Humor in the Workplace

I was a little bit stressed out this morning due to the fact that I had all of these *generic job issues* to finish and no training wherewith to finish them all. I have talked to the boss since, and he seemed very understanding and very calm about the whole thing, so that cooled me off considerably.

However, in the apex of my strife this morning, as I walked past a co-worker, I asked him if he would take my pen and stab me in the eye. He responded, "Blue ink or black?" He then said something along the lines of "so the fun's starting for you too, huh?" This short conversation gave me a brief mood swing in towards happiness.

About an hour ago, that same co-worker came by my desk, and asked if I would kick him in the junk as he was also stressed. I responded, "But you don't even have a little Chinese ship."

Not really.

So, yeah, that co-worker's a pretty good guy, in my opinion, even if his last name sounds like it should be his first name and his first name sounds like it should be his last name. I will not give his real name, but it is basically the equivalent of somebody being named Ramirez Carl. Seriously, to you future parents out there, don't do this to your children if your last name could be a first name; it confuses the snot out of people who don't know you and get your emails.

I should also note a new development in regards to my post the other day about the fire alarms being turned off.

Today, I needed some help in a program that I use every day in my new job. (Read: I was just about to take my keyboard and smash my monitor, but the gf [who works with me] advised me just to request some help.) I emailed the proper group in our email program, and the man who is our floor leader called me from the ninth floor looking for me. This is substantial because his cubicle is TEN FEET AWAY FROM MINE on the same floor.

Well, I guess the bright side is that this happened before a fire, so he knows where I sit now. It still doesn't fill me with happiness though.

An Unoriginal Idea

Let me just say that the following is not my idea; I read about it in somebody else's blog. But let me just say that it brings me great joy and personal fulfillment that when I receive advertisements for credit cards, I then take those advertisements and place them in the return envelope provided and mail it back without filling it out. That way, the credit card company is paying to junk mail themselves.

They charge people an obscene amount of interest; the least I can do is confuse the crap out of some poor schmo in the mail room.

I'm at work on a Saturday,

And the person who is training me didn't show up.

Sigh. I guess I should just avoid all people whose job title includes trainer. I think I'd be happier all the way around.

Two Things about my Office

Due to my humongous fear that I will be fired for not doing work on company time, if someone calls me on my cell phone at work and I decide that I need to take it, I walk over to a flight of stairs that people don't use very often due to the fact that to get to these stairs you have to walk past all eight elevators that our building to get to them as well as the fact that there is another set of stairs that most people sit much closer to. After walking to the stairs and talking there, I looked and realized that only one of the two exits from the stairwell required a swipe from my employee id badge to go through.

Now what's the point of that? Will anyone attempting to break in and mess up the place be that easily thwarted if they arbitrarily look at the door with the swiper first?

I can only hope that they are so easily distracted.

The other thing that I wanted to say was that we just received an email that said that the fire alarm systems were going to be shut down for a while to give them a chance to be repaired and that in the mean-time the floor "Emergency Response Team" members were told what to do.

I guess I'm not really pleased about this in that the last time we had a fire drill, our "Team" member knew maybe 30% of our names. Yeah, not even our full names, just a third of the letters. I became known as "Analy," a nickname which is not always the most appropriate.

Okay, not really. He really didn't know our names.

I hope I'm not listening to my ipod if there's a fire, because otherwise I will be left behind as is pictured in the, uh, picture below.

I guess I'll have to stay on the ball in checking for extreme heat fluctuations.

This too

It pleases me that this thinks I look like two different supermen.

An Open Letter to All People, Everywhere

Dear Sirs and Madams:

Inasmuch as it is a viable option given where you live and how you like to exercise, please strongly consider not choosing 24 Fitness as your gym. Their employees are liars, and they will pass the buck as soon as make one.

If you have already chosen 24 Fitness, I offer you my condolences.

Love,

Analyst Catalyst

An Open Letter to Bill Burns, Fitness Manager

Dear Sir,

Why do you lie to me and lead me on to believe what turns out to be false? Have you no integrity?

