Stupid People

There was a study that stupid people are more likely to rate themselves as being smarter than those around them.  The intelligent people walk through life assuming everyone else is as smart as they are and being constantly disappointed.  The stupid people walk through life smug and content.

It's a depressing confirmation of the fact that being smart really doesn't get you very far.  I mean, genius level fine,  you'll probably do okay - although, we really have no idea how many geniuses are just stuck in their parents basements, incapable of life, so maybe not.  But just your everyday, garden variety, above average intelligence isn't much of a boon.  Idiots prefer idiots, and it doesn't pay to be the only person in a meeting who wants to gouge out their eyeballs.  People can tell.

But then I think, am I the stupid one?  Is it possible I am so stupid I can't see that other people are smarter than me?  When my peers discuss how fat our erstwhile accountant Donna is, and wax poetical on the nature of said fat, am I actually bored of a conversation that is just over my head?  Maybe Donna's fat is a metaphor for something - the emptiness of life or the futile nature of our jobs.  Maybe I am the stupid one, not understanding the social rituals of my tribe.  Maybe it's just me.

Hobbies

It's time I took up a hobby.  That's what my wife tells me every time she catches me staring morosely into space, wondering if it's too early to drink a beer (it's not).  I usually nod my head at her seriously, like I've already begun thinking of what this hobby should be, like I'm sifting through a list in a my head - parasailing, duck hunting, trinket making...

Obviously I'm not going to do any of these things.  There's no point to it, there's no end game.  I don't even like duck.  But I will concede there is a certain boredom in my life lately, more so than usual, and it's become clear, at least to me, that it's time to have a child.

I've found the generally accepted consensus to be that having a child should not be a goal pursued for your own selfish amusement - but why else would you have one?  How does one unselfishly have a child?  It's a non-entity that you are choosing to bring into existence because you happen to feel like it, which seems pretty selfish at the core of it.   But maybe people believe that by procreating they are giving a gift to the world, a gift of superior genes, empathy and intellect?  That's just disgusting.  I'll pitch it to my wife.

Crush

I have a crush on a co-worker.  I say "crush" because it sounds more gentlemanly than wanting to bang the shit out of someone in the bathroom.  Either way.

I'm fairly sure she had a crush on me at one point - with or without the secondary meaning.  I think this because she got drunk at an event a couple of months ago and tried to kiss me.  It was the culmination of everything I've ever worked for in my life but the act took me by surprise and so I wound up dodging her head and then exclaiming "Wow you're drunk!" I still haven't quite forgiven myself for this, especially not on days she wears this ridiculous white dress that's kind of, maybe see-through a little.

Anyway, now she avoids me and I stare desperately at her ass whenever I have the chance.  That is the sum of our relationship all because I fucked up the last chance I'll ever have to sleep with a woman other than my wife.  It's going to be just me and my wife, again and again, until we die.  Unless I hire a hooker.

Interviews

Sometimes I like to send out my resume, book an interview, and then call and cancel it.  It gives me a sense of control.

My Career Aspirations

It's not really what I think of as a party, but I guess I was at a party yesterday.  At some point, "party" stopped being code for the purposeful overconsumption of alcohol, followed by mutual groping or good-natured vomiting.  Now it's a small gathering of upright adults, with everyone trying not to seem drunk while drinking.  Everyone has internalized this new definition except me.  Subconsciously, I'm always anticipating a night of nauseous debauchery which explains my inevitable disappointment once I arrive to parties nowadays.  People mostly talk.

So last night I was at a "party".  In the middle of polite conversation with some lonely looking people, one woman asked what I did.  I told her.  I was feeling reckless, so I added, "And I hate it."

I thought this would get a laugh or at least a sympathetic smile, but it appeared I had severely misjudged my crowd.  There was only a strained silence.

"I hate my job," I repeated, causing my wife to blink at my rapidly.  I make her nervous sometimes, with my sudden honesties.  "I'm looking for a new one."

I smiled politely at the frozen people.

