The Nightmare Before, During and After
‘Twas a wrong time ago, longer now than my screams,
In a place where an asshole concocted his schemes;
For the story that you are about to be fed
Took place in the shithole where I was made dead.
Now you’ve probably wondered where happy hate comes from.
If you haven’t, I’d say it’s time I flung dung…
Yo. Halloween approacheth and that has got me in a festive mood. So I’ve begun work on a holiday movie of my own. I just wrote the poetry above for the intro scene. Grammar be damned. I’m going after a mood.
If none of this makes sense, no worries. None of it makes sense to me, either. I’m just doing the best I can.
Proximo has got to go
Wow. I can see my office from here.
Imagine, if you will, a workplace that is roughly the size of a shipping container.
Oh yes, oh yes. Another good time work post is upon us now.
I previously reported on my discovery, the 666 equilateral triangle. It’s a place where dreams go to die. In short, it works like this. I sit six feet away from cow orker. Cow orker sits six feet away from the boss. The boss sits six feet away from me.
Technicolor? Bah! Imagine Fart-O-Vision where you get to experience the subtle nuance of every biological function of your neighbor. Good times, indeed!
It’s enough to make one go barking mad, but I, of course, resist that with all my might. That’s why I’m still completely sane.
So, in honor of Friday, the most deceitful day of the week, I merely have a quick question to ask.
In this post I’m going to refer to my boss as Proximo, mainly because, as he interfaces with my existence, he is so proximous.
The first part of the agony is a function of time. I spend more time at work than doing anything else in my life. (Source: This nifty little graph.)
That only communicates part of the story, though. The other half of the misery equation is one of proximity.
I’ve thought about this and realized that my current situation is truly unique. At some jobs the boss didn’t even work in the building. It would be a big deal when the boss stopped by (almost always by “surprise!”). All the employees were like, “Oh shit. The boss.” It changed the feel of the environment. My last asshole boss lived a mile away from the office, worked from home, but liked to jaunt over unexpectedly quite often, even though he didn’t like being there very much. I guess the necessary evil of fucking with the employees outweighed his distaste for being in the shithole. He’d usually flee as fast as possible after he had made his point.
At one place where I worked for 16 years and over 1,000 employees, the CEO liked to stroll around as part of tactic to be seen as accessible to employees and interested in every part of the operation. I knew the guy because we’d been on some committees together and had worked on a few projects. He’d stroll by and say, “Hi, Tom.” I knew I wasn’t about to get fired but it still somehow felt like it. The CEO walking by and saying your name wasn’t something that happened all the time.
Or the boss worked out of sight in an office around the corner or across the floor. The boss would occasionally stop by from time to time but certainly wouldn’t stay there all day long, day after day, every single day of your life.
I literally spend 40 hours a week six feet away from the boss. He seldom, if ever, leaves that space. It’s his clubhouse, his sanctuary, his home away from home. It is where he goes to escape his wife. It is the one part of his existence where he is the boss. His word is law. (Unlike his home life.) So he just loves and adores being there.
His wife will call him and try to make plans. It’s pathetic to listen to him tell her how busy he is (he’s not) and how he has to work late. He loves to work on Saturdays, too, and bitches when a holiday comes along and forces him to spend more time with his family.
Me? All I think about is escaping that fucked up place and spending every other precious moment of my life with my wife. Another thing I realized lately was that I would never trade places with my boss. (Is that like a positive thought?)
Our workstations are L-shaped so that I can’t see him unless I turn around (thank God) but he can view me and my computer screen without me being aware. My computer is in his line of sight. I know that arrangement is no coincidence. Six feet from my office chair is his office chair.
A great decorating idea for the office restroom.
Here’s a nice little bonus. When he gets up off his ass and goes to the restroom and sits on the toilet, he’s still exactly six feet away. You see, my workstation shares a wall (decidedly not a soundproofed one) with the office bathroom. But I think I’ve already expounded about that enough in the past. (For the curious, research my posting history if you want to know more about what the boss in the restroom is like. Bring a strong stomach.)
So yeah, I’m within six feet of the boss for just about 40 hours a week, every week. It’s like clockwork. I don’t even get a break from him when he goes to the bathroom. And I realized that sort of boss proximity is completely unprecedented in my experience. Does anyone out there have anything even remotely like this?
Worst Movie Bosses
Ha ha ha! I'm the boss of you!
Ever since I reviewed the movie Horrible Bosses this last Monday, I’ve been thinking about bad bosses as portrayed in the movies. You’d think by now I’d be an expert on this but I kind of struggled. I couldn’t think of very many.
Of course, the first one to come to mind was Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. I’ve seen that movie so many damn times. Lumbergh is a classic boss, always moaning about “TPS reports” (whatever the hell they are) and trying to get employees to work on the weekend. He’s not a very good listener, either, and becomes nasty when the consultants he hired turn on him. LOL!
Other than that, the only other bad boss I could think of was the Meryl Streep character in The Devil Wears Prada. Yes, I’ve actually seen that movie, but I barely remember it. Sure, she seemed like a biz-natch to have as a boss, but, deep down inside, didn’t she really care about her worker? After all, she told that other company they’d be idiots not to hire her and then there was that smile at the end of the movie that told us she was nice. You know, deep down inside. Not that it may have matter by then.
