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By Tgreen, April 27, 2016 11:11 pm

There came a day when a small web-based company of no particular note in a small city of no particular interest found itself on the brink of losing two of its biggest clients. The spark was gone, the work was bland, and the clients were cheap. It was a dangerous combination and the small company could not afford to lose both clients. It couldn’t afford to owe either one, really, but there was a secret contingency plan to lay off half the company and do some anonymous side work for one of the more reputable porn sites until better clients could be landed. The three execs who knew of this plan didn’t ever want to have to implement it, but each one of them had large mortgages and unhappy marriages to support and they were willing to sacrifice whatever was necessary in order to keep that money coming in.
One of the middle managers at the company, a harried man of 40 named Gil, took it upon himself to get an outside perspective. Since he didn’t know about the secret contingency plan he didn’t know that he was one of the lucky ones who would not be laid off. He also didn’t know that this would prove to be a mixed blessing because he was actually a paying customer of the reputable porn site in question and it would have taken no more than three days for this information to work its way through the now much smaller company. But without knowing any of this, he came to the office one day with a plan to fix things and a new consultant to potentially fix more problems in the future.
It soon became obvious that while his coworkers were happy to have the idea that solved the immediate client problem, none of them appreciated that Gil was now bringing in an outsider on a regular basis. Some of them didn’t want the competition and some of them were afraid the consultant would be able to take one look at them and see just his little they did anymore. And others just didn’t want to be bothered learning another name and sharing the office snacks and having another person whose weekend they now had to ask about. And so the first meeting with Lou the consultant went poorly. No ideas were shared and no weekends were laughed about and no plans were made to put together a Happy Hour to welcome the new guy.
Gil felt responsible for this problem, because he was, and so he set out to fix it. Since he’s fixed the original client problem, he thought maybe he was on a roll and it was probably best if he struck now while he was on a hot streak. He set out to gather his brain trust around him to come up with a plan on how to deal with Lou, realized he didn’t have a brain trust, and so he forced the people who reported to him to gather in a room late one afternoon to discuss the situation. Within minutes he learned that while the group had several different reasons for not liking Lou, the one thing they all agreed on was that Lou knew nothing about their business, and possibly knew nothing about any kind of business. Kevin, who’d taken on the role of ringleader at this meeting, kept calling him an idiot savant without the savant, and it only went downhill from there.
“Where did you even find this guy?” Kevin asked.
“I met him at a party,” Gil said. “We got to talking about work and I mentioned some of the problems we were having and he had some good ideas. So good that I asked if he’d be interested in a consulting gig. And he was.”
“You seriously offered him a job after meeting him at a party?” Kevin said.
“Yes.”
“That was a terrible idea.”
“Why?”
“No good has ever come from anyone you meet at a party.”
“I don’t agree,” Gil said.
“I met my wife at a party,” Martin said from his seat at the end of the table.
“There, see?” Gil said with an air of triumph.
“See what? He’s agreeing with me,” Kevin said.
They all looked down the table at Martin. “Who were you agreeing with?” Gil asked. “Me or him?”
“Him.”
“There, see?” Kevin said. “It’s unanimous. Get rid of him.”
“The two of you agreeing doesn’t count as unanimous,” Gil said.
“Then let’s take a vote.”
“No vote.”
“Oppressor.”
“I’m not oppressing anything. It doesn’t matter who wants to get rid of him. The contract is ironclad. If we fire him we still have to pay him everything.”
This was true. What Lou lacked in business acumen he made up for with his uncanny ability to negotiate a good contract. Besides guaranteeing his fee, plus a fat early termination penalty, his contract stipulated he was only required to come to the office once a week, he didn’t have to answer every email he received, and while he was expected to offer advice and solutions, he didn’t have to offer good advice or solutions, or say anything that was remotely helpful. It could be argued that by signing this contract the company was proving it deserved every hit it had taken recently, but Gil refused to consider that possibility.
