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.