That was about it. That was all that came to mind. So I turned to the internet. Ah, I found something called “The Top 10 Worst Movie Boss” on Spike.com. Now we’re talking. Let’s see what they thought of that I didn’t.
Continue reading →
Spam hacked from the Abyss
Just an FYI in case you didn’t already know…
I don’t email people in my address book with bullshit links to bullshit “Make More Than $12,000 a Month” websites.
E-V-A-R. Ever!!!
Like always, the evil is out there, pounding against our shields 24/7, probing for weakness, looking for cracks, hoping to real in another sucker stupid enough to fall for their lies.
This morning my Hotmail account was apparently compromised. When I started receiving quizzical emails from my friends, I knew something was up.
I suspected it was a spoof – just emails when that had been faked to look like they came from me. Still, it made me curious so I checked my “Sent” folder.
Holy shit. This morning between 6:23-6:24am my Hotmail account was used to send 15 fake emails that contained links. In the name of science I tried the links. They led to a website on a bullshit domain name. The page was copied from NBC news to look like a real news story, and proclaimed the awesomeness of making more than $15,000 a month.
Nicole Williams of , never thought that she would consider it, until curiosity got the best of her and she filled out a simple online form. Before she knew it, she discovered her secret to beating the recession, and being able to provide for her family while at home with her three children.
Apparently the page is supposed to be customized with the city of the victim, but in this case, the hackers were incompetent.
Anyway, this is just an FYI to my online friends to reassure you that I don’t send shit like that. I used a secure password but apparently it got hacked. I’ve already changed it.
I love it when the universe notices me.
Stick it to the plan
Where am I going
How do I get there
What should I bring along
Are people kind there
Is peace of mind there
Will I finally belong
Cause you know ships sail their courses
And heroes ride horses
They know where they belong
But I travel in circles
Quickly to nowhere
Singing my unfinished song
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself – Well… How did I get here?
Once In A Lifetime
From the moment we are born, everything conspires to fill our heads with the word “should.” Our parents, the environment, and all of the other people how come and go in our lives essentially program what we know, who we are, and even influence that which we desire.
Boys like blue and play with trucks. Girls like pink and play with dolls.
At some point, though, after enough growth, the individual can exceed the sum of their parts. They can question anything they want about their own life. Is the religion of my parents, the religion I’ve known my whole life until now, is that the religion for me?
As you get older, you want things. Perhaps you want a flashy car or you want to get pregnant and have baby and/or rush out and be married. Do you ever stop to wonder, “Why do I want these things? What is it about these particular things?” Is it truly what I want or just the predictable output of the programming I’ve experienced since the moment I was born? How much is really me and how much is just random chance because I ended up in this part of the world and with these specific people?
You may find yourself getting out of school and taking one of two common paths – Jumping right into more school or going directly to work.
Perhaps you’ll become independent and established and have your own home or apartment. You’ll populate it with possessions and begin taking on financial obligations and debt that make regular income a very important part of your life. The more you owe, the more you have to work. Unless you are one of the few to be independently wealthy, that means you’ll be working a full-time job, perhaps more. The more you own, the more you work, and the more you want, and the more you consume. You may find yourself in a cycle where it becomes very hard to break free.
At some point you may realize you aren’t doing what you want at all. You might be doing what everything but. You may have been deceived by the should.
Lately, following the death of Steve Jobs, there has been a lot of blather about being that square peg that refuses to be placed in that round hole. Be different. Be unique. Be someone who changes the rules and changes the world. Refuse to conform. Write your own destiny and never compromise, never do what they tell you.
I can’t help but wonder. How easy is that? What would that world look like? What if seven billion people collectively said, “You know what? I’m going to do what I want. I won’t let anyone else tell me what to be.”
I don’t imagine that world would have very many ditches.
So what is your life path plan? Besides finishing high school and going to college and/or getting a job, what are these other paths? I see kids these days dropping out of high school and not getting jobs. They just sort of flounder, either living off mom and dad or bouncing from place to place, using it up, then landing somewhere else.
I don’t imagine they put a lot of thought into their future or any sort of planning on where they want to go. They just sort of exist. But what if they tried? They are actively rejecting the traditional life paths that most of us took, so what are their options to go forth and be different?
In the movie Into The Wild (based on true story) a young man graduates from college as a top student, gives away his possessions, donates $24,000 to charity and then hitchhikes to Alaska. Now that is a person decisively making a choice and deciding what they want. True, in the end, it didn’t work out quite so well, but the boldness of the choice is breathtaking. Could I do something like that? I highly doubt it.
Another year has passed me by
Still I look a myself and cry
What kind of man have I become?
All of the years I’ve spent in search of myself
And I’m still in the dark
‘Cause I can’t seem to find the light alone
Sometimes I feel like a man in the wilderness
I’m a lonely soldier off to war
Sent away to die – never quite knowing why
Sometimes it makes no sense at all
I can understand that some kids may want to reject traditional dogma and decide their own fates. But how many possible life paths are out there? What is it they can really do to achieve what they want? If they reject the traditional 9 to 5 what will they be doing instead?
I can respect a non-traditional choice as long as it is conscious, not drug-induced, and makes sense on some damn level.
I really want to know.
Shouts from the Abyss 
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