“All I want you to do is talk to the guy when he’s here,” Gil said. “He offered me good advice at the party, so he’s not a moron. Maybe he’s just unmotivated. Maybe he just needs to loosen up and feel more comfortable with us.”
“Yes,” said Phil from his seat at the other end of the table.”
“See, Phil knows.”
“No, it’s not that;” Phil said as he held his phone up for all to see. “I knew that advice he gave you sounded familiar.”
“Let me guess, he got it off of one of those motivational poster sites,” Kevin said.
“No, not even close,” Phil said.
“See, give me some credit here,” Gil said.
“He got it off an episode of The Office,” Phil said. “I’ve got it queued up right here if you want to watch it.”
“We’re taking our business advice from episodes of The Office now?” Kevin said. “Is that ironic or pathetic or some new level of bad we’ve never seen before?”
“Was it at least a good episode?” Carol asked. She rarely spoke up at these meetings because she had a hard time masking her contempt for Gil’s management style. In truth, she was usually so quiet Gil would forget she was even present, and today he spun his head around in surprise at the sound of her voice.
“Trick question,” Phil said. “There are no good episodes of The Office.”
“That’s not true,” Carol said. “It was really good for a couple of years.”
“British version was way better,” Kevin said.
The debate continued for the better part of an hour, and only ended when Kevin noticed that it was time to go home. They were unable to agree on the quality of The Office or which version was better. They also realized that the debate about The Office had distracted them completely from the matter at hand, and left them with no strategy on how to handle Lou’s upcoming visit.
“How can I even talk to the guy now that I know his advice came from a TV show?” Gil asked. “You guys are gonna have to talk to him.”
“How can you not talk to him?” Kevin asked. “Will you just hide all day?”
“Maybe I should call out sick.
“If you call out sick I’m calling out sick too,” Phil said.
“How can you do that? You won’t even know if I did it until you come in to the office yourself,” Gil said. “You can’t call out sick once you’re already here.”
“I’ll just say I’ve got whatever you have.”
“Like an epidemic,” Kevin said.
“Don’t say epidemic,” Gil said. “Not after last time.
The last time the office thought there was an epidemic came the day after Karen from Accounting threw a Game of Thrones season finale party that ended in one case of alcohol poisoning, a half dozen sick calls, and a rumored pregnancy scare. Pictures from the first half of the party were featured on the company’s social media page. Pictures from the second half were almost universally deleted upon viewing. Since no one was willing to admit how far things had gotten out of hand, though, everyone claimed to have a virus and the HR department came within an hour of implementing the company’s pandemic plan. This plan involved a contact with a company in Mumbai that promised to seamlessly continue the company’s work with an expansive group of outsourced employees. Ironically, it was later acknowledged that had the pandemic plan actually been implemented, the company would have turned the largest quarterly profit in history. Thus there as an unspoken rule that no more than three employees could call out sick at the same time.
“I’m reserving the right to call out tomorrow,” Gil said. “So you bastards better show up. You too, Carol.”
“You can’t include her in the blanket bastard statement?” Kevin asked.
“I’m just playing it safe. I’m not sure where HR came down on that one,” Gil said. “I failed their last two quizzes so I feel like I’m on very thin ice with them. Best to behave myself.”
“But calling out sick to avoid your contractor is fine?”
“It’s a strategy.” Gil gathered his tablet and his notepad and stood. “I trust you guys to talk to Lou and get something out of him. Then, when I’ve recovered from my 24-hour flu, we can discuss it at length and figure out our next step.” Before anyone could say anything else, he hurried from the room. People could say what they wanted to about Gil, but he could leave a room faster than anyone else in the company when he was motivated.
The rest of them looked at each other, wondering who was going to call out sick tomorrow and help start the next epidemic scare.
“You think this guy watches The Walking Dead too?” Carol asked.
“Why?” Kevin asked.
“Maybe he could offer some advice from that show.”
“Okay, now we’ve got a plan,” Kevin said. “Good meeting, everybody.”

