That could come in 'hand'y

I guess its too bad that neither left arm (yes, you read that correctly) functions fully. Think of what we could do with 3 arms.

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life

America is fat. This shouldn't come as breaking news to anyone, and it makes sense that fast-food restaurants are turning to healthier alternatives to attract an American public trying to lose weight.

"Fresh-mex" restaurants are no exception. What's interesting is the nutrition information accompanying their burritos and other offerings. As it turns out, ordering a burrito is terrible for you (who knew?!?). Surprisingly, one of the least healthy ingredients in the burrito is the tortilla. So Qdoba, Chipotle, and all the other fat distribution centers have taken it upon themselves to offer tortilla-free-burrito "alternatives" (read: burrito without the bread for Atkins semi-compliance). Being health conscious, but still wanting an unnecessarily large meal, I ordered one such Naked Burrito today.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that given the prospect of not having to fold the burrito, risking tortilla breakage and subsequent rewrapping, the employees tend to be more generous with the portion sizes. Significantly more generous. I felt as if I'd eat two wrapped burritos when I'd finished my naked burrito (yes, I understand that the mentality of 'finish what's in front of you' should not apply at fast-food restaurants but its been ingrained). I felt gross. Still do.

Most of these places also serve alcohol, in case you were wondering. I have yet to see a "light" beer or beer-alternative to match the naked burrito idea.

So you can get fat and drunk and then wonder why it happened - fast food tastes good, but eating it is still a choice.

New cube, new you!

After a long awaited, but sadly necessary, hiatus, I am back. Great news too: I now have a cube! No longer will I spend my days in a converted call center, inadvertently inviting everyone to conference on every phone call that I take. Having a cubicle is not necessarily something to be proud of. Its an office space, not an office. There are (usually) no windows. Converting from a call center to a cube is kind of like osmosis, though. Its always optimal to gravitate to where there are fewer people occupying a greater space.

Look for more updates today and the rest of this week.

Better check your portfolio

What the heck happened to the DOW yesterday?

Cousin Larry!

If only Larry Brown actually said these things to reporters. From his prior actions, though, he might as well have. I was happy with him as a coach for the Pistons, up until he started looking for another job while still coaching them. The next question is, will Isaiah Thomas be able to coach his team to a greater record than Brown (23-59?!?! Didn't he bring the Pistons to the Championship?), or will his top players continue to underperform?

I was born a ramblin' man

This week marks the first time in a long time that I have travelled on business. I've heard many a colleague or professional athlete complain about travelling, but I actually enjoy it and here is why:

• Hotels - There are two options here and neither one is bad. Option 1 involves being put up in a Marriott or a Hilton. In this case, you get to rack up hotel points like nobody's business. Future vacations become free through rewards and destinations move farther and farther away from home (more on that later). Without disputing the quality of a large chain hotel, there is always option 2. This means staying in a privately owned or small chain hotel. Often these cater to unique crowds. Corporate apartments, for example, offer spacious living spaces and (in my experience) ridiculous amenities like marble floors and egyptian cotten towels. The hotel where I am currently staying could best be described as a country club. While I'm not gaining rewards points, it is still pretty nice to wake up in the morning and head over to the driving range before work.
• Flights - Travel, as one might expect, generally requires flying to a given city. It is almost impossible to build up reward miles in a reasonable period of time without consistent business travel. Even though it requires an early monday morning rise to make it to the airport, it provides an extra nap opportunity and gives you a guaranteed break from the phone and email synonymous with office life. Like a mini-vacation.
• New Places - As boring as the small town you're travelling to might be, its still different and has something to offer (if just for a short while).
• Food - Again, something different from the cafeteria you're used to going to every other day. And most companies pay for you to eat while you're travelling.

Or you could sit in traffic every morning listening to the local radio show. I guess that's a tough choice.

Tags: Travel, Transportation

A fool and his money...

I'm not even sure I need to explain the reason this is going up. If I do, then you're probably one of the people who would buy this product, although you'd benefit from it as much as you would by taking a deep breath. I can't believe that Japanese people are going to buy it, although its been parodied before.

He makes a good point

This comes from a coworker (some might call him a cube-neighbor) who has an interesting observation about the office we work in. While I haven't noticed the coffee cups in the bathroom, I do agree with what he's saying. If I had noticed, I would be equally annoyed and hope that all of these people are at the very least washing their hands.

