubs of the stuff and my room is littered with empty Advil bottles. I’ve become rather partial to the gel form, because then I can swallow more than six at once. (Am I making anyone nauseous?) I feel like I should be studied by the Advil Institute and give them advice on how to better bottle or prepare their next batch of Advil. When I complained to my dentist over the phone about the pain he said “Are you taking Advil?” I was stunned in silence. Am I taking Advil? Perhaps you would like to come to my apartment, if you can open the door through the piles of empty Advil bottles, and look for my Ibuprofened little body. I’ll be the one in the kitchen, with the blood shot eyes and fat cheek, baking an Advil cake.

At first I was afraid of taking a narcotic. But Vicodin hasn’t done anything for me, except make me lie awake in my bed thinking “Am I in some placebo group or something?” I’m now convinced that anyone who’s addicted to Vicodin would get the same high from chewing a stick of Trident. And I had a lot of hope for the Vicodin. I mean, it’s gotta be one of the scariest words ever. Vicodin. It’s kinda like vampire, but kinda not. Imagine if someone were named Vicodin. I would always be scared of them. There probably is someone out there named Vicodin, in like Yemin or somewhere. I sure don’t wanna meet them. And when you tell people you’re taking Vicodin, it has like the scariest connotation. People at work said “Are you taking anything?” I’m like “Yeah, sometimes Vicodin.” They all immediately gasp and take a giant step back. It has a perception to be eerily powerful or something. But I’m here to tell you, people, it’s not. And trust me, I was one of the believers once too. I thought the only people who should be taking Vicodin were people who like fell off a ski lift onto a metal spike and then were run over by a dog sled. Not a little girl who was in a dentist chair for about an hour and had her tooth tapped, and then left. (Seriously, that’s all I felt.)

I’ve forgotten what solid food tastes like. If Jell-O doesn’t make it, I don’t know what it tastes like. Today was my first day with any type of real food. I was pretty nervous. And I have to chew like an old lady… really slowly and straight up and down.. no sudden moves. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve come to appreciate the fact the McDonald hamburgers are flat as a pancake and lack any substance. You don’t have to open your jaw or chew at all… they just sort of slide in like a punch card.

It’s been five days. Five days! And I’m still puffy and in pain. And everyone has their two cents to put in about the situation. But I know something’s up. My concern now is no longer that I’m going to live through the anesthesia (since I did) but that the left side of my face will be numb forever. You might laugh at this, but it could happen. Now, I recall having the consultation to discuss such things with the surgeon guy a few days before the actual event. (We shall refer to that as “the day which shall not be named”) He was showing me a panoramic x-ray of my mouth, which I was so mesmerized by that I stopped listening to what he was saying. I seem to remember now him pointing out some white lines along my gumline that he said were nerves that can sometimes get stretched. Stretched? What are they, jump ropes? These are NERVES! Aren’t they kinda important? Are they gonna sproing back in place, or am I gonna be paralyzed forever? Now I wished I’d paid more attention during that consultation, but at the time, a funny looking bird appeared at the window, and all I can remember from then on is “blah blah blah tooth, blah blah blah permanent paralysis, blah blah blah, do you consent?”
So I really don’t know what was going on in my mouth when I went in for surgery. For all I know, I could have agreed to something totally different. “So, during the consultation, we agreed that you should have all of the teeth on the left side of you mouth moved to the right, right? OK, here we go! Count back from 100!” Cause really that’s what it feels like he did.

** An interesting blog side note: My spell checker insisted that Vicodin should be spelled “Vic ODin.” No, mister computer. I’m not referring to the jolly Irishman who owns the pub down the street, Mr. O’Din. I’m in fact referring to the completely inert drug Vicodin, whose name is highly commonplace. Thanks, Mr. Spellchecker. Vic O’Din of Hoboken, Ireland is glad you’re thinking of him, but he agrees that you need to get out more.

Office Rule #58 (Death by Chocolate)

2004-09-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

Let your co-workers know about your likes and dislikes early on. More to the point, let them know what things you like to eat, and what things will kill you.

I made the mistake of not telling anyone in my office that I’m allergic to dairy products. In hindsight, my first day should have been like this: “Hi, my name is Heather and I’m allergic to milk.” Not only then would everything be clear, but my co-workers would have probably regarded me as the “new weirdo” and would have left me alone. My co-workers have a tendency to nag and try to hang out in my cubicle. I wish my cubicle had a door. Then I could lock it. Or at least pretend to be on the phone when they come by and gesture through to sound proof window to come back later, like my boss does.

