work

A few weeks ago I wrote about how annoying it is to get an “affirmation cookie” instead of one with an actual fortune. Well at lunch today one of my co-workers got what we thought was a horribly rude fortune cookie. Instead of the usual mindless drivel, instead of even a useless affirmation, the “directive” cookie he received at California Wok read, “Work on improving your exercise routine.” Ouch.

More proof that Los Angeles is the world headquarters for Club Awesome™: In how many other cities can you get to the office one day to find you’re now working in Madonna’s crotch?

For lunch today a few of us walked next door to the new Brazilian restaurant that opened this week. It is literally in the building next to my office, so the bar at The Sampa Grill was the absolute closest place we could go to watch the second round of the Masters. The style is Churrasco, which basically means a tremendous amount of fire-cooked meat. I had pork, chicken, some sausage, and three different flavors of beer beef (typo!). I also had a salad and a bowl of soup. Even though the food was fantastic and all-you-can-eat, at $22 (including a Coke and the tip) it’s a bit pricey to become a lunch-hour standard for us. But it was definitely a nice Friday afternoon treat. Too bad Tiger didn’t seem to be doing so well.

A year or two ago I was returning to my office from lunch with some co-workers. I spotted an old, rusty, razor blade on the sidewalk. “You don’t see that every day,” I said. In retrospect I was probably wrong. Everyone likely sees dozens of rusty razor blades on sidewalks and in gutters every day. We just don’t notice them. That’s not the point. The point is that I told my friend, Jon, that it would make a good domain name. “You should register rustyrazorblade.com,” I said. And he did. Now, if you’re looking for an esoteric, complicated, intense Apache and / or MySQL resource, it’s the place to go. True story.

Awesome. When I woke up today I thought to myself, “I really hope that there is someone pounding on the other side of the wall behind my head with a hammer all day.” It looks like my wish has been granted!

At some point in your life, you’re going to be asked to find a bat stretcher. This is a terrific story.

I’ve gone through this experience myself, so I know the feeling. It happened to me while I was loading trucks on the midnight-to-ten shift for Old Dominion Freight Lines. One of the dock managers told me that I had about 30 feet worth of furniture to load onto a 28-foot trailer, and that I’d better find a trailer stretcher in time to get the truck on the road.

I’m also ashamed to admit that I’ve done this to every new guy at almost every place I’ve ever worked. At Infosearch Media we told junior tech support guys to find a cable stretcher. When I worked for Regeneration Technologies we told fresh meat that we had to find bone stretchers. When I rowed for Florida Crew we told the rookies that the only way they’d get to sit in a boat was if they found a rigger stretcher. Even at Subway we used to tell kids that the sandwiches were too short and they had to go grab a bread stretcher.

Late Friday night I finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. This one’s been in my personal queue for several years; I sort of randomly found it on the shelf while looking for something to read on the plane to New York last week. It’s a psuedo-scientific exploration of what it’s like to live on minimum wage in America, and I can’t say that I was very impressed. Ehrenreich is a competent author and she weaves a half-interesting tale, but as a Democratic-tainted exposé it was nowhere near as good as Rivethead or any of Michael Moore’s mockumentaries. More than anything it seemed like just a whining liberal complaining about how darn mean all those big corporations are. She comes down heavy on Wal-Mart — Who could blame her? — but there’s nothing earth-shattering in her story. I’ve worked plenty of minimum wage jobs in my day. It’s back-breaking and demoralizing and all that, sure. I know that. Doesn’t everyone? There’s just a lack of any true revelations or fact-reporting in this book for me to recommend it. If you want to read about the plight of the common American, the state of “the poor”, or anything truly brilliant concerning the U.S. economy you should grab P.J. O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich, Levitt’s Freakanomics, or Schlosser’s Reefer Madness. And this is as good a time as any for me to give another round of applause to Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox. Read that.

Generally I am sitting at my desk by five-thirty in the morning. I am always completely startled by the alarm at 4:45, as if it’s the first time I’ve ever had to get out of bed. “What the hell?!” I think, although I’ve been waking up at quarter to five since I graduated from college. I chug a glass of orange juice, throw on my gym clothes, and hit the road. I get to the office by 5:15 or so, boot my laptop, and decide if I should go directly to the LA Fitness a block from my office or reply to email for a little bit first. It’s a good way to start the day. Except for a few times when I’ve fallen off the workout wagon for a week or so (or, like, all of 2004), I’ve been doing something along those lines ever since I rowed crew at the University of Florida from ‘94 to ‘96. This morning I had to be somewhere in Westwood at 7:30 so instead of going to the gym I took Buddie for a run around the block. But most of the time I have the same routine.

It’s a rare day that I’m not the first one in my office. I am also, interestingly enough, almost always the last one in the office. So not only do I turn on all the lights every day, but nine times out of ten I have to roam around this huge building turning off all the lights every night. Turning on the lights in the morning never bothers me. I enjoy it, to tell you the truth. But when I’m tired and I want to go home, I hate — I loathe — the fact that nobody else ever turns off the lights when they leave a room. The conference room light is almost always left on. All the lights in the main sales rep area are left on. There are two or three managers who leave the lights on in their office every.single.day. The lights in both of the ladies’ restrooms are always always always left on.

It’s not huge. It’s not the end of the world. I don’t even care so much about the wasted electricity. I just hate having to walk through the building every night. When it’s time to go home, I just want to leave, y’know? </rant>

Last week while I was returning from lunch, I found a lost cell phone near Quizno’s. I scrolled through the contact list and called My Sister. My Sister said that the phone belonged to her sister and that she was probably very upset that the phone was catching rays, lounging in the grass instead of chillin’ in her purse. I told My Sister where my office was and that I’d leave the phone at the front desk. At some point My Sister’s sister came and got her phone and left me a Starbucks gift card. And the karma wheel roll’d …

In-depth reporting from Staples.com:
The Refrigerator: A Source of Workplace Stress

I used to work for a paging company about 600 years ago. InterLink Paging. This was back in the dark ages, when mobile phones were still the size of shoe boxes and it actually made sense to own (or lease) a “beeper”.

Anyway. We used to have a policy that a phone number had to be out of service for at least 6 months before we were allowed to give that number to a new customer. It made sense to me. Sure, every now and then if we were “low” on numbers - usually an order hadn’t been fulfilled by Southern Bell in time - we might assign someone a number that had only been out of commission for five months or something wacky like that.

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I have Papa John’s pizza on speed dial on my office phone.

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I drove over the hill and down into West Hollywood yesterday for an interview. At some point during my trip I topped 10,000 miles on my truck. After the interview I met my girlfriend at the Olive Garden and then we booked to the Kodak Theater. Our friends, Michael and Deanna, got us tickets to the taping of Barry Manilow’s concert. (He’s on tour promoting his new CD and his most recent greatest hits CD.) I had a great time. I’d never seen Barry live so it was quite a treat. He played a bunch of classics and it was cool because, since they were taping it, he kept stopping between takes to tell stories about the songs and ad lib. Our ticketed seats were up in the mezzanine but there weren’t enough people on the floor so we got to be seat fillers closer to the stage.
I highly doubt we got on camera, but you can catch the show on CBS next month.