Punchy Friday & Office Pet Peeves

Before I commence to grousin' about work, let me start off with a dash of positivity.  The best thing about my job (aside from the $$)  is my gaggle of work pals and the oddball banter that can erupt between us.  Now, on Mondays I am no good for banter...I pretty much have the disposition of a wet cat and it's advisable to just leave me be. But there is some good banter to be had Tues-Friday and I definitely  peak on Friday...when I am feeling the "punchiest"

Lemme make with some examples and I do so hope it will provide somewhat of a voyeuristic thrill...

 Bookish banter with Paul...he was stunned by overhearing these 2 coworkers chat about the 50 Shades of Grey series and one of these ladies remarking that these were the first books she's read since high school...

from a week or so ago...

Ok , ok, ok chortles aside...onto the rants.  Here are some of the things that most irk me about life on the cubicle farm...

Mass lunch orders-- I admit, this is a weird thing to be annoyed by.  So the scenario is this-- I get an idea of where to go for lunch (I am struck with "LUNCHSPIRATION", as I call it...yes I really do call it that)  and I mention to my good pal Rox "I wanna order Cantore's to deliver. You in?"  Invariably, Rox proclaims loudmouthedly "WE'RE ORDERING LUNCH FROM CANTORE'S!" The immediate result is about 20 "Oh me too!"s.  The time I intended for my break  is swiftly  approaching, but I've not ordered yet, because Pam & Joanne are looking over the menu, and oh-- maybe Shawna wants to order too.  And, natch, there's a dozen quirks & codicils to Pam's order and Shawna's totally MIA. Then, when everybody's made up their minds, somehow, I wind up with all the cash, doing the ordering.  Someone's order gets fucked up, someone else thinks I tipped excessively...BAAH. Lunch is NOT supposed to be so high-pressure.  I've trained myself now...I will actually email to Rox "I'm getting Cantore's for lunch.  You can order too, but KEEP YOUR DAMN MOUTH SHUT ABOUT IT"

This is even more crotchety of me-- I hate passing around cards for people.  It's not that I don't wanna impart get well wishes or happy birthdays.  I just hate how the circulation of the card devolves into a disorganized clusterfuck.  What they ought to do is..if there is a Happy Birthday card for Joanne, send out an "Email All" email, then open up the distribution list and delete Joanne's email address from it, then broadcast "There is a birthday card for Joanne at so-n-so's desk.  Stop by between now and 3pm on Friday to sign.  We will be giving her the card at 3pm Friday when we have cake in the lunchroom." But that is not how it's done in my office.  They oh-so-cleverly put the card in a manila folder and someone signs it...gives it to another person to sign...and it gets shuttled around the office thusly.  Oh sure, that sounds simple enough, but it always gets to a point when, the card is getting pretty loaded up with signatures and it takes a bit of figuring to see who has & hasn't signed it (to determine whom you should pass it along to) And often you wind up with someone wandering down the aisle , a daft cow, saying "Did you sign this? Did YOU sign this? Card for Joanne--who needs to sign it?"  So me, I get the card and I just take a moment and  figure this out by reading.  Often, I get these cards to sign before Paul will (probl'y 'cause many in the office are put off by Paul). So I would sign, check & verify that there is no Paul scrawl and carry it next door to his desk to him.  He always would sign it and then just immediately bring it right back to me. GRRRRR-- did that burn my toaster strudel!!  I put that in the past tense, because this pattern has ceased.....well, I just don't give him anything to sign anymore.

I also get annoyed by the lack of resourcefulness in my office.  I get the sense that there are just three, maybe four of us who get how to look up information on the internet. It is way more commonplace for somebody to just bellow "WHAT'S THE PHONE NUMBER FOR THE RANDOLPH SENIOR CENTER??"  Are you for real that unevolved? Seriously????