Anyway, this whole not knowing about me is starting to get worse and worse. I consider it the mark of a true friend for them to know that I’m allergic to most things under the sun. And, it’s the mark of a really great friend who will ask a waiter at a restaurant we’re at if the meal is cooked in butter, because their dear friend over here might die. But maybe I shouldn’t be so exclusive with this information. I feel like it’s a third date sort of conversation point. And in everyday life, it certainly shouldn’t be brought up if not called for, because of the inevitable questions it provokes, such as “Weird! What happens to you?! Would you die?! Like, how exactly would you die?” or “Oh my gosh, I would just kill myself if I couldn’t have ice cream. That’s so sad… don’t you just wanna kill yourself? Don’t you?” and the latest one which I seem to be getting is “So do you eat a lot of peanut butter?” Huh? I don’t get this one. Honestly, about three people have asked me that one recently. I don’t see the logic behind this one. Peanut Butter? Because, when you think of no milk products you think… peanut butter? Yes, you’re right. In fact, I subsist solely on peanut butter. Why, is that weird? Don’t you? I don’t think I’ve had peanut butter since I was in first grade and ate it with raisins on a celery stick.

So anyway, since on the first day I failed to mention my weirdness, it’s now getting too late in the game to say anything! This wouldn’t really be a problem, but I seem to have become to target of the office’s new-kid-outreach program or something. A couple times a week one of my co-workers comes by my cube with some kind of snack to give me. I’m sure they think they’re just making my day, but in reality it’s really awkward. It started off easy enough. My cubicle mate gave me a biscotti. Without even a glance at the ingredients I knew it was not Heather-friendly. “Thanks!” I said enthusiastically, and as soon as they turned the corner, I opened my bottom drawer, threw the poor little biscotti in the back and closed it, never to be seen again. So this was easy enough… I would just fill my desk drawer with these foods and pretend I ate them. (Weird, when I wrote that out it makes it sound like I have an eating disorder or something, like one day some janitor or something is gonna stumble upon my stash of dairy products and I’m gonna have a meltdown when I realize everyone’s found out)

But then, they starting wanting to see me eat the stuff they brought me! This has to do with them being too friendly. A few weeks ago someone brought me a chocolate chip cookie, and then sat down in my cubicle. Oh no! So I just stared at my friend while she told me the story of her “stupid, useless brother”, all the while the cookie starting to crumble in my trembling hand. I had to nod along with her story and just sort of hold the cookie. It must have looked pretty unnatural, me with wide unblinking eyes, nodding every now and then, holding a cookie about three feet from my body. So after she was there for a while, I started to realize I might actually have to eat this cookie! Is it really worth nearly dying over social courtesy?

But luckily, I didn’t have to decide that one, as my friend finally got up and finished her story and left. Before she left though, I of course had to thank her for the cookie, “Thanks! I guess everyone knows chocolate chip cookies are my favorite… mmmm!” When she was finally gone, and with a sigh of relief, I tossed the cookie into the drawer of no return and got back to work.

So now that all this has happened I’ve really backed myself into a corner. Now that I’ve pretended to enjoy all these things, there’s no way I can be like “Oh, by the way, just so you all know, you’ve all been slowly killing me with these foods because I’m allergic to them.” And I’ve never known such giving co-workers. Is it normal to shower the new employee with dairy products? I feel like I should stand on my chair (which might be tough because it’s a rolley chair, and me lurching around trying to balance myself might not have the same effect) and announce “Everyone listen up! Stop trying to buy my affection with food! I’m a normal person and all you have to do is talk to me!” But I haven’t gotten the courage yet, so when I see someone coming towards me with something in their hand shortly after our lunch break, I try to slip out the back and pretend I’m making copies.

In fact, I’ll open my bottom drawer right now and give you an inventory… there’s a granola bar, a Milky way, some Reese’s pieces, that biscotti (which is starting to grow fur), an Almond Joy, a few cookies, some See’s candy, some caramel Hershey kisses, a bag of Doritos, and some pretzels. Oh wait, I can eat those! Score!

22 Year Old Dies From Work-Related Stroke

2004-08-20T16:14:00.000-07:00

So all day yesterday, and most of the day before, I just sat in front of my computer and played on the internet. It was pretty fun actually. I checked my bank balance. I ordered some books I wanted. I set up my phone bill to be automatically paid online, and I somehow accidentally navigated to a few porn sites which I quickly closed and prayed that none of my company’s IT guys decide to research my internet history. I started to feel a little guilty about this when I left at 5 and saw my co-workers madly working. I knew they’d be staying till about 7. But they all like me, so they don’t mind.

Now, you might be wondering why I’m not super busy and also staying until 7. Well, I’m still the new kid. After the projects I’m given to work fizzle out after a few hours, I spend the rest of the day trying to find something to do. I’ve figured out that when my supervisor doesn’t have work for me to do, it’s because he thinks our boss already gave me something. So basically I’m like that guy in Office Space who no one notices has already been fired. My boss thinks my supervisor’s keeping me busy and he thinks my boss is keeping me busy! Hooray for falling through the corporate cracks!