"Well, what are you thinking the next step is?" a man named George finally inquired.

"Sending out my resume." I was annoyed by the obviousness of this.

"No no - I mean, what are you looking to do?"

"Oh you know - " I waved my hand dismissively.  "I figure I'll take the job that offers me the most money."

George nodded in a concerned sort of way.  "That's it?"

"Yes," I said, though I supposed as a middle-aged man there ought to be more on my agenda, like saving the whales or acquiring a particular job title.  But there wasn't, so I confirmed, "That's it."

Later my wife told me she had never met someone else who could appear gauche, insecure and arrogant all at the same time.  I thought of reminding her of a certain incident at her bachelorette party - I was fairly certain bargaining down a stripper who didn't care to show his balls was both gauche, insecure and arrogant but in the end, I wasn't sure.  Besides, I've been married long enough to let some things go.

Mid-Life Crisis

The day I turned nine years old, I realized that I was almost ten, but had done nothing with my life.  My youth had been wasted, I was sure.  I felt a sort of emptiness and despair as I opened my presents.  What did I have to show for my elementary school years?  It was an early mid-life crisis that continued fairly unbroken for the next thirty years.

Generally, it's helpful to have had so much practice with mid-life crises.  I'll think my life is over and it's all meaningless, life is just a series of days you spend behaving and then at the end of it all you go, "Fuck," but then I'll remember - I've been feeling this way since I was nine.  How serious can this feeling be?  I've been dealing with this shit my entire life, it's just a fucking feeling.

But then sometimes I'll veer into a more pessismistic reading and think, holy shit, I've been feeling this way since I was nine.  I'm going to waste my entire life, thinking that I'm wasting my life.  What the fuck am I doing?  It's very meta. 

So when that happens, I pick up smoking again.  I tried to explain all this to the wife when she caught me hiding behind the shed in our yard with a Camel Light, but she seemed to not see the connection.

The Wife's Diet

The wife is always dieting.  Well really she's always talking about how she's dieting, refusing to come with me to get bagels and then getting drunk at 5pm and eating all the bread in the house.  I suppose that counts.

But instead of making her feel better, giving her some sort of sense of control - or release with the bread? - she just whines on daily about how fat she is, how much cellulite she has.  I mean first of all I didn't even know what the fuck cellulite was until she told me about.   It's not like I'm sitting around looking up pictures of cellulite on people - something my wife does by the way, for unfathomable reasons.  And now that I know more about cellulite than I ever thought possible, I still don't get the big deal.  Meanwhile my wife was born with an innate knowledge of what cellulite is and also the belief that it is shameful.

When she's been looking at pictures of celebrities in bikinis, or God forbid US Weekly has come out with its beach bodies edition, the wife will refuse to have sex for at least a week.  She won't even want to be touched, instead preferring to run the streets like a homeless animal for as long as her body can physically stand it.  Then she'll come home to stand in front of the mirror, dripping sweat and squinting at her thighs.

As a bystander in the Great Cellulite Battle, I understand that there are two things which I am never to say out loud.  One is that my wife may have been a fun crazy drunk in her twenties, but she was never a beauty. Fine looking sure, but she really wasn't all that much to look at, plus she dressed like a homeless person most of the time.  Where is this vanity coming from?  Who the fuck cares about her thigh dimples?  I keep this confusion to myself.

The other thing I never say is that the running and the dieting don't affect her cellulite, not even a little.

Sick Days

I have come to expect that any assistant of mine will take sick days when he's feeling perfectly well.  Assistants are loathe to use vacation days, God knows why.  They're like squirrels saving nuts.  So instead of coming to me the day or week before and politely asking if they can use one of their two thousand vacation days, they sit on their hands until the day in question and call in "sick".  Usually on a Friday.

But it's fine.  I am a man of realistic - some would even say limited - expectations.  All I ask is that a person inform me of their "sickness" by 9:00am and cough a little when they're back in the office to maintain the charade.