Please expect me to come into your location and make a scene within the next couple of days. I have reached my threshold of patience with you as well as the mendacity that you represent for your company.

Love,

Analyst Catalyst

An Open Letter to 24 Hour Fitness

Dear Sirs,

Why do your employees lie to me? Why do they, when insisting that I will be able to have my personal training sessions that have expired back, jerk me around for a month before telling me to check with the gym that I had purchased them at? Why do I have to go from gym to gym anyways? Are not all of your customers in one database? Should they not, then, all be able to be accessed from any computer connected to that database?

Do you train your trainers to be duplicitous, or is that just a side effect of too much testosterone?

Thank you,

Analyst Catalyst

And another thing

Poor Lex Luthor! I just feel like he should start saying, "Would somebody PLEASE give me the benefit of the doubt?"

Also, unrelatedly, if you really needed to get into a database to do your work so that the customers stop being upset with you, but you keep getting an error message when trying to enter the aforementioned database, how frustrated would you be? I would like answers in a "How many infants would you kill to get it to work" format.

A new toy

This game is one of the most maddening expressions of futility that I've come across.

My high score is right about 22.

Not to be a fanboy, but...

I'm turning into a fanboy. The gf has taken up loving the television show Smallville, and I, therefore, have taken up loving the television show Smallville. Luckily, her roommate has purchased seasons 1-4, which means that we get to watch all of them. We are only on season two, but it's a pretty fun watch for the most part, except for the fact that I hate the main character. I have illustrated this thought below:

Seriously, Clark Kent is stuck in Smallville with two super attractive girls, and either one of them would take him in a heartbeat if only he'd grow some cajones.

See attached math problems.
1) + = FREAKING HOT!!!

2) + = ALSO FREAKING HOT!!!

I understand that later on in the series there is another young lady that could also be the object of his affection, and still he's a big doof of a losery loser boy, which is similar to any author of any blog who posts about something as trivial as this. See the next equation 3:

3) +blog+too much time=big doof of a losery loser boy.

In case anyone's still reading, it just makes me furious! Pick one of them! They're hot! You're Hot! Be hot together!

That is all.

NO!!!!

Today I came to work early (6:15) to get some training done for my new position as the person who is training me comes in really early (4:30) and believes that this time would be the very best for me to learn how to do my new job.

This is fine, you know, whatever. She's a pretty funny lady, and training is going pretty well now that I have a better grasp on what it is that I will be doing.

Nonetheless, our department received an email this morning advising us that, should workload permit, we are free to leave at three o'clock. This means that most people get a couple hours of non-worked paid time.

At this point, I would just like to re-itterate the fact that THIS IS THE ONLY FREAKING TIME I'VE EVER COME IN BEFORE EIGHT, AND THIS IS THE DAY THAT WE CAN GO HOME EARLY.

So, I will work my eight hours and call it a day, I guess, and perhaps remind fate that the next time it tries to screw me, I'll be ready.

It continues

The protest, I mean.

The thing about Islam is that we, or at least I, don't know which people are the fundamentalists. In America, if we hear a televangelist say something, we can oftentimes dismiss it. However, with Presidents W Bush and Clinton repeatedly saying that Islam is a religion of peace and it's just the super conservative sects that are violent without helping us to understand who the super conservatives are, we are put at a disadvantage to truly understand which people to dismiss.

I suppose you could assume that the ones calling for deaths to the infidels are the fundamentalists, and therefore dismiss them. But, it seems like there's just a huge number of people calling for deaths of the infidels. Whole countries like Iran seem to advocate murder.

Perhaps the stories are just exaggerated in the media. A couple of years ago, I had the good fortune to visit Israel for a week and a half (my brother is currently spending a semester over there). If memory serves, while I was there, there was, from what I learned from the news, a fairly substantial riot not too far from where our group was, and we didn't see or hear anything. It is possible that our guides knew about the incident and kept us away from it, but we didn't hear any gunshots or screams, which led me to believe that the uprising was not as substantial as the news led me to believe.

I don't know though. A million and twenty-five thousand dollars and a car to kill somebody...it's almost like it's game show. It's almost cartoony. It's definitely surreal.