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By Tgreen, April 19, 2016 9:12 pm

  
Recently I updated the music on my iPod Shuffle for the first time in a couple of months. I’ve got a long playlist named “Commute” that I add songs to every now and then, and when I think of it I hook up the Shuffle and sync it and see what I end up with. The other morning while walking from the train to the office I got “Child of the Wild Blue Yonder,” an old one from John Hiatt that I haven’t heard in awhile, and it took me back.
It’s a good song. Not my favorite from Mr. Hiatt but the first one I ever heard. And I realized I could remember the first time I heard it. I was in my old office in the library at school, some time in 1990, and WNEW played it. And something about the song registered enough for me to pay attention at the end to find out whose song it was. And then, since these were definitely pre-Internet days, I had to look the song up the only way I knew how — walk over to the Wiz on Fulton St. and see if they had the cassette. Yes, I heard a new song on a radio station in NYC and walked to a store to purchase the song as part of an entire album on a cassette tape. The only thing that story is missing to make me feel completely ancient is a reference to a pet dinosaur.
But after the Shuffle had moved on and I’d made it to work, it was that old office that kept coming back to me. I was going to an engineering school at the time. Back then it was called Polytechnic University, but it’s something else now. Part of NYU in fact, based on the alumni donation solicitations I get. They want my donation they can send me a diploma that says NYU on it. Otherwise, no dice. 
In 1990 I was working for the school library as a technical writer. The Dean had scored a contract with IBM where we had to write a user manual for some electronic library database system. The system and the original documentation came from Germany, so we were starting from scratch as far as English instructions went. I helped put together a team of 3 other writers, which was easy since by then there were only 3 other writing students in the whole program who I could stand. And they took a room in the back of the main library and gave it to us as an office to write in.
The office was tiny and crowded and, during the months when they were building a campus outside, it was actually dangerous. So much dirt and dust got kicked up by the construction that every couple of weeks we had to get our printers serviced to clear out all the gunk. I’m not sure we ever considered what that gunk was doing to us. More likely we figured we were made of stronger stuff than those IBM behemoths.
We had a mini fridge because I stole it from the upstairs library and wouldn’t return it when they caught me. It was stocked with sodas and a nice collection of beers hidden behind them. We had filing cabinets stocked with liquor, all filed under “L”, I’m sure. Or maybe B for booze or R for Rotgut, because I could not afford anything one would call the Good Stuff back then. We had a professional-grade dart board to ensure we always had an excuse to blow off work. Some days a picture of the Dean was tacked to it for added incentive, and I got caught red-handed in the middle of that kind of game at least once. We had three or four desktop PCs that nearly always had some virus or other thanks to the pirated video games installed on them. They also rocked Windows 3.0 because we were on the cutting edge of technology.
There were knives, stun guns, nunchucks and a couple of items I probably still shouldn’t talk about stashed along with the booze. We had a giant white board that existed mainly for us to draw nasty pictures and write nonsense and, most importantly, to provide a steady supply of dry erase markers for sniffing. There was a fight to get that board budgeted and I doubt we ever used it for even one of the long list of reasons we provided for why it was vital to the project. Unless we somehow convinced someone that the project required us to use it to mark people’s heights for fake mug shots, because we did that a lot. And also, that board held the original Defcon settings that ultimately turned up on my cubicle walls at Smith Barney and one day got adapted to the Treetop Lounge Security Advisory and then the QA Classic Alert System. Thank you, library budget, for the tools I could abuse for comedic purposes.
This was the office where one night, out of sheer desperation and more than a little laziness I invented the Vodka and Gatorade and then immediately regretted it. And then we debated whether it was bad because it was really cheap vodka or because it was just a horrible idea. Spoiler alert: it was both. This was also the office where I mixed enough kamikazes and Long Island Iced Teas to at the very least qualify to play Isaac’s second cousin on any Love Boat revival.