But I have been a little worried that doing nothing and then going home is a little bad and that I might get in trouble for it. Whenever anyone walks by my cubicle, I madly scramble around, trying to minimize the screens with the google search results about where to find the best ribs in southern California or what local salon Suzie Message-Board recommends. I’ve honestly tried to find work, but I think I’m just too damned efficient. When I get some task, I get all excited and I finish it. There in lies the mistake.

I now know that no ones expects a deadline out of me and that’s probably the only task I’m gonna have all day today, maybe all week. So unless I stretch it out and do some web-surfing (and possibly blogging) in between working, there will always be the awkward moment when I hand the finished work to my boss too early and she says “you’re done already?” And then there’s the uncomfortable few minutes of her not knowing what else to give me and me just standing there, shifting from one foot to the other, waiting, and secretly wondering if I’ll make it back to my desk in time for the end of my Ebay auction.

So I’ve continued in my merry ways of just doing what I’m told and nothing more. (That’s the American way!) So, today I was fairly shocked when my manager came over and told me we were having a “surprise” staff meeting. Really? And you want me there? I still think you’d be better off including the mail boy in that meeting than me. But I reluctantly close my instant messenger conversations, grab a pen and pad of paper to make me look official, and go to the conference room.

My department has been pretty empty lately. There’s always someone out sick. And there’s only about 7 of us. Every day I’ve been here at least one person has been out sick. And unfortunately, it’s never been me. Either there’s a crazy corporate accounting bug going around, which I’ll inevitably get, or people have begun realize that this job sucks and need one day a week to stay home and scream into their pillows.

So today happens to be a very poor turnout day. Probably because it’s Friday and because…well, because it’s Friday! That’s a great reason to stay home! I, for one, don’t have the luxury to take sick days every time a Friday rolls around, like the rest of my department seems to. I have officially accrued 2 vacation days. That’s right. Two days. Until next year, that’s all I get. But I really think that I might be able to just sneak in in the morning and put an inflatable doll at my desk, and no one would know the difference. And maybe a tape recording of me that plays every few hours that says things like “I don’t know.” Or “I’m new.” Or “Is that something I should know?”

This “surprise” staff meeting was poorly attended. I plopped down on a chair next to the one office-mate I can stand, and our boss walks in and shuts the door. That’s funny, she doesn’t usually shut the door. Everyone else looks very serious and I begin to wonder if I’m missing something.

“I have a very big announcement,” my boss said. I look up from my doodle of my boss on a surf board to listen. “Heather is going to be leaving us.”

WHAT?! I nearly fell off my chair! I’m sure I turned the shade of a beet and began to have a heart attack! Are you kidding me?!? This is how you fucking fire me?! What the…

But I realize that no one’s looking at me. Everyone’s looking down the conference table at… the other Heather! (Refer to my first blog for details) Oh my god.. abort self-destruct.. abort. We’re OK…. Resume normal breathing and heart rate. What’s that ringing in my ears? Does anyone else notice the room is spinning?

I have no idea why the other Heather is leaving because I spent the rest of the meeting trying to regain my composure. I fanned myself with my pad of paper and tried to make my heart beat not feel like an African drum. It’s ok.. It’s ok.. you’re not fired…

There was a lot of sighing and near tears between the other Heather and my boss, but the jist I got was that the other Heather wanted out. And rightly so! This means I’m officially the only Heather in the office! Hooray!

As we all file back out of the conference room, there are some very down faces. Mostly because everyone knows this means the workload has now increased for the rest of us. But I don’t care. Maybe that means my work load will increase from non-existant to barely filling an hour. Woohoo! One girl is kind of weeping, probably because the other Heather is her only other office friend and she’s sad to see her go. As I leave (I would have skipped out, but my heartbeat hadn’t returned to normal) the other Heather stopped me. She said “I noticed you getting a little chocked up in there when you heard. Thank you for caring so much, Heather!” And gave me a hug.. “Yeah,” I said, wiping a bead of sweat from my brow, passing it off as a tear, “You’ll be missed.”

An Office Chair Wheeled Straight From Heaven

2004-08-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

There are few excitements in life when you work in an office. A big one is new office supplies. Today I came back from lunch (very late by the way, so in fact, I snuck back in from lunch) and I found a brand new, state of the art, Aeron Posture-Fit adjustable office chair in my cubicle!

At first I thought there’d been a mistake. I wanted to find some maintenance person in the halls and be like “Wait, you don’t seem to understand. My cubicle has come to be known as the place where office equipment goes to die. This can’t possibly be right. I want my old chair back before I start getting a big head. You’ll know which one it is. It has ripped upholstery and one wheel is sort of cock-a-mamie. And if you sit on it and wheel it to the right too fast, it makes a sound like a dying cat. And if you lean back too far, a spring pops loose that makes you freeze in your recline and wonder if that sound was the chair or your back giving out. Kindly fetch my chair from the dumpster, where it most assuredly is. I know my place in this office and I won’t have it any other way.”

