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At work, I’ve taken to writing individual tasks on spiral-bound fluorescent index cards and discarding each as I finish the task. The cards are quite easy to see and I’ve inadvertently given my boss a way of tracking my productivity. Today, I’d been in for a few hours and only had gone through two cards and a coworker gave me a hairy eyeball. After leaving, I threw about a 1/2 dozen empty cards in the recycling bin and received a much more approving look later.

I think I’m going to set aside six or seven cards to throw out and reuse daily to maintain the minimum appearance of productivity. Luckily, this is a new task each time, requiring anew card, further padding my excellence. I’m a f#$%ing genius.

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I’ve taken to bringing my portable hard drive to camp to play music and today I left it plugged in over lunch.  I came back and it had deleted a whole bunch of “virus threats”.  The anti-virus had deleted 1/2 my cracking and hacking tools as trojans and exploits.  Since when did anti-virus tools work?

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There’s a paper shredder in work.  An industrial paper shredder to be exact.  It can take about 20 sheets at the same time and chews through both staples and paper clips, despite being clearly labeled to the contrary.  But I can’t quite master its usage.   It can be clogged but seemingly only by putting in the feed paper incorrectly.  If it’s cocked to the side, it’ll press against the side of the shredder and stop the machine.  The slot’s 14″ wide, but somehow every God damn time I put paper in it, it’s invariably drawn as if by magic to the size of the entry slot and jams.  People walk by and see the jammed thing and wonder how I could be so dumb as to fuck up putting a 8.5″ piece of paper into a 14″ slot.  Invariably, regardless of my attention or intent, the paper will practically run to the wall for the express purpose of jamming.  Other people, seemingly oblivious can put entire phone books through the shredder without an iota of effort or concentration.  Rat bastards, maybe this is printard’s molevolent brother shredtard.

Today I jammed the shredder with only four sheets of paper, four!

As an aside, I think it’s funny that we have a shredder that could eat plate glass and grind up automotive steel but we have to use a special device to destroy CDs which perforates the surface with a little star pattern.  Bad guys can apparently put CD shreds back together with the skill of an Iranian carpet weaver but can’t overcome star-shaped pockmarks.

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I’ve been speaking with the Hispanic custodian around lunch every day, and most of our conversations center on trivial things as I really don’t know enough Spanish to ask him his opinions of Hegelian dialectics, but for about the last month, he’s brought up the same damn topic every day: Do I like the taste of cats.  I haven’t been able to switch the topic so every day we’ve talked about various cat sandwich toppings as I’m conversant in Spanish food.

Until today, where he pointed at the window at a woman walking past a car. And asked “So, what do you think of my (word I couldn’t identify)?”  I had no clue as to whether he was talking about the woman or the car.  Both were quite… well… warn “played” in the vernacular of card condition so I had to find impartial responses that could apply to both, how long have you known each other, is it better than your last one and are you having fun with it.  I hope we return to discussing eating cats shortly because I insult his girlfriend or more dangerously, his car.

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There were a lot of streaks on the floor today from someone’s shoes, I asked and the co-worker I recently can’t stand cut in with the following:

Him: They’re probably yours.  You’re so fat you can’t help but leave shoe marks.  It’s ok, Terry.

The oddity was, that immediately before he said this, another coworker admitted that she had streaky shoes but he decided to advance his theory any way.  I look forward to more of his awkward and idiotic claims about the influence of my carriage on the surrounding environs.

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There was a woman in work today from the UK who sat behind me at lunch.  She was rather well spoken but kept confusing the differences between British English and American English.  She’d say a word followed by “What you call a” and then some horribly antiquated term for the same.  Here were my favorite three:

Example 1: You’re prescription costs are terribly high here, I went to the pharmacist, or what I believe you call a compounding apothecary and I had to pay double what I normally do.

Example 2:  You have some fine clothiers in Princeton, or what I think you call a haberdasher.

Example 3: It’s much cloudier or as you guys say obnubilated than I thought it’d be.

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My co-worker out on maternity leave has become the proud mother of a healthy baby boy.  As is tradition, the office in boxes were spammed with descriptions, health updates and pictures.  One of my co-workers without Internet access came in, saw the plethora of messages, read them and then shouted “yes!”

Me: So, happy for her and her child.
Him: I’m mostly happy for her child.
Me: What do you mean?
Him: The baby’s name is James.  That’s a normal name.
Me: So.
Him: Every member of her family is either named after a virtue, prophet or Biblical king name, maybe he’ll be the first one in his family to turn out normal.

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I found out the security captain at work was the one responsible for giving our new ID badges.  Time for a complicated scheme to get him back for stopping me from stealing scrap on Friday…

I walked over to his office holding my ID badge in its plastic case by the extensible part that attaches to my belt.

Me: I’d like to get a new plastic case for my badge *Hands captain badge holder, he grabs it by the large part that contains the ID*
Security Captain:  *Flips it around in his hand* Nothing looks wrong, why do you need a new case?
Me: I dropped the part that contains the ID into the toilet before flushing.

He nearly fell off of his chair in the process of throwing the badge at the garbage can.