Does anybody else think it's odd that there are still protests going on about this?

THIS is it

This is not nearly as cool as I remembered it being, but here it is none the less. I finally found it on the internet.

AnalystCatalyst:1 Internet:0

Also, does everybody remember that in the cartoon Scrooge actually swam in building full of gold coins?

Does everybody also realize by now that if you tried to dive into a pile of gold coins you'd probably kill yourself?

I pose these questions because I, as a child, wanted a huge building with a dollar sign on it full of gold coins to swim in. Well, I guess more than swim in them, I wanted the power that such riches would afford, like buying any Nintendo game I wanted.

I'd like to make a side comment here that when I prayed as a child, my prayers were basically two lists. The first list was that God would keep everybody I could think of safe (mom and dad and brother and grandma and grandpa and grandma and grandpa and great-grandma, etc), and the other list was asking for everything that I wanted, as if the creator of the universe had nothing better to do than to be my own personal Santa Claus.

But I digress.

When Scrooge is getting all of his money stolen in the cartoon movie (I had a wasted childhood, I know), did he really think it was a good idea to keep all of his gold in the aforementioned building that had a big freaking dollar sign on it?

How did he get all of his money if he wasn't any smarter than that?

Now, with that said, I promise I'll lay off the Ducktales.

In other news, I am going to the Symphony again tonight, and I will enjoy it.

Suicide Recipe

And I'm not talking about mixing all of the different types of soda at the buffet (except for diet: that would be gross).

Take one part me being trained for a new position that I just don't understand yet, add two parts of the person who used to fill this position getting trained for a new position and not having time to train me, and bring to a boil with a customer calling four times today requesting something that we usually get to them much earlier in the month and saying things like, "It never used to take this long before" and "You'll get it done by close of business? How about in five minutes?"

Serve over ice, and just shoot me in the back of the head already.

News Link

What is interesting to me about this is that the same people who thought that it was perfectly reasonable to call French fries "freedom" fries are probably going to be the ones who think that this is the most ridiculous notion a group of people could muster.

I also find it interesting that an unflattering portrait of Mohammed in a cartoon is tantamount to blasphemy, while using his name in conjunction with a tasty treat is perfectly reasonable.

I suppose that the reaction of the Moslems would be similar to the reaction of Christian groups if a cartoon with Jesus lifting up his robes at at a playground showed up in the NY Times or Washington Post, except instead of burning things, Christians would spew vitriol on tv, and most everyone else in the country would make fun of them for not getting the joke.

It's all right. This is America. It's okay to make fun of Christians. But all other religions need to be treated with amazing grace and respect, as is evidenced by the apparent refusal to publish these cartoons in America.

The Daily Dump had a funny post about the cartoon and subsequent protests that is worthy of your consideration as well.

EDIT 03/09/06: Since the link no longer works, the news article was about how the Iranians had stopped calling Danishes "Danishes" and had started calling them "Roses of the Prophet Muhammed."

An Open Letter to the Man Who Made my Quesadilla

Dear Sir,

When I ordered my quesadilla with sausage, spinach, and jalapenos this morning, I anticipated that that latter ingredient would be sparsely populated like a meeting of the "Paris Hilton Embodies Wholesomeness Club." Boy, was I wrong.

In the quesadilla you made, there was a whole layer of jalapenos. Eating this quesadilla was a test of my pain threshold. Why, oh why did you put so many on here? Is that the way you would like your quesadilla? Cheesy and painful?

My initial response was akin to the fat extra's response to his car getting messed up in The Big Lebowski: "You kill my @%$#ing car? I'll kill your @#$#ing car!" except less funny because I am not as fat and not in my boxers, and this was more about tongues than cars.

I expect an apology and, once my mouth heals over, another quesadilla that is especially delicious.