Honestly, my cubicle is filled with old equipment. My computer is old and grainy and when you want it to do something complicated, like open an excel file, it crunches and cranks like it’s using a cheese grader to produce results. I think there’s a hamster running on a wheel that makes my computer run. Also, all of my office supplies seem to be the office rejects. I have rusty scissors that look like they were left over from when the company began, and if I want any kind of “new technology”, like, for example, a 3-hole punch, it takes 6 weeks to order it.

When I first got here, the assistant told me to make a list of everything I needed in my cube. I was so excited by this prospect. I was gonna make my cube the picture of modern office living. So I spent an entire work day picking out the kind of calendar I wanted. One with a tree of the month on it? One with inspirational quotes? One with a dry erase option? The possibilities were endless and I was so excited. After flipping through pages and pages of calendars, I realized I’d been looking for a few hours, and that was verging on just plain crazy. So I picked one and then moved on to mouse pads.

So after ordering all sorts of things to make my cubicle livable, I sent my order in and sat back to await all my supplies. After all, who can work without an ergonomic floating-gel-cushioned wrist guarded mouse pad? I sure can’t. So I refused to do anything too complicated until everything came. Then I got the sad news from our assistant. Almost everything I wanted was on back order. But there were a few nice Bic ball point pens I could have. Great. I guess it’s understandable. I mean, you can’t get those very unique and hard to find bright yellow post-it notes just anywhere, right?

Then the next day, there’s a voicemail telling me that my calendar is in! Hooray! At least now I have something to hang up on my cube wall besides the black and white photocopied announcement of the office luau which is in 6 months. I rip off the saran wrap and look at my brand new calendar… for 2005. What kind of numbskull orders a calendar in July for the next year? Obviously I’m not thinking ahead that far! “Um, yes I know it’s a bit odd to want next year calendar already, but I’m a very busy and organized person and I’m actually currently booking well in February.” I have trouble even planning what I’m doing this weekend, much less in 2005! So that’s what I have at my desk so far. A calendar I can’t use and some Bic pens that have the ends chewed off, which was probably done by the person I replaced who was impatiently waiting the arrival of their own office supplies!

Plus, my desk is set at the height of a midget. I keep having to remind the assistant that I want it raised and each time I have to re-convince her that it’s necessary. “Are you sure, Heather?” “Yeah, I know. But call my crazy, I like my knees to fit under the desk.” “It’s just that I think this is the standard height.” “Well, the bruises on my knees and the curse words coming from cubicle every now and then beg to differ. Are you saying I’m abnormally tall?” A lot of people in the office have mentioned that they think I’m tall. This is weird to me, because I’m only 5’8’’. There’s an intern here from the same school as me and he’s 6’6’’. So one girl came up to me and said, “Is everyone from your school really tall?” Yes. Because THAT’S what our school’s really known for. Tall people. Yes, in fact, we take classes from about 9 till 3, and then we all gather on the football field for stretching exercises to grow taller. That’s one of the reasons I picked that school… for the excellent tallness professors and the nationally recognized tallness program.

So, I finally got this new, ergonomic chair. I’m very excited by it. But, there seems to be one think wrong with it. It has a weird smell. When I first walked up to my cubicle and saw it, I got so excited. But as I ran up to it, I got this whiff of old Chinese food. Great, I thought, the lordy lordy girl in the cube next to me must be having Chinese food for lunch while she reads her Bible today. (That girl is a whole other blog post waiting to happen.) But now, each time I leave and come back, I smell the smell again! I’m convinced it’s now my chair. All I ask is that the smell doesn’t stick to me so that I have old Chinese food chair smell on me all day. So while I take great joy in wheeling around the halls in it and adjusting it up and down and up and down until it starts to make groaning noises, I can’t help but notice it’s a stinky little chair. But that’s ok. Nobody’s perfect. Not even free office chairs.

U.S. Savings & Distrust

2004-08-10T17:02:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think the people around here trust me with too much. Part of my job is to take checks to the bank every couple days. This sounds fairly normal.. but it’s really not. This isn’t just some mom and pop shop with two checks a week to deposit, with both checks having kitten watermarks and quotes from the Bible on them. (I can’t believe I just wrote about the Bible in my blog) These are serious, hard core checks. My company is big… it’s 20 floors crammed full of people doing boring jobs and creating boring transactions which require boring checks to be deposited.

But, on my first trip to the bank, I noticed that these checks are not so boring. On average, these checks add up to half a million dollars! And they want me, ME, a little girl to walk them to the bank? I don’t think they realize, I’m still pretty little at heart. I mean, I get scared if someone claps loudly in my vicinity. If a car backfires near me, I’m usually the one cowering in the bushes. If someone even slightly scary came up to me and said "Give me those", I'd hand the checks over in the blink of an eye. I ain't fuckin around with street people.

