- His verbal diarrhea is suddenly replaced by verbal constipation.
- His internal monologue is suddenly externalized. He's heard muttering to himself throughout the day.
- When asked how his weekend was, he emits a loud moan and goes back to what he was doing.
- He glares at his coworker when "Manic Monday" comes on her radio.
- The bags under his eyes are large enough to double as change purses.
- He's 10 pounds lighter than he was on Friday.
- He fell asleep on the subway to work...standing up.
- His voice sounds exactly as you'd expect after yelling for 16 straight hours.
- He's constantly texting some random dude he met over the weekend.
- He slightly alters the lyrics while singing along to "Sexy Back"
- He absentmindedly puts his water bottle in his back pocket as he walks about the office.
Well looks like my pays-too-little but easy-going job is crapping out some fringe benefits. A client of ours from New York has asked my employer to fly me down for a little event she's doing.
As someone who's barely been anywhere his whole life, this is wet my pants level exciting.
Now comes the hard part: I have to get my freaking passport. I have six weeks or so. Should be okay, I think. But I'll have to pay extra to get it rushed.
The event is on a Thursday, so I'm going to ask them to book my flight back for Sunday. You know what that means. Party weekend! I'll have to arrange my own accomodations for the weekend, so I'll probably go for a hostel. More money for partying, right?
Anyhoo, if any of my dear readers can recommend some good clubs in the big Apple it'd be greatly appreciated. Requirements:
- House or trance music
- Hot, shirtless, gay men in my age bracket. It doesn't necessarily have to be a gay club. New York's answer to the Comfort Zone would be the bees knees.
- Must be a drug club where drugs are easy to get relatively inexpensively
- Must be after-hours
Every so often at work I have to pretend it's 1989 and saunter up to the fax machine. As I approached the discoloured piece of arcane technology yesterday I leafed through the small stack of junk faxes, as I often do.
Honestly, why are people bothering to send this 20th century version of spam? Do people trust some random ad they get through their fax machine. I mean, at least with email you can reach millions of people pretty quickly. With a fax you can send, at most, one per minute per phone line. Wow.
Anyways, as I was idly perusing the junk yesterday, I spotted something a little more entertaining than the usual vacation packages and Nigerian scams. Take a look at this (click to open full-size):
I don't even know where to begin poking holes in this thing. But let's give it a shot.
They increase their odds of winning by playing "intelligent numbers"...umm, what? As in some numbers are more likely than others? That's fundamentally not how the lottery works. They're all equally likely, stupid. The only way to beat the lottery is to rig it, or get unbelievably lucky. It's not a charity, folks.
It's said that the lottery is for people who suck it math. I say this is for people who suck at life.
They're pretty smart about the way they present it though.
WE HAVE ONLY 20 POSITIONS LEFT !!!!
YES! OVER 80% ARE FILLED
DON'T LOSE OUT FOR EVER
See the whole limited-time offer thing is smart. Creating a sense of urgency makes people act before they think.
Now the problem is thus: It costs $10,000! I would really like to meet the person who has $10,000 yet is stupid enough to fall for this half-assed scam. If you have ten grand in the bank and you can't see through this, you don't deserve that $10,000.
In fact, I'm not even going to condemn the scammers, because the holes in this are so obvious that anyone who falls for it must be blinded by greed or incredibly stupid. I bet if they made it $1,000 to enter they'd get a lot more takers.
Regardless, it's nice to see some home-grown Toronto scams for once. At least the money's staying right here, am I right? That's gotta be good for the local economy!
One final word to anybody thinking about contributing to this "plan." If you're going to flush $10,000 down the toilet, at least do it in style. Rent some hookers, order some blow, and take it all on a flight to Luxembourg. Go on a bender to end all benders. Then you can look at your empty bank account and say "I may have wasted a ton of money, but at least I can't remember a fucking thing!"
I'm sure you're all wondering why I've suddenly disappeared off the face of the blogosphere. Well, turns out that when I hooked up this weekend I got more than just laid. I haven't been this sick in quite a long time. Seems like a high price to pay for sex.
So I missed work today. Really, I should've called in Tuesday and Wednesday too, but for some reason I felt so damn guilty even though I was actually sick. It's not because I'm particularly honest. Hell, at the bank I never used sick days when I was sick. If I was already miserable I might as well be at work, right? Why waste a sick day on being sick?
The thing is, my boss wouldn't care if I called in sick. She's so laid back that for some reason I don't want to take advantage of that. Even when I'm sick as a dog. It's kind of perverse really. I mean even if I weren't sick, we know everybody uses sick days as a sort of personal day, right? It's an unspoken agreement. Sometimes we just need a rest. Hell, I don't qualify for vacation until November people.
By the way, walk-in clinics suck. I really enjoyed my 3.5 minutes with the doctor. Way to earn your $200, ass-wipe. Makes me miss the smarmy British doctor from my hometown. At least he'd make a little small-talk first.
But in a way this is sort of a blessing. When you're sick, all your other problems seem smaller, less important, and entirely surmountable. Health is something you don't really appreciate until it's gone, and once it's back everything else is just gravy.
On the other hand, this happened literally seven days before my drug plan kicks in. You win this round, god!
Despite many similarities to Initech from Office Space I really, really like my job and I'll tell you why.
Theoretically I start work at 9 AM. The first three days this week I arrived at 9:30. On Monday my boss and the other girl on my team both "worked from home", which is code for "do other stuff but return to check my email every 90 minutes." Tuesday I was the first of the three to get to work, and on Wednesday I beat my boss but not my coworker.
Notice a pattern? This place is slack as all hell. In fact I'm writing this blog post on company time.
Not to say I don't do my job, I do. My boss knows that no matter what time I get here, I'm not going to leave if there's something that needs to be done. So in exchange for her not caring if I'm late, I don't make a fuss if I have to work until six. And I have, many a time.
Needless to say this is an uber-refreshing change of pace from the call centre panopticon I was stuck in before. That's right my boss actually trusts me to do my job, you know, like an adult. Oh, and I also don't have some stupid schedule that tells me when I can have lunch. Nice, eh?
It might sound pretty basic and not all that exciting, but to someone fresh out of school that's used to crap jobs (and being hated by his boss), it's the bees knees.
Now as I've said previously, this job pays for crap. In fact, I took a pretty decent pay cut from my horrible bank job. But can you put a price on a boss that gets you two pounds of gourmet cookies for Christmas when you've been there for three weeks? Or a boss that drives your coworker to Winners to get some new clothes when she gets here soaking wet from the rain?
Now like I said, this place has some Office Spaceish qualities. It's a software company with about a billion cubicles and a very generic name. It's an in industrial park. In fact, I think if I had a different boss here I might hate the job. The work I do isn't particularly interesting or exciting. But when you get the sense that the boss is on your side, how bad can it really be?