Your Friend,
Analyst Catalyst

In Case Anyone's Counting

As I cannot find the picture that I'm thinking of, and must therefore either be crazy or confusing two different video games, I submit this picture from a different video game that would be my portrait should I win all of the money on either game show:

This is an especially opportune picture as my name is really Maude. It is also fortunate in that is has always been my dream, once rich beyond my wildest dreams (which is apparently to the tune of eleven grand), to purchase a large golden dollar sign and to stand upon it smiling with wads of money in my hands.

But seriously, for those of us who grew up playing this game (Monopoly) on Nintendo, Maude was a computer generated opponent who I always chose to play against because she was beautiful and I had no friends. While playing, I stuff stuff like, "You want my Park Place and Boardwalk for Baltic? Well, normally I wouldn't, but you've got a face I can trust. Just promise me free passage and a little kissie-poo, and it's all good."

Sadly, she often reneged on these deals, especially because there were no promises of free passage that you could actually transmit through the game system. I suppose it's pretty obvious that the kisses never came to fruition either.

Now that the game is old, however, and I am still in my (relative) youth, perhaps I can be the Harold to her Maude! Excellent!

p.s. If you get that last reference, good for you. It's mighty obscure, at least in my mind.

A couple of sites

I just found these sites, and couldn't be more moderately pleased.

The first shows you a satellite picture of whatever address you put in, and for homes, tells you how much they are worth.

The second is a blog about one of my favorite books, Freakonomics, by one of the authors.

Ah. New ways to misuse time.

Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune

I just applied to be considered as a contestant for both of these shows. This is my second go around for Jeopardy, but my first for Wheel of Fortune. Should I manage to get into one or both of these over the next year, that will greatly advance my lifetime goal of retiring at the age of twenty-four.

Did anybody play "DuckTales" for the original Nintendo system? I couldn't find a screenshot, but when you beat the game, it shows Scrooge sitting on top of a giant pile of gold coins. I don't have time right now, but if I can't find it tomorrow, I will submit this artist's rendering of what it would look like

Mmm...gotta get me some of that! That's the retiring at a ridiculously early age that I'm talking about!

The Symphony

I had the good fortune to go the San Diego Symphony last Friday night. They are a wonderfully talented group of musicians, and I am rarely disappointed when I get to go see them. I was particulary looking forward to this concert because they were playing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the second movement of which is one of my very favorite pieces of music. Seriously, if you have not heard this piece of music, I insist that you walk, nay, run to your local purveyor of classical music and purchase it. It should be noted that it is unacceptable to drive because music grads are elitist and want everyone else to have to work for beauty.

However, in the first half of the program, they world-premiered a new double concerto (which for you non-music majors is a lot like a symphony except that it is a platform for virtuosity through instrumental solos: a concerto would have one soloist, a double concerto two, etc.) that, although I laud them for their showcasing new music, kind of wore me out. Perhaps I'm a musical Philistine, but I have a difficult time with both new music and opera, albeit for different reasons. New music seems to rely too much on innovative techniques as opposed to relying on actual music.

At this point, let me state that by new music, I mean most all "classical" music composed within the last sixty to seventy years. Let me also state that I don't think it's bad or anything, I just don't understand it yet to the point that I can really enjoy it.

Having said that, I think the gf made a good point about when she said that there were a lot of good musical ideas, they just didn't form a cohesive whole. So, if the double concerto were a paragraph, it would look like this:

The Piedmont is esteemed above all for its red wines. I fell down at school the other day. WHAT A GAME! My hunger to succeed feeds at my very soul. Why on earth would you wear a bonnet when it's 1995?

All of those sentences work in the appropriate context, but together they make something that your average bowl of alphabet soup would dream of creating.

The most obviously innovative aspect of the performance was that at certain times in the second movement the composer titled something like "The rose dying", the percussionists took to ripping apart pieces of colored paper. This was effective aurally, but it was also effective visually, and it was here that I took offense. It seems to me that music needs to be essentially aural: Nietszche says that "In music, the passions enjoy themselves." He wrote about music in great lengths (dang loquacious syphilitic Germans), and his basic idea about it was that music was the most perfect art form because it was the most personal. That is, any music (without words) will create a unique response in the listener greater than any other medium due to the fact that you can only hear it; something you cannot see or touch but only hear will elicit a different response in every person who comes into contact with it. I say all this to say that by giving the listener something to watch other than the orchestra, the composer is taking a purely aural art form and making it visual. Perhaps blending sensory perceptions was his point, but to me, it was an innovation that didn't need to be made in the realm of symphonic music.