And here I am, skipping through sketchy downtown with a Fortune 500 company’s bread and butter. And I have been known to swing my security badge above my head like a helicopter to pass the time. So you can just imagine the sight of me doing this twice a week. If you saw me, you’d probably think “Where’s that loon going?” Well, I happen to be going to deposit millions of dollars, mister!

And you’d think, when I got to the bank, I’d be really cool, because we were such a big company. I thought I’d have to get security clearance and be able to use my thumb print on a scanner to get into the back room, where they do the ultra cool transactions. Then I thought, maybe they’ll invite me in for a tour of the vault and let me help myself to any safe deposit boxes. But no. My Fortune 500 company, with its zillions of employees and millions of dollar in checks every day, banks at Dink Bank of the US. Seriously, it’s like the smallest bank known to man. I find it hard to believe that my company’s massive checks are put in the same vault as Johnny McBoring’s $15 dollar pay check from his paper route.

The only cool part is that I get to stand in a special line called the “Merchant Line”. We have our very own teller, who knows my name now and is always quick to tell me her thoughts on the weather every day. But I’m quite happy to talk to her for many reasons: 1. She never uses a sentence with the word “accounting” in it. And 2. She has bangs that defy gravity. I am mezmerized every day by them. She somehow gets her bangs to stick straight up in the air, and then swoop back into an 80’s wave. It’s crazy.

But the last time I went, my hair-sprayed friend wasn’t there, and instead I was waved over to a special part of the bank. Oh, I thought, here’s my chance to go in the vault! But instead, a woman in a little room called me over. It was this weird little booth with a locked door that she had to buzz to let me in. When I opened the door, it was like a little apartment in the bank, with a comfy chair and mahogany walls. So I settled into the chair and gave everyone else in the bank a mean look, like "I'm in the little room and you're not!" When the teller was done, she had to ask me to leave. I guess I got too comfy. I haven't been buzzed back into that little room since.

The walk to the bank is also pretty interesting. I take a different route each time, mostly to avoid noticing that the homeless person sleeping on the corner of 3rd and Ash hasn't moved since I started working here. I always walk by this sad little hot dog stand. It always looks so out of place, as though the guy running it doesn't realize this isn't New York City and that people from around here don't eat questionable meat products sold on the street. Sometimes I think about stopping to get a hot dog, though. I could kick back and enjoy a hot dog and take in the sights. But I'd probably put the stack of million dollar checks down beside me and then forget them. How would I explain that one to my boss? It also might look a little suspicious if the deposit slip had ketchup on it. ("Oh, the bank said that's part of their new security policy. You haven't heard of it?! Well, maybe you should brush up on your bank security...")

Once I forgot to make the deposit when I was supposed to. I just left the checks locked up in my desk drawer overnight, underneath my stash of bubble gum, Hershey kisses, and chapstick. I'm sure my boss would love to hear that. After that, I think I lost my depositing privliges for a few days. But don't worry, I'm back in the game now. I think I'm gonna put on my resume "Responsible for bi-weekly secure deposit of corporate funds with three star security clearance." Hey, you think anyone's gonna call me on that? 80's-hair teller girl will back me up, I'm sure...

The Last Train to Ghettoville

2004-08-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting experience on the trolley today. Did I mention I take the trolley? Well, normally it’s a nice, leisurely ride to work, but lately, it’s been getting weirder and weirder. I mean, I’ve gotten used to the odd, public transport smell by now, and the fact that the trolley drivers can be really mean and vindictive, but now the other passengers are starting to push the envelope.

Apparently this morning I caught the 7:44 Ghetto Express – “Direct service to anything and everything ghetto.”

When I got on, I purposely sat near this little old man who was asleep. Mostly because the seats face each other and I hate waging a silent war over whose knees get to go where. With a sleeping guy, I always win. So I started to give him the once over, trying to figure out his deal, and why the fuck he was on a train at this hour of the morning. Shouldn’t he be at home clipping coupons or something? Or talking to his cat about ‘the good old days’? If I were that age I would be curled up in bed and not on a trolley headed to downtown. Heck, if I were ANY age, I’d be curled in bed right now if I could be.

In fact, there are a lot of people on trolley that puzzle me. More than once I’ve been tempted to go sit down by someone I’ve been staring at and be like “So, what’s your story?” I mean, who goes on the trolley to downtown before 8? The only people I can think of are people going to work. But every morning there’s a handful of people who really don’t fit into the morning commute crowd. Often there are kids younger then me in jeans… all by themselves, just staring out the window… probably wondering what the hell they’re doing on the trolley!