And lastly, but not at all leastly, I am probably getting an ulcer from all the piss-poor spelling & grammar in my coworkers' emails. It aggravates me THAT much.  Proofreading is a dying art form. It really is sickening.  I am even more appalled when I see such sloppiness in management emails.  Dammit, I expect a modicum of education and literacy apparent in folks that make 4X what I do.  Oh, and all of the emails from our intake department are IN ALL CAPS. ALL THE FECKING TIME.  Sometimes a rookie to the agency will question why that is and the explanation often  given is something to the effect of " Oh, well, it was decided , for consistency's sake, that all the case notes they input in the system, would be in all caps".  Now that is the popular wisdom, but I  never give that answer.  That is a BULLSHIT explanation!! Unacceptable!! If you can't figure out how to disengage your caps lock or if you find disengaging and re-locking too labor intensive well...you are seriously fucking impaired in my estimation.

They Say You CAN'T Judge a Book By Its Cover...

and yet I always do.  I WILL buy the occasional trashy historical romance but NOT if Fabio is on the cover.  You can always pick out a chick lit book (a genre I generally avoid)without reading the jacket copy because of the fonts & palettes they use on the front.

Ahhhh, but they don't make covers like they used to, dammit.  Here are some favorites I found on the site Cover Browser. The website is just covers of magazines, games, comics, & books--very simple but thoroughly  enjoyable. It is probably the best site ever for mindless 'net meandering, because you hardly have to do any reading or thinking at all.  The pissah of it is, half the time I plug the URL into my browser, it won't load. It's sickly, that website.  Luckily, I am sharing a goodly number of faves (in the hopes that my smartass captions will suffice for a proper post.  I am ever so blogstipated. SORRY)  so maybe you will never need to peruse Cover Browser. Although... I did just focus on trashy book covers here and the website has quite a lot of comic book covers to explore.  (Parenthetical tangent here-- I am a wannabe comic book nerd.  It seems to me like comics woulda been a neat thing to get into..'cept I never did. I consider delving into it, but then think....WOW, there is such a long and complex  mythos for DC, for Marvel...and that's not even tapping into all the indie publications.  At this stage...I obviously didn't catch any comics ab ovo,  and it is just NOT humanly possible to catch up....MASSIVE undertaking, that.  So fuck it. ) (Tangent PS: that whole rant also applies to why I never watched Lost) 

If ever you do scope out the comics covers on Cover Browser, seek out the lone  "Cap'n Oatmeal" cover.  It fascinates me immensely.

Back to my looong-abandoned segue though.... Ahhh, book covers....not what they used to be, friends....

No sarcastic remark to be had here...just sayin'--I HAVE THIS MOVIE. Oliver Reed is in it and I watch anything (pre 1980) with him in it.  He and Alan Bates are my weird retro-active Brit actor crushes

Aaaghhhh--PINCH!!! INJUN SUNBURN!! How dare you steal my cap??

I was compelled to set this as my desktop pic.

One of the racier Harlequin Books, I'm sure....

Yah, some girls at the club will let anybody & everybody grind up on them. Slut. Ew.

these three are not so campy/pulpy...merely examples of good graphic design that I like

Odd book title...makes one wonder what the plot is all about. How does this cover relate? This first thing to spring to my wicked mind is : "C'mere baby, I'mma bury my banana in them melons"

So "Brokeback Mountain" wasn't all that groundbreaking after all, huh?

Are they wielding cheese graters as weapons? Who grates gorgonzola? Well you can tell by their attire that they are idiots.  PS: nonfiction factoid: I looove me some gorgonzola cheese.

Welcome home, HUN. How was pillaging today?

It was bad of me to laugh. But-yes-I did laugh.  This reminds me: there needs to be a word made for meaning "laughed against my better judgement".  Y'see..there are different words for different types of laughs. A "guffaw" for instance,  is sort of a boisterous belly laugh.  But there needs to be a laugh-verb for the type of laugh you do when you laugh against your better judgement.

I'm not sure I get what a train has to do wi--  Ohhhhh, CLEVER.

"....And that mysterious menace is gonorrhea"
Mostly I zeroed in on this cover because the title brought to mind Astronaut Jones, and ohhhh how I luv me some Astronaut Jones!!

Behold (and excuse the horrid quality )--

Not sure if "One Too Many" refers to girls or alcoholic bevvies but whatever the case I can tell by Blondie & Skunkie's overt scoffing that it has resulted in impotence.