We had a phone so the upstairs office could keep tabs on us, but all that did was give us free access to the outside world, since this was years before the cell phone and I never carried around more than one quarter to use in a pay phone. That semester the phone number got printed in the campus phone directory as the library’s main number. I told them they would regret it if it wasn’t fixed. They said if I made them regret it they would fire me, which in theory I would regret because I was supporting a very large bar tab at the time. And so we waited to see what would happen. And what happened was no one with access to the directory ever bothered to call the library for anything, because I don’t think that phone rang more than once.
And the one time it did ring? It wasn’t library business. It was one of my professors calling to bust me for skipping a final. Now, I did not intentionally skip a final. What happened was, they changed the exam room at the last minute and didn’t post the new room. So half the class showed up in the wrong place and half showed up in the right place and to this day over a quarter of a century later I don’t know how that one half found out about the change and got to the right room. But the professor, who never had much use for me, called to bust me and tell me I was likely to fail because I’d skipped the final. I explained what happened and she was not impressed. She repeated several times that half the class found the right room and so it was my own fault for missing out. When I finally got a chance to speak, I pointed out that if half the class could find the new room, that meant half the class could not. This argument ultimately got us a second chance to take the test.
It was a good room to hide out in for several reasons. For one, most of my friends didn’t know exactly where I worked so if I needed to sneak off for awhile after torching someone in the old Coverup Report, this was the safest place I could go while still staying on campus. Also, the upstairs bosses didn’t come down too often because of all the stairs. We had a boss right next door to us but he was barely out of school himself and mostly all he wanted to do was play video games and pretend he was a burgeoning cyber criminal, so he was usually preoccupied. The best reason to go there, though, was the fact that any time I was in the office I could, in theory, be working and therefore could, in theory, be billing, and I liked the fact that it was so easy, in theory, to earn money.
It was also easy to find amusing diversions on the days we were legitimately working. That boss who had the office next to ours had his own coffee maker. He also had a door with a lock that we could crack open with a large paperclip, so you could say we also had our own coffee maker. This meant nothing to me, because I don’t drink coffee, but the people I worked with appreciated the convenience. And so one day, I’ll call them coworkers A & B to protect the guilty, decided they wanted a coffee, so I popped the door for them to go to it.
Now, I don’t know anything abut the history of the fancy flavored coffee we have now, but back in 1990 it must not have been too common because the one thing they all talked about was mixing some fancy chocolate milk mix into the coffee while it was brewing. The thought was that this combination would produce something delicious. And so this one morning while the boss was upstairs and A & B were looking for coffee, it was decided that this would be the day to finally create this wonderful concoction.
It did not go well. For some unexplained reason, the combined chocolate and coffee didn’t produce a pot of chocolately goodness. What it did was clog the filter and cause hot water, coffee and chocolate to explode all over the small office, including the boss’ desk, chair, and computer. Needless to say, it was going to take awhile to clean this up, so I was sent upstairs to create a diversion. I found our boss and the Dean in the Dean’s office and I walked in and announced that the project was way behind schedule and we needed to fix it right now. Was this true? Probably, because we were always behind schedule, but no one ever wanted to fix it because everyone wanted a taste of that sweet, sweet IBM money.
But I put on a good act and told my two bosses how much of the problem was due to their screwups and we hashed out a plan of attack that we probably all forgot about ten minutes later, but I kept them both busy long enough to get the call that the office was cleaned of all evidence that there had been a coffee mishap.
I went back downstairs with my boss and he called the three of us into his office to discuss the day’s schedule. When he was done, he asked if anyone wanted some coffee and of course A & B said they did. And as the boss set about preparing to make a pot, I suggested that maybe this would be a good time to try adding the chocolate to the coffee, because everyone had been talking about it for so long and we should at least find out if it even tasted any good. And the boss agreed. And A & B both gave me looks that by rights should have killed me right then and there.
We three cleared out of the office while the coffee brewed and we went to our room to wait for the inevitable. It didn’t take long before we heard the boss screaming, so we ran in to see the same destruction that A & B had just finished cleaning up. The boss was swearing up and down as he tried to wipe coffee residue from his keyboard and his desk and his lap. And I watched him try to deal with this mess and all I had to say was, “Yeah, this is the same thing that happened when A & B tried it.” And then I went back next door to continue whatever story I was writing.