Tags: Coffee, Office Gripe

You're missing out on half the fun

A friend of mine (one of the 4 regular readers of this blog) noted that he doesn't read the articles attached to each post, or even click on the links within the posts. While it might be true that everything I say, touch, and therefore type turns to gold, I can guarantee that the quality of your wasted time will be enhanced. At the very least you'll understand what I'm talking about.

Tags: Definition

Won't we have to change all of the license plates?

Ok, this demands a repost and an explanation. I spent two straight nights in the office. Hence the poor spelling and grammar. Here is the fixed version:

I think that it is ludicrous that D.C. denizens do not yet have voting rights. To any naysayers, take a look at the license plates, and then think back to a war that happened in 1776. You know, the revolutionary one that our forefathers [if you're not in the U.S., then they're not yours but at least you can sympathize] fought and remember the reason behind it.

This seems to be a step in the right direction for Washington D.C., and it only took 230 years [Yes, I know DC was only disenfranchised in 1880].

Tags: Voting Rights

Did anyone see Prison Break last night?

Yeah, so they, um, broke free. Um, so this is awkward, but now what?

A penny saved is a penny earned

I don't think this helps much, but I guess its a start.

Tags: Transportation

Does anyone else think this guy might be disturbed?

I'm not even sure what David Blaine is trying to do this time. Living underwater, and then attempting to escape through chains. His statement last week was that if he couldn't pull it off, "...the world will see something pretty insane." About as eloquent as an 13 year old asking a girl to dance, right? I'm not sure if I should be impressed or fearful of Blaine and his fans (who might be more disturbed than he).

I am also reminded of G.O.B. from Arrested Development. I have no doubt that some of the inspiration for this character came from Blaine's antics. Life just seems to imitate art more and more every day.

Tags: Arrested Development, David Blaine, Jeremy Piven

T.G.I.F.

A note before the actual post: this is what the world has come to? Whatever happened to Perfect Strangers, and Family Matters? Whatever happened to predictability?

But I digress, as my mind is prone to do on Fridays.

It seems commonplace at this point, that Friday morning will come and everybody around the office will be getting excited for the weekend. Inevitably I will receive a FedEx box or email which contains a monstrous task that needs to be done by COB Friday. Of course its impossible to get done by COB Friday, so the secondary requirement is that it be done by the time the office opens on Monday. I think that I've escaped this phenomenon only twice in the 9 months that I've been working. If you haven't worked on a weekend yet, then you're one of the lucky ones.

The only things more depressing than weekend work is staying late on a Friday afternoon. The reason behind this discrepancy is that you can engineer a Sunday morning so that you are physically incapable of doing anything but work. Unless you take a sick day, or work from home, the odds that you have something better than work to do on a Friday afternoon are pretty good.

Tags: Strong Bad, Tom Hanks, tgif, Depression, Office Gripe, Sick Day, Work From Home, Weekend Work

Up all night

Worst nighttime cold medicine ever.

Seriously, I mean come on.

Tags: Insomnia, Arrested Development,
Tylenol

Really, what's the point?

I was told by a friend that he didn't understand the purpose of this blog. I realized that I haven't really defined it yet and wanted to take the opportunity to do so.

Everybody, in my opinion, has something that they don't like, or aren't ecstatic about, in the workplace. I also believe that it would be difficult to find a person who doesn't take a couple of breaks during the workday, even for short periods of time. That's all this is at this point. A place for me to take a break from the workday and share what's interesting or frustrating about working life, or find things that I believe people might enjoy on their work breaks.

I promise that there won't be anything posted that's not work appropriate. I can't vouch for any of the personal blogs that I've linked to, but I'll do my best in that regard.

I don't pretend to have a job that's worse than anyone else's, but rather one that is similar to many others. If the blog doesn't amount to anything more than a place to vent my frustrations and waste my breaks, then that's OK. If I somehow gain a loyal following which entails more than the current 9 unique readers, then that would be great too. So tell your friends and feel free to send content and leave comments. I hope to keep at least 9 people entertained during the day.