At first I thought you understood these implicit rules.  You played by them so well.  You called in sick - on a Friday of course. You whispered convincingly, as though the pain of your illness was almost too much to speak through.  I liked that touch, and told you to feel better.

But then Monday, I heard one of the girls in the cube farm sneeze.  And then cough.  And then sneeze again.  Frankly, it was irritating, because can't any of you take a sick day when you're actually sick?  I went over to tell her to leave for the day.

"But it's just allergies," she told me.  "I get really bad allergies, but I haven't been sick in a really long time."

"Me neither," you chimed in, poking your head over the cube wall.  "I never get sick."

I stared at you.

"It's true," you assured me.  "I never get sick, I can't remember the last time I was sick."

It was a gaffe of enormous proportions, made worse by the fact that you stood there grinning at me, expecting some sort of praise or show of astonishment at your indefatigable health.  Had you forgotten you had called out sick?  What mechanisms were working in your brain?

It was too much to sift through, so I turned, went back to my office and shut the door, leaving you looking hurt at my refusal to acknowledge your incredible immune system.

Drinking with Colleagues

There's something about waking up hungover and finding that five of your colleagues have friended you on Facebook.  It feels good but also bad, and then you vomit.

Going for drinks with the office used to mean letting loose a little, letting your hair down, maybe making out with the hot chick you're always seeing by the copier.  Now it's all fear and side glances while you remind yourself not to mention how much you hate the company, or the whole industry really, or maybe even just the world.

But then you do.  You mention all of it.  I mean really, you spend thirty plus years training your body to think it's okay to do whatever the fuck it wants once some liquor is in it and then suddenly you're expected to maintain your professional integrity while bonding with the team over tequila.  It's ridiculous!

You can take a certain solace in your friend requests the next morning, but it's a mixed bag - you've achieved a certain popularity within the team, but also a greater likelihood of being fired.

My Wife Is Depressed

The wife is depressed.  It's one of those things.  You think you're going to be terribly sympathetic and understanding when confronted with someone's supposed mental illness, but then there you are, calling someone's mental illness "supposed."

Being around a depressed person is a lot like being around a sad person, except a sad person still has to go to work and show up places where they said they'd be.  For a depressed person, it's just too much to ask.  They have to do exactly what they want to do at any given moment.  This is the only way they can survive and fuck you for not understanding.

No One Likes the Posters

I heard you talking about the posters. While I admit that hanging visual representations of our company's core values in the elevator banks is completely fucking ridiculous, your smug attitude about them is really no better.

"I can't believe people really buy into this," you muttered to yourself while waiting for the elevator, then gave a nervous smile when you saw I had appeared behind you. "I mean," you said, "Maybe some people need this encouragement…" I stared at you and we rode to the lobby in silence.

While I can almost appreciate your point of view as I too sometimes feel that I am the only sane one here, I am not nearly egotistical enough to really believe it.  We all think the pyramid is shit. I would bet you that even the guy who designed it, thinks it is shit. There is probably one person in the entire company who doesn't think the pyramid is shit and even he has his suspicions. So your amazement at these posters' existence, with its implied condescension at all the assholes you work with, is frankly, irritating.  No one believes in anything here, certainly not the posters.  We're just getting through the day, just like you.

Company Values

The company has hung poor replicas of the food pyramid in every elevator.  But instead of nutritional information, these sad signs are apparently meant to illustrate the hierarchy of our company's values.  It looks just like this:

But with "integrity" forming the base instead of whole grains.  I would have appreciated some originality - overlapping circles or something.  Now every time I leave work, I'm hungry, the shape working on my subconscious.

I have no idea why our parent company felt the need to remind us all that our core value is "integrity".  I don't even know what the value of integrity means.  You can be a serial killer and maintain integrity by continuing to kill people.  It's a nonsense value.  The entire moral code of the company is resting on something meaningless.  If some inspired higher-up did this intentionally, well, my hat's off to them.

Job Search for Managers

Part of any job is spent looking at other jobs online.  Everyone knows that.  And it's fine when you're an assistant.  It's soothing.