So I began to forget about the little old man across from me. Mainly because I suddenly became immersed in my own battle over what color my pants were. I was wearing a black patterned shirt, and suddenly I realized my pants were brown! What the hell.. I totally clashed! Or maybe it was just a faded black that didn’t match my shirt… So, most of the trolley ride was me thinking “They’re brown… no wait, the way the light just hit them, they’re black. Yeah, they’re totally black. But what if they’re brown and someone at work thinks I have a drinking problem who can’t even match an outfit? I have come in to work hung over twice in the last two weeks. This could be the clincher… “

When suddenly, while the trolley was stopped at some station, probably the corner of Murderville and Rape Street, this scary cop leapt on board! I was sure he was there to check our tickets, and suddenly I realized I didn’t have one! I’ve been buying monthly passes and totally haven’t gotten my latest one! Well, in all honesty I haven’t even bothered yet because I’ve never, ever had my ticket checked! So, of course, I’m thinking, today’s my lucky day.

I start thinking up an excuse to tell this rather large police man about why I still have July’s pass. And just as I’m thinking of a way to make myself cry, I notice that he’s not checking tickets at all. Everyone in the trolley car is suddenly looking over at where I’m sitting. The cop was after my little old man friend!
The cop starts poking my sleeping friend! I guess they have to wake people up who are on the trolley so they don’t miss their stop or something. Then he starts shaking him. Suddenly I realize, I haven’t really seen this guy move since I got on the trolley. The trolley’s still stopped and now people are standing up and coming over to see what’s happening, all the while the cop keeps shaking the little old man!

People near me start gasping and looking at me, and I’m like “what’s all the fuss about?” When suddenly it hits me: “OH MY GOD, I’m sitting across from a dead man on the trolley. I’m sitting across from a dead man on the trolley!”

But, don’t worry guys, he wasn’t dead. He woke up with a start and thought someone was trying to fight him. (I guess when you ride the trolley at weird times, you’re on edge) The cop just pulled him up and dragged him off the train! It was so weird! I think someone must have called and said he’d been there a long time… he was mumbling something about where he was headed. Probably Jupiter or something. In which case, that’s the next train over.

I can only imagine he’d been sitting there, riding the trolley back and forth all night long! In either case I quickly settled back my self-absorbed state. If I’m late to work, they’ll never believe why! And my pants are definitely black. I think.

The auditors are coming!

2004-08-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

So one of the big decisions upon graduation from college with a degree in accounting was whether to become an auditor or go into industry. You hear years of debate about it, and every fellow nerdy accounting major gives you his or her two cents. Most people go into auditing because those big four firms like to suck up new, happy, confident accounting grads and suck the life out of them, help them get their CPA, and then dump them back on the street. Are you beginning to tell what path I chose? Industry is a private company that is more like a normal office environment where you work normal hours and work up the corporate ladder. All our professors would say “it’s a decision you have to make for yourself.” Well, I prefer another phrase, which I coined myself, which is: “it all depends on what sucker will hire you.”

So I chose industry, while many of my friends are auditors. Now that I’m at a big company, there are external auditors permanently in our building, slowly making the rounds and checking departments.

The big buzz in our department is that … wait for it… the auditors are coming! Rumor has it they’re gonna pounce on us in the dead of night, feed on our flesh, and steal our children. They’re ruthless and mean. They carry laptops and have pocket protectors. They ask things like “Where’s the back-up for this?” and “What do you do here?” (To which my reply is a shrug and I whisper to them ‘Hell if I know.’) And don’t even think of throwing around words like “Enron” around here. That’s like saying "bomb" at an airport. People act like it’s Armageddon. Every time someone says “auditor” they say it with such fear that I always follow it up with a scary noise in my head… dun dun dun!!

But really people, it’s just your office. What could they really do to you? The worst they could do to me is take my Hershey kisses from my bottom drawer. Actually, that would make me pretty mad. Chocolate is what gets me through the day. But there is a guy a few cubicles over with a plant on his desk that I’ve been eying. He’d better lock that up safe.

So, all of our work now is focused on getting ready for the auditors. I’ve been working on putting together this huge binder of stuff. I could tell you what’s in it, but I really think you might fall asleep and never log back into my blog. After a few words like “reconciliation” and “quarter-end” most people are nodding off onto their keyboards. So anyway, this binder is becoming the size on my cubicle. I’m going to need a dolly to deliver the final product to my manager. And, I’ve been flipping through so many pages while working on it, that I actually had to go get some of that “tacky fingers” crap that you used to see on your teacher desk in high school. It’s basically and tub of Vaseline that’s relabeled “tacky fingers” so you think it’s professional and for office use. So after seeing this stuff sitting on my desk, I officially feel like an office nerd. Could I be any more stereotypical? Next I’m gonna be carrying my calculator on a string around my neck.

So I finally finished the binder and my manager said “So if the auditors (dun dun dun) come, is this going to be what they want? There are no mistakes? You did it right?” And how am I supposed to reply to this? “OOOh, you wanted NO mistakes?! Well, you’d better give that back because I was under the impression you just wanted a half-assed job. In fact, most of the papers in here are just printouts of funny pictures I found on the internet.”