You readers may respond however that "This composer has written more music and been performed more often than you have, so it would perhaps do you good to take some notes from him and not to throw stones."

Duly noted.

Statistics

The company tracks us in the programs we use here by our user name, and based on this information, they can tell how quickly or slothfully we're doing our jobs. For the last couple of months, however, I've been doing work under other people's user names due to high stress deadlines and whatnot. What this means is that my boss thinks that I'm working hard, but he has no quantitative evidence to prove it.

Excellent.

This site is cool!

And by this site, I mean the one that you are on!

But seriously...

I love books, but more than that I seem to love purchasing them. Case in point, I have an overflowing amount of books and I believe that I have probably read or used for my purposes (i.e. for research) maybe thirty percent of them. And even that figure is a very, very, very liberal estimate. A more conservative estimate is probably half of that. This is not a good thing, especially if you have to move around very often, and especially not a good thing if you would like to have money for meals. My analysis of the situation is that this is my great pretention in life in that I expect people's response to my collection to be something like:

When in reality it is generally more like this:

And that is honestly the truth, folks: I opted out of having a dresser in my room so that I could have more books in it. However, to be fair, the dresser was pretty broken, and so it wasn't making much of a case for me to keep it.

In any case, I found this today, and I'm already considering purchasing at least one more book that I most likely don't need.

Sigh. When will I ever learn?

The Experiment, Day 4

I went to the gym last night and weighed. My new weight: 253! That's down three pounds in as many days! That's incredible! I will perhaps have to continue the experiment another week to see if I can keep the weight loss going, although I have a sneaking suspicion that my metabolism will slow down to a grinding halt if I continue this intense of a low calorie diet, and then I will be not eating what I want to AND not losing weight, which would be the worst of both worlds. But for now, I'm content to give it a go for another week, although for lunch today I will be having a sandwich and some soup in celebration of the weight lost (which is, of course, the dumbest way to celebrate weight loss: by eating).

Jamba Juice Update: ESPECIALLY DELICIOUS NOW THAT IT MAKES ME LOSE WEIGHT!!!

An Open Letter to the Gambling Community

Dear Gamblers of the World:

My girlfriend recently received a bonus for a job well done at work. It was my suggestion to take it to the nearest casino, put it on black, and then have twice as much of a bonus. This was a suggestion to which she refused to acquiesce.

How can I convince her?

Love,
Analyst Catalyst

This seemed appropriate

Your Job Dissatisfaction Level is 49%

Well, you don't have the worst job in the world, but it's not great.And don't worry, you're not the problem - your company is.Start looking around for another job, even if you're not totally fed up.Because in time, you're going to be dying to quit!

Should You Quit Your Job?

I also recommend the "At what price would you sell out for?" I would for about 350K.

The experiment 3

Jamba Juice Diet, Day 3: DELICIOUS AGAIN!!! Man, I just need to get the Strawberry Surf-Rider every time. It's like there's a party in my mouth and everybody's invited!

And here is a link to the site that I got the above cartoon from.

The Printer Here at Work

There was about a day back there when we couldn't print the invoices that we send to our customers because our printer was out of toner. We got a new toner cartridge, but now it leaves BIG FREAKING BLACK MARKS ALL OVER THE INVOICE!

How this must come off to the customers is something like, "Uh, can you give us thousands and thousands of dollars? Don't worry about those black marks, they're not important; we're entirely legit."

The Experiment 2

The Jamba Juice diet is going well, although my zeal for the deliciosity of said beverage is waning a bit. My attititude has changed from "DELICIOUS" to "DELICIOUS--but do you realize that you're mostly just eating liquid? That's right, eating liquid...I know it sounds dumb." I feel like I've lost weight though, and my clothes already fit me a little better. There has been no chance to re-weigh though, since I haven't been back to the gym I was at on Monday; I went to a different location of the gym yesterday. It has been my experience that the scales from gym to gym are calibrated differently, and this is a scientific experiment: the data must be precise.