But one day you'll realize that the job descriptions you're mindlessly scanning are actually in your field.  Instead of the whole search inspiring strange fantasies in which you're suddenly working as a video game programmer, you'll find yourself just picturing doing your job somewhere else.  For a moment this will depress you, but then you'll think Maybe I should actually apply to one of these.  

It's a bold idea, and you'll be worried that the new job wouldn't be any better than your current one.  Maybe it would actually be worse?  You'll check the salary range and realize that the logic of market valuation dictates that the job would have to be worse to in order to merit higher pay.  And if you're currently not having children because your wife insists you'd need more money for their demands then any additional income you accrue would be earmarked for a diapers savings account or lamaze classes or a bigger apartment or cribs - and how does that incentivize you to move to a new, worse, job?  So some tiny creature can sit in an overpriced chair while barking demands at me in its tiny creature language? It's like Communism!  The more I make the more I will have taken away!

And that is why I am still at this shitty job.  It will happen to you too.

Lying in an Interview

Everyone lies in interviews.  If you accuse them after the fact, people say "Oh no, I didn't lie, I just exaggerated."  Whatever, you lied.  It's fine.  Everyone lies.  I lied to get this job.  In my interview, they asked if I had ever worked with some obscure computer system and I said fuck yeah and I was hired.

I experienced some mild panic over the lies I had told, but then I did what any sane person would do and Googled everything.  When I came to work I had at least some knowledge of what I was saying I was an expert in.  And I have never been found out, effectively transforming my lies into truths.

Now you on the other hand.  I remember your interview.  You were so calm, so self-assured, but just nervous enough that I didn't think you were an asshole.  You told me how much you liked problem-solving, how great you were with numbers, how just totally fucking smart you were.  You were a breath of fresh air and didn't look like you were about to cry, which is more than I can say for the girl who interviewed before you.

At this point you've worked here long enough for me to realize that your interview was either a once in a lifetime fluke, or you are a sociopath with different personalities.  And I've been moving towards accepting that.  I'm working through it, it's a process.  However, when I hear you say, just outside my office door, in casual conversation with an intern, how much you hate problem-solving (who the fuck SAYS that), how horrible you are with numbers, and how, overall, you consider yourself pretty dumb - well, this is a new level.  You are a whole fucking new level.

Assistant Appreciation Day

The company has an Assistant Appreciation Day, which I usually find….you know, fine.  It's fine.  If everyone wants to have a party because a group of people do their fucking jobs, that's fine with me. 

It only mildly irritates me that I am expected to actually attend Assistant Appreciation Day.  I mean, do I make all of you assholes come to Management Appreciation Day?  No, of course not.  It's a trick question too, because we don't even have one.  The most appreciation I get is pretending I don't know you all hate me.

But I'll go to Assistant Appreciation Day.  I'll show up and clap for you poor schmucks and smile over my whiskey.  Maybe there are hardships of the assistant job that I don't fully understand, maybe fucking up someone's coffee order every day takes an emotional toll, I don't know.

However, when my boss comes downstairs and tells me that not only do I need to attend Assistant Appreciation Day, I need to leave the office at 3pm to be there on time – all because of you, because you are my personal assistant and it would apparently mean something to you if I was there for the entirety of the festivities – well, that is where I draw the line.

Up until then you had helped me in absolutely no way and been a personal pain in my ass.  The one item in your favor was that you had not actually negatively impacted my life.  You'd been a moot point, a zero, a burden to the company, but mostly a wash for me.  It was like I had never had an assistant at all.  But now the very person who was hired to make my life easier, the very person who was hired to ASSIST me has instead started to IMPEDE me.  Do you see the total illogical nature of this?

Because of your day in which I dutifully showed my appreciation by drinking Johnny Walker Blue, I was forced to come into the office over the weekend.  This is something I have done many times before, but never with so much resentment. 

Cost/benefit analysis of you:

Benefit: None
Cost: My time on the weekend, the $200 tie on which a woman from accounting spilled her Cosmopolitan.