Because yes, I did use the computers to write my own stuff. I couldn’t help that. I didn’t have a computer of my own so this was the best place to get a lot of writing done at once. I could crank the radio, do some work, play darts, write whatever story I was writing, and then cycle through the sequence a couple of times a day. To this day it’s still one of the better writing setups I’ve ever fallen into. It’s second to living a block off the beach and walking out to the boardwalk to write during my work breaks, but it’s streets ahead of scratching out a couple of paragraphs during NJ Transit delays.
As it turned out, that office was a good place to go on those nights where you just didn’t want to go home right after class but money was too tight to go anywhere else to drink. When I think back now I realize there were more of those nights than I remembered. It was a tough school to go to. On the first day one of my professors said that half the people we were sitting with wouldn’t be back for a second year. It took me into the third year myself before I had to switch majors to avoid starting over more or less from scratch anywhere else. And once I made the switch, I mostly slipped into survival mode. I was there to get a degree and stay sane, in no particular order.
The Coverup Report was born in that office, and written more or less exclusively in there. The Coverup Report begat The Poison Pen which begat Happy Friday which begat the Treetop Lounge which begat Greetings from Shokanaw which begat all these shitty Trump jokes I post on Facebook which, I assume, will begat something else somewhere down the line. But that cramped room, which was kind of like the bunker for those of us who had the keys to it, was the one good place to go when you needed some time to figure out how you were going to survive today’s bullshit and prepare for tomorrow’s. We were a commuter campus so we didn’t have dorm rooms. This was as good as it got.
We didn’t have dorm rooms and we didn’t have decent lab equipment and the library’s collection was generously considered out of date and if you got right down to it we didn’t have any facilities that were worth a damn. We had crack houses around the corner and a high school across the street whose students seemed to major in mugging students from my school. The main building was a former razor factory that still strongly resembled its original form, though without the same charm. Few professors appeared to care about the students and the administration was so actively useless that it might as well have run for Congress. I have gone on record for years saying I was miserable almost every waking moment I spent in the place.
But there were good people there. Good friends. I may have hated the place but I have to admit that I found a way to have about as much fun as one could have there. It just took some work. And that office, which they never should have given us and where they never should have allowed us such free rein on a daily basis, was the luckiest thing any of us could have stumbled into in the middle of that hell hole.
It was bad. Very bad in a lot of very basic ways. But it was good too, if that makes sense. It probably doesn’t. If you went to school and had a blast and look back fondly on most of it, I cannot relate, and I cannot explain what I had. We’re speaking two different languages. I know this is true because I’ve had this conversation before. I met good people there. People who walked away with the same lesson I did — that life was nothing but problems and no one was going to solve yours for you, so you’d better get to work. This might not have been the lesson any of us set out to learn, but you don’t get to choose. We learned that too.
I’m only speaking for myself, of course. I mean, I know the majority of my friends hated the place too because we’ve talked about it, but it’s likely we all hated it in our own ways. And we all found our own way to stay a little sane too. One of mine was music, and since my musical taste ran more to the redneck than anyone I knew, I was pretty much on my own with that one.
And yet one day a combination of things had me at my desk with the radio tuned to the right station at the right time to hear that song that I still listen to today. And 19 John Hiatt albums in my iTunes library later, there’s still a connection to that one song and that one day and that office where work occasionally got done when there was absolutely nothing better to do. So here’s to all the shitty offices in shitty situations that grind us down while we hold on to live another day, and all the crazy people who made surviving it a little easier, even if they all had worse taste in music than you.

I posted this link to the song but it doesn’t seem to work consistently, so if you really want to listen, and you should, go look it up on YouTube.

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By Tgreen, April 19, 2016 8:41 pm

 Guy walking through Madison Square Park wearing a gorilla costume and carrying a cell phone. All while being filmed by his own personal crew.