A joke

One day the he-boss at my office job announced that he had heard a good joke.

Q. What do you call a hot Lebanese girl?

A. As-if!

Hilarity ensued! And by hilarity I mean I stabbed myself in the leg with my pencil.

My boss.

Office culture

Some days it seems as if everybody I work for is crazy. That’s quite a lot of people. But by far the craziest of the crazy bosses are the bosses at my office job.

They’re a middle aged married couple, of the rich-but-tacky persuasion. She’s a bleach-blond lush with a weight problem. He claims to have lived a life of wildly improbable adventure, encompassing travels with head hunters in Borneo, working for the US military and falling off a really high mountain.  When cornered, all anyone can do is smile and nod as this pudgy, socially awkward programmer spins what I’m almost certain are fantasies.

The pair of them rule the office with an iron fist. Below is a list of things I have been formally told off for in the three months I’ve worked there:

*Wearing sneakers in the office.

*Wearing trousers with a ragged hem.

*Arriving late.

*Forgetting stuff.

*Leaving things on my desk at night.

The offending items were listed  in an email as follows:  teabags, hand cream, painkillers, documents and a water glass.

*Looking bored in a meeting.

* Wearing my iPod while doing data entry.

*Agreeing with a senior staffer that a certain task was boring.

*’Unilaterally’ finding myself some work to do during a dry patch.

In my past life, I was an adult.

*Playing Scrabble on my computer.

Truth be told, that game is like crack for nerds. I can’t go an hour without a hit.  So maybe I’ll let them have that one.

I could see their point, if this were how Scrabble really worked.

The cumulative effect of all these tellings-off is that I constantly feel like a clumsy, slightly rebellious adolescent. Every time somebody cracks a joke about the time I wore sneakers to work, I’m suddenly fifteen again.

Perhaps the craziest thing about my crazy day-job bosses is that they’re big into feng shui. See, our office is pretty bad. It’s small and cramped, the toilets smell and when a flourescent tube blows it generally stays out for a couple weeks. There’s no parking, most of the door handles are stuck and the black and grey colour scheme would depress anyone. The solution? Hire a feng shui expert.

We have fake flowers, big rocks and a statue of the Buddha. We also, for some reason, have Norah Jones and Seal on constant repeat over the PA.

Some days, I wish I were dead.

The working week

I have a couple of regular jobs that keep me in rent and beer. One is a part-time gig as a DVD reviewer, which pays peanuts but keeps me well supplied with free movies. It’s also kind of fun seeing my articles pop up in all kinds of weird places after they get syndicated.

I’d be happy enough to stay a lowly critic, if only I could make a living off of it. But in the nine months or so I’ve been doing it, I’ve never once earned enough to pay the bills. Which leads me to my regular gig – the office job.

If I behaved this way at work, I'd be fired.

Nine to five, Monday to Friday, I’m a reader at a media company. I read newspaper articles, blogs and broadcast logs about car manufacturers, government agencies, finance companies and the like, and help quantify what’s being said about them in the press. It is indescribably dull. In fact, it’s only the bizarre and oppressive office culture that keeps me going sometimes…