The Good Mood

Yesterday I went home feeling that we'd had a good day.  You seemed to understand the words that came out of my mouth, something  I had long ago stopped taking for granted.  You seemed to be listening, sort of.  You seemed to almost learn. 

It meant something to me.  It meant maybe you could stick around.  It meant maybe I wouldn't have to fire you, an unfairly intricate process which involves recording every time you fuck something up - a task which frankly, can get exhausting. 

But then I realized that I had come into the office with uncharacteristic good cheer that morning.  After my generous and inexplicable purchase of coffee and doughnuts for the team, I had exhibited patience, forbearance - maybe even kindness - as you told me precisely what you didn't understand about your job.  As I explained the finer points of Excel for an hour or so, I spoke with the attitude of a teacher speaking to his most treasured pupil.  You sat there wide-eyed, eating doughnut after doughnut as I held your hand through each step of the way.

In retrospect, you didn't learn any faster, or actually help me, or really do much of anything besides eat the free doughnuts.  I was the one with the great attitude, I was the one laughing off the fact that you had been faxing papers to clients upside down for a month.  So our great morning together was only a result of the fact that I woke up still drunk.  It seems the only way this relationship can work is if I am constantly drinking whiskey to the point of vomiting each night - unfortunately a pipe dream.

Assistants Are Hired To Do the Things I Hate

"Man, I really hate doing the quarterly reports," you sighed.  I looked at you in utter shock.  Not because of the sentiment - everyone hates doing quarterly reports - but because you thought I would care.

What did you want me to do?   Tell you that I would do the quarterly reports?  To not trouble yourself with such things?  That you should try to, oh I don't know, run the fucking company while I personally deal with the billing discrepancies?

I wish I had more quarterly reports to give you.  I wish I could make you do quarterly reports every day, all day.  I wish I could explain to you how many fucking quarterly reports I've made in my lifetime and how completely done I am with them and anything that even says "quarterly" in its title.  But instead I just nodded in a disinterested fashion, knowing that we will never get along.

"Thanks," I said, nonsensically.

The Stress of the Job

Today my colleague asked me, quite casually, how you were faring.  I said fine.  What was I supposed to say?  That I've been working, on average, two extra hours a day since you started?  So I said fine. 

But then the woman clucked at me, like I had said something awful.  "What?" I asked.  "Can't you see when someone is stressed?" she said rhetorically.  I frowned at her.  Stressed?

I decided to clear things up.

"Are you stressed?" I barked in the general direction of the cubicle farm.  You poked your head around the flimsy wall which interrupts my view of the office floor, but said nothing, damningly.  "You really don't have to be stressed," I said, and you smiled at me like I had said something nice before disappearing back into your 6x6" box.  I frowned, realizing that I should have been more clear.

What I meant was: Your work here does not merit being stressed.  Were you to disappear on your next lunch break, we would all survive.  I'm sure the receptionist would worry a bit, perhaps even send an email or two - maybe even call the cops, she's always overreacting.  But the company would go on as before and we'd replace you in a week.  That seems pretty low stress to me.

"See?  He's stressed," said my colleague, like this was somehow all my fault.

I really need you to start looking more serene.

My Assistant Cannot Copy Correctly

I handed you a binder full of documents this morning and asked you to copy them.  I was really quite excited when you responded by asking where a staple remover could be found.  It showed some initiative, some foresight.  There were multiple documents in the binder that contained staples and you had noticed that.  You had deduced, or perhaps learned first hand, that documents cannot be copied with staples in them.  Not well, anyway.  I was momentarily delighted with you and your precocious nature. 

Sadly, when you returned the documents to me, I knew I had misjudged you once again.  They came back to me unstapled, out of the binder, and in slight disarray.  I looked at them, then at you in disgust.  "Thanks," I said.  I considered making you staple them again.  After all, how else will you learn that documents should be returned to their natural state after manhandling them?

But I didn't think I could handle any more disappointment.  I flipped my tie over my shoulder and started to staple.

I had it done perfectly in fifteen minutes.