I think my co-workers have spent too much time cooped up in an office and too little time at the local bar, getting drunk with soon to be auditors, like I do. Many of my college friends are about to be some of these “scary” auditors, and trust me, they’re as cool as the rest of us. First of all, they mostly don’t know what their talking about. Second, they spend most of their time IMing their friends. (I know this because at the moment I am IMing my friend at an auditing firm who’s supposed to be working... she says hi)

Actually, I heard that one rogue auditor has actually been spotted on our floor, trying to camouflage herself by pretending to be one of us. But she’s been spotted. So now the word’s out. Actually, I think I’ve seen her. She’s been asking this one lady for all sorts of files and I keep seeing her walk her over to this file cabinet which is behind me. The auditor is about 4 foot 11 and is one of the most unintimidating people you’ve ever met. I think I tripped over her just now on the way to the bathroom in fact. But my co-worker has a different attitude. She walks the auditor girl over to the filing cabinet, hands shaking, fumbling her words, and drops the keys a few times. I sure hope she’s doing this for effect. Later today, we were gossiping about the auditor girl at the water cooler (I swear, this office is straight out of Dilbert!) and someone said he thinks her name is Dolphin! I laughed so hard I had to prop myself up by the copier. Let me tell you, if a girl named Dolphin comes a knockin, she’ll be getting the files herself.

So after I cleared up the binder mess with my manager, she also told me to tell people that the auditors are coming. What, am I supposed to run up and down the cubicles ringing a bell? I feel like friekin Paul Revere.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas - and also gets spread around the office

2004-07-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

So tonight, we’re going to Vegas. I think a new rule of office conduct is not to tell your co-workers too many details about your out of work plans. For one, most people around here’s weekends consist of mowing the lawn or taking the family to wal-mart. So I let a few too many people know I’m going to Vegas this weekend. And that I went out last night for my birthday. So today, I stumbled in a half hour late and couple of my cubey friends said “Did you have fun last night?” or “where’d you go, who’d you see, what’d you do?!” Couldn’t’ they see that I was hung-over? I mean I’m wearing an outfit that doesn’t match (what are the odds of finding a matching outfit on the floor of your closet with your eyes closed?) my hair’s insane, my eyes are so bloodshot I may have to change my eye color on my drivers liscense to “red” for Vegas, so that I match my ID, and if I’d remembered to wear nylons, they would surely have had runs in them.

So I was trying to explain to one girl how crazy last night was and how I don’t even know what time I actually went to bed, or how my alarm clock went off on time. So I said “I got up really early this morning.” When I meant to say “I didn’t go to bed till really late last night.” So she just kinda confused and was like “Oh… cool.” Forget it, I’m not even gonna try to say complete sentences to people this morning.

When I woke up this morning, my alarm was blaring way louder than it ever has before and all of a sudden Maria walked into my room. She apparently slept on my couch. I have no idea how I got to bed, or when I got to bed. But I do know I forgot to take out my contacts. So that added to my general nasty feeling this morning. The sad thing is, I can’t even remember the facts of this morning that well, much less last night! So Maria left at some point, and I tried to get ready to go. So all I needed was my car keys and my phone and we’re good to go. Hmm.. where’s my cell phone? Crap, it’s gone. I left it in Claire’s car and now it’s an hour away. So I just grab my purse, which is in its usual state of day-after-going-outness, with my ID and credit card floating around lose and all sorts of stuff missing. I stumble to the trolley in reasonable good time and suddenly realize I forgot my security badge. So I had to get a dinky replacement one from security, which I’m sure I’ll forget to turn back in since I can’t seem to remember anything lately.

I tried to go to the cafeteria to find something to make me feel better. I figured orange juice would be good to rehydrate me. (I’m sure my triathalon friend, triatholon-Jake is right now yellilng at the computer about how that’s so not true and how could I possible think that was good for a hangover because of OJ’s low electrolyte omega vitamin D inibitor balance or something, but I’m a novice when it comes to healthy foods) But the cafeteria only had giant soda cups for juice! The smallest one is 36 ounces! What kind of weirdos work here that consider 36 ounces a small? And what kind of people need at least 36 ounces of any liquid?! So now I have this vat of orange juice on my desk which is inevitable gonna spill everywhere. Everytime I take a drink from it I feel like it's going to drown me.