Tags: Statistics, Definition, the number 9

Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back

I took a sick day yesterday. I would have sold my soul for some Contac Day & Night (second one from the right, now called Contac Cold+Flu Day & Night for whatever reason), but was forced to settle for Tylenol Cold. Contac, in my experience, does an excellent job of mitigating cold/flu symptoms for 5 days at which point the cold/flu has usually run its course. Tylenol didn't do its job and confused me altogether. Here's my comparison:

• Contac gives you 5 sets of 4 pills - 3 for the day and 1 for the night (conveniently colored yellow and blue so that you don't mix them up). Tylenol has 6 sets of 2 pills for both the day and the night time medicine. They recommend that you take two daytime pills every 6 hours, and two nighttime pills before going to sleep. For a given 24 hour period, I will have taken half of the total daytime pills and 1/6 of the nighttime pills. That means I'm going to run out of daytime pills 4 days before I run out of nighttime pills. Winner: Contac
• The nighttime pill for Contac knocks you out cold. Fast. I've had people tell me things that I don't remember from when I was taking the night medicine. Oh, and you sleep like a baby. The Tylenol nighttime pills took about 3 hours to kick in and then lasted for the full 6 hours. Since I went to bed at 11, I woke up at 8 making me late for work. Also, I had awful nightmares and woke up several times during the night. Winner: Contac
• Here's where things get a little tricky for Contac: the daytime pill. Contac takes care of all symptoms incredibly well, while Tylenol only partially takes care of symptoms. Contac, however makes me light-headed while Tylenol doesn't. I think that being light-headed is a fair price to pay for alleviating my cold symptoms. Winner: Contac
• Tylenol uses an "instant refreshing feeling" (read: mint coating) as a major marketing ploy. I didn't feel refreshed. Contac has no marketing ploys, their medicine just works. Winner: Contac

Everyone who I've referred Contac to swears by it. Its too bad that its sold in such short supply in drugstores, but I know that I'll be stocking up for future sick days. Better to be safe than sorry.

Tags: Medicine, Sick Day, Contac, Tylenol

You kill the joe, you make some mo'

James put this in a comment on the post about coffee etiquette, but I think it deserves to be front and center. Reebok is apparently onboard with my thoughts about coffee etiquette.

I also think that I should post this shameless plug as a measure of thanks for the video.

Tags: Terry Tate, Coffee

Yeah, well I broke it in an hour

An update on the Da Vinci Code Ruling that had the code embeddeded within.

Tags: Da Vinci Code

The coffee etiquette here sucks

This is along the same lines as the put away your toys post, but I think it merits some real estate on here anyway.

I drink coffee. I have not always been a coffee drinker, but since I started working I've learned to enjoy it. I've also learned that I have a hard time staying awake if I don't eat/drink in between meals. Since coffee is relatively healthy for you (and yes, I drink it black so the caloric intake from the cream and sweetener doesn't bother me at all), and I like the taste, its become my go-to office "snack."

Why is it that whenever I go to get a cup of coffee, the pot is empty? On top of that, the burner is always left on, which means that the thin layer of coffe is going to be burned into the pot glass thereby ruining every subsequent pot of coffee brewed in that specific pot.

It seems to me that when the coffee pot is empty, or when you drink the cup that's going to make the pot look gross to the next guy, you should fill it up. Easy enough to remember. I used to work at a summer camp, and from the age of 8 the kids learned that "If you kill it, you fill it." I doubt that this language would suffice in the workplace, but I have a hard time believing that the cultural norm of the people who work in this office is so far displaced from the culture here in America or up in Canada.

Tags: Office Gripe, Algonquin Park, Coffee

Google makes a pit-stop at the armory before going after the big guns

Google has been slowly poking at Microsoft's software market for a long time. Products like gmail, and calendar were direct attempts to place hard-coded, not to mention expensive, Microsoft products on the web for free to consumers. In my opinion (and I think the rest of the internet-connected world agrees), Google products have always been more user friendly than Microsoft's. Now they're making an attempt to ensure that they can pull the market share away from the giant in a fair and equitable manner... by alleging that Microsoft is once again passing go more often than they should.

I certainly wasn't expecting this, especially since my version of IE7 loads Google's search engine in the upper right hand corner. I was thinking something more product-based, for example. Some distributed tool that displaces Word. I am impressed and pleased with their ardor, though. I don't like being locked into software options, and I like Google. Plain and simple, this seems like a good move.

(Interesting side note, in searching for this link I didn't realize that Google had already bought Writely. I guess they are taking that approach too).

Another interesting note here: Blogger's spellchecker (Google owns Blogger) just spat back Google as a misspelled word. Huh.

Tags: Google, Microsoft, Antitrust