"Ohhh, if I could fly.. I'd lift YOOOU up...I'd take you into the night, and show you a love..like you'd NEVEEER SEEN.." Oopsie--my bad,  that's "OUT of the Night" is it? Well, 'tis no wonder my brain went right to Soft Rock...that guy looks like an old mythical Kenny Loggins

Again these three are just ones that I especially like...

MUCHO Gothic....I dig that!

 

And THIS is precisely why I go by "Sandra" exclusively. So many distasteful connotations to "Sandy". Well, there's Annie's dog, for one. And it appears that human Sandys are even worse: loose moralled, inept buttoners.

They are SO hot right now. Not just for masochists anymore. Real Simple did a 4 page spread on Torture Gardens in their May issue, actually!

Yeeah, so  a lady in my office sells Avon on the side, and it doesn't seem to be half so adventurous as all this!! Either the gig has changed a lot since the 60s, or this AVON book is recruiting propaganda thinly disguised as a work of fiction..

I really do find that good manners take the edge off of burning mortal hatred...

It appears the day-glo orange valance matches the day-glo orange curtains, so the carpet, must...  ah, well, you know. Redbeard is WELL FIT, ain't he?  Hubba, hubba..it's not for nuthin' that the severed head was the last thing I  noticed in this tableau.

OH GOODNESS!! The rohypnol wasn't supposed to wear off until we hit Mars. Take a sip of this White Russian, sweetie...

Hunhh..funny. She does NOT strike me as the type that would knit sweaters for her dog.

LOVE and FURY, is it? Reeeeally? You couldn't guess it by this pair-- she looks disgusted and he just looks QUEASY

WOW. Ummmm..words fail me. I got nothin'.

Diversions....

I do believe I mentioned  the excellent website Futility Closet in my prev. post.  Well here's some scraps of knowledge/info I've culled from the Closet as of late...

1. While I have, on numerous occasions, heard the expression "running around like a chicken with its head cut-off", I never knew there was once a famous chicken doing just that until I read the legend of Mike. Ohhhh, but were I woman of means, that could scrape up travel funds at a moment's notice I would ABSOLUTELY call out sick for the rest of this week and trek out to Colorado so's I could attend this weekend's Mike the Headless Chicken Festival in Fruita, CO.  It looks to be pretty rad.

2. I also discovered the oddity that is Dion McGregor this week.  I didn't read about anyone (the press or the public) trying to expose him as a fraud, but when I heard what his schtick was, I immediately thought :HOAX.  I don't want to be, but it really seems that I AM a born skeptic.  Anyway, phony-baloney or no, if you check out Dion McGregor's "works" on YouTube, it is apt to plant some crrrrazypants dreams in your melon. Behold--


Seriously, I could not decide which vid to share(and by that I mean which one was the most remarkably wackadoo). "Don't Break the Mailman" & "Dear Uncle" made me laugh. "The Wagon" is a tad NSFW.

3. I have gotten into browsing the FC collection of riddles, and making myself solve them without just clicking through to the answer like some kinda mental sloth. The math ones I still stay away from...I am of the view that only the most DEPRAVED of masochists would divert themselves with algebra exercises. I like the logic puzzles, and I usually need to doodle out the solution with some sort of diagram or grid.  I am possibly a good visual learner...perhaps this is why I did so lousy in Algebra I & II (scraping by with Ds every term)  but somehow managed an A+ in Geometry.  Someone said to me that that means I am right-brain dominant, but I think I've read before that that whole "right-brained" "left-brained" classification of folks gets sloppy & oversimplified.  I just feel I need some tangibility to my math, otherwise, I can't fecking cope!!  Anyway, I like a good logic puzzle. I got a nice ego boost from triumphing over The Zebra Puzzle when I spied the footnote appended to the answer reading--
"If you succeeded, congratulations — purportedly only 2 percent of the world’s population can solve this puzzle."

I did struggle and diagram for a couple of hours, but still ....that stat seems bogus.  Although it may be true that only 2% of the world's population would bother solving the puzzle. Now, that's MUCH more plausible...