I’ll let you know how Vegas goes…

Office Rule #33: Avoid Office Parties

2004-07-29T16:21:00.000-07:00

I hate office banter. Call me cynical, but I really can’t stand being trapped in a room with my co-workers for any extended period of time. Today, someone on my floor, who I don’t know but have always said hi to, graduated from something. I’m not sure what exactly she graduated from, but everyone seemed to get very worked up about it. I think people were mostly excited about the idea of getting away from their computers and eating bad cake for 30 minutes. People were crying and hugging and it was a big hoopla. For all I know she just got her GED, but the way they were acting she’d just done her dissertation on “How to evoke emotion out of your co-workers with minimal effort and a cake from Ralphs.”
So we all passed around the cake, usual fashion, where you see all the good pieces of chocolate go by you, and finally you get one and it’s white cake with a smeared “s” from congradulations in frosting on it. That’s when the banter started. The laughing about people’s husbands (“What am I gonna do with him?”) or about how excited they are for Friday (“It’s almost Friday guys!”) Not that anyone in my office has exciting plans. What are you doing this Friday, I sometimes ask my co-worker. “I’m going to do laundry and play with my calculator!” These people need to stop working for a little while.
Then there’s the co-worker with the annoying laugh. You can hear her around the whole floor. Even when in a bathroom stall, plugging you ears, you can hear her laughing. And she has a name that sounds like it belongs on an episode of Doogie Hauser – Rhonda. So during the office party, while we all stifle a laugh at boring stories about someone’s non-existent home life, this girl’s laugh trumps them all. Which is probably good because then I don’t have to laugh as hard. Too much fake laughing is harmful. So instead, anytime there’s an office party, I make sure to sit next to her. Then I can just kick back and eat cake while she laughs for the both of us.

Office Rule #12 Only one Heather per floor

2004-07-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

Rule #12 of working in an office: Avoid ever working near someone with the same name as you.
In my little “cube” complex, there happens to be another Heather. And worst of all, she totally outranks me. Plus, she knows way more than me. But that’s really not surprising because I’ve spent the first two weeks of my job making sure I don’t learn anything, but rather perfect my emailing and web-surfing abilities. In fact, I think the mail boy knows more about the company than me. Someone will come to my “cube” and ask “I’m looking for Linda Herfnegger.” And I just stare back, blinking. I should know this, I’ve been here for two weeks! And the mail guy inevitable answers, without even lifting his head. Or, someone will ask “I have a question about the solutions division… which company are you working for?” And once again, I’m stumped.

Unfortunately, my cubicle is located in the middle of the floor, right next to the elevators and conference room, so I have to field a lot of questions like this Everyone in the office has to walk by my cube to get anywhere. This is a major plus if: A) it were a college dorm B) I actually had something to do and always looked busy or C) looked cute everyday. The latter you’d think I’d actually be able to achieve sometimes, but no. When running on 6 hours of sleep a night, it’s hard to look anything above average. I spend most of my day trying to plan when I can squeeze in another hour of sleep. That is, except for yesterday when I actually DID fall asleep at my desk! It was horrible.

The other Heather gave me something to do and the explanation was something like “So then this here is the G/L account coding for the cost center. And you know all about C-O Reconciliations? (I nod, blearily) Yeah I thought so… so since we gave a debit to this flow through account, it will be unaffected. OK? If you have any questions, ask me.” Yes, I have one big question. What did you just say? I know I smiled and nodded a little but that’s just really good corporate, schmoozy acting that I’ve perfected through a university education. Did you just ask me to do something? So I walked back to my desk with papers in hand. I crossed paths with my manager, which I always seem to do when I’m confused. So I quickly started thumbing through the papers and looking quizzically at them and mumbling to myself “Hmm.. yeah that looks right…. I could get this account ready for quarter close… oh, hi Lisa! I didn’t see you there! I’d stop and chat but I’ve gotta get back to work!”

But then when I got back to my desk, I realized I really had no idea what I was supposed to do. I opened a few excel windows that I remembered seeing on the other Heather’s computer, and clicked around a little, probably changing figures that will cost billions of dollars. Then I started the clock game. You know, the “ok it’s 3:35 so I only have an hour and 25 minutes left! That’s nothing! OK I can do it. I can bullshit until then.” And then “OK it’s 3:46, woohoo 11 minutes just went by and I didn’t even notice! It felt like… 11 minutes.” So it was during this little game that I feel asleep. Not totally asleep and I don’t think anyone noticed. For like ten minutes I just dozed off on my hand and woke up when my hand slid out from under me and my face hit the keyboard. I think I might have changed a few more numbers too, and cost the company a few more million.

So back to the two Heather thing. Every now and then, someone will say “Heather?” and I’ll shout back a stifled, “Yeah?”, hoping of course that their not asking me where someone’s office is or what division of the company I work for. But, no one ever is looking for me. It’s always the other Heather. So I’ve learned to never respond to my name, against all natural instincts. But then today, when I asked my office crush if he wanted to go to lunch with me and my friend, he said he couldn't at first. Then, he walked back to his desk and seconds later shouted "Heather!" This time, I was sure it was for me. So I quickly shouted back "Yeah!?" Sounding way too eager, standing up in my cubicle to see him and in the process knocking over my chair and nearly spilling water on my keyboard. When suddenly I realized he too, like all others who know better, wanted the other Heather. I sunk slowly back into my chair and hoped that no one had noticed. I think I'm gonna need to go by a different name. This really can't happen again.