My biggest problem with dieting in general though, is the fact that I just love to eat. Sweet foods, salty foods, sweet and salty foods and so on all have a place in my heart (which is apparently in the arteries). Perhaps I do eat too much; I am sometimes concerned that Kevin Spacey's character from SE7EN will cease being fictional and come and make me a pasta that I can't refuse. Food is a wonderful treat for me.

I love preparing it:

I love cooking it:

I love smelling it:

And I love eating it:

To conclude this nonsense with your obvious questions, 1) Yes, at my house the stove magically appears after food preparation, 2) Yes, I prefer to cook with a giant mushroom on my head, and 3) Yes, it is my preference that all food that I prepare be amorphous blobs.

I'm doing an experiment

I've decided to go on a Jamba Juice diet for a week. The premise is remarkably similar to the Slim-Fast diet: a Jamba Juice for breakfast and lunch (with at least one of them being one of their new low-calorie ones and usually the other one being Strawberry Surf-Rider...mmm...) and then a reasonable amount of just about whatever I want for dinner.

I figure it can't kill me to try it for a week. I'll keep the results posted.

Yesterday, I weighed myself at the gym and weighed 256 lbs. This is down from the 261 that I weighed at the beginning of January, but I attribute most of that weight lost to having a cold in January and not having very much of an appetite.

The gym weight is my weight with clothes but without shoes, and it's my weight at night, so this is running contrary to my mother's advice of always weighing in the morning as that is when you are lightest. We'll see what I weigh tomorrow.

My job

My boss just asked me to submit an application for a full-time position with the company, as opposed to my current temp position.

I'm excited, but somewhat worried about the future of my creative life. Oh well, the pay is good, and it's nice to not have to eat dog food.

Pat Sajak

I was going to post on how Pat Sajak's skin is very tight, and when he smiles on Wheel of Fortune, he looks kind of like what I would imagine a troll would look like when said troll was asking me for my bag of gold as I tried to pass over his bridge. But, in doing some research to make fun of the man, I learned that he had served in the military in Vietnam for a couple of years. Because he is a veteran, I opted against it.

That is all.

Coffee

When I got up a moment ago to get coffee, I expected to get coffee and not what is apparently liquified baboon butt. However, now that I know what I am drinking, I will continue to drink it as I am still cold and this is not the worst baboon butt I have imbibed.

Wuh?

So last night, the gf, I, and two of our friends with their baby (who's pretty freaking adorable) went to a semi-pretentious restaurant, as we are all semi-pretentious people. Well, I guess I can't speak for the others, but I myself am very pretentious in that I like Radiohead and I go to this restaurant.

But seriously, this restaurant is what a restaurant would look like if Marilyn Manson were an interior designer and also a cowboy. I mean, where does one even get black urinals? My buddy pointed out that it's disconcerting to not be able to see one's own urine. And it is. I myself stood in the restroom for at least 8 minutes wondering if I had, in fact, gone to the restroom.

Anyways, this restaurant was, as semi-pretentious restaurants often are, fairly pricy, but that's all good because the food is served less on what you would call plates and more in what you would call troughs. Another aspect of dining that makes this restaurant unique is the BIG FREAKING BRANCH of rosemary that is customarily stuck into or otherwise incorporated into every dish on the menu. I wondered if the restaurant was pro-republican, and this foliage was their silent way of supporting Bush and still drawing in their, most likely, extremely liberal clientele.

Touche, Hash House, touche.

In all seriousness, the meal was very delicious and mostly reasonably priced other than the barbecue sauce that I misguidedly asked for. I thought that it would make my meat loaf extra special delicious, but it ended up being an additional charge on the bill. It was just a couple of bucks, but even so, charging for a condiment seems in poor taste, no pun intended.

P.S. If you are a friend of mine or the GF's, and still have not received a Christmas present, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. Rest assured that one will be on the way soon enough.