Happy Birthday

Everyone enjoys a good excuse to stop doing work for long periods of time. For some that excuse is often to sleep off a hangover in the back seat of a car. But for the less cynical, those excuses are often limited to awkward socialization with co-workers, usually to celebrate someone's retirement or birthday, the latter of which I find unbearable. Where I work these gatherings are with people who are on the same "team" but who don't necessarily ever see each other or have the need to speak.

Birthdays at the office are forced and awkward. They exist under the principle that if one person's birthday is celebrated so too should we celebrate everyone's. In my experience each team of people chooses a designated Happy Person who spruces up a word document with clipart balloons with everyone's birthday listed on it. Happy Person's job is to buy a birthday card and cheap cake whenever another birthday rolls around. Secretly we all sign our names on the card and think of a witty way to say Happy Birthday. I usually just write Happy B-Day, then sign my name. woo hoo. The birthday boy or girl knows the cake is coming, because after all, it's their fucking birthday and hey, Janice in accounting got a cake so why shouldn't you. I'd much rather be celebrated by being allowed to go home or with a celebratory round of Jameson shots for all, especially the people who don't want one. Yea, especially them. The department has "allowed" for 15 minutes of non-job related activity to eat cake and then return to work, never to talk to your co-workers until the next birthday.

During my first year my birthday was missed. They later surprised me with an ice cream cake 3 months later, but the damage was done. I didn't care when they forgot about me. I didn't. Really. You don't believe me? Jerks.

A Brand New Cube

Today I had the privilege of answering several arbitrary "behavioral related questions" before a panel of 3 somewhat-more-powerful-than-me-but-not-too-much-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things suits. My answers were required to be in the form of STAR, meaning I had to carefully separate the Situation/Task, Action, and Result of exactly 6 of my life's events which may or may not have actually happened. I did so with a smile on my face, very happy to indulge the suits in the wonderful round of BS I had rehearsed for just 10 minutes prior to the meeting. Yes, I was on an interview. If all goes well I will pack up my modest belongings in the south end of the building and have a crew of people (whose only job is apparently to carry boxes) carry my junk over to a substantially larger cubicle in the northeast corner of the building where I will do a similar job for a modest increase in yearly salary.

I hope to one day work in a cube with a door and perhaps a window or two.

Terry Tate

Terry Tate demands that if "you kill the joe, you make some mo'." He's very adamant about this. I believe that if you kill the joe and nobody is around to witness, nobody is the wiser.

Below, one of the all-time great commercial campaigns of our time:

Mint.com

You never imagined a life spent behind 3 squared walls, but at least you get paid for it, right? Unfortunately, the bills are piling up anyway and you drive a gas devouring monster to make your 90 minute roundtrip commute. You contemplate paying a professional to tell you just how in debt you are, but he'll just ridicule your negative net worth and besides, that'll cost money too.

Along comes mint.com, a very user-friendly (and free!) website that can consolidate all of your debts and bank accounts into colorful charts to show you just how awful a spender you are, provided you trust it enough to give up all kinds of information about your accounts.

Below you can see just how much money I've spent on gas in July. Month to date I've spent $235 on gast, mostly from Wawa.

funkyfreshballa@snax.com

When you work as a customer service representative you look for ways to make each call just a little less boring. Unfortunately, at a conservative company like mine a call can only be as interesting as the person calling in. So, I've found one surefire way for a client to make me laugh on the phone every time: a hilarious e-mail address.

In some cases these can be purposefully funny, and the client will laugh along with me when they spout it off. I remember one example: talldarkngreesy@xxxx.com. That guy at least acknowledged how uncomfortable it was that I had to have him confirm how it was spelled. But my favorite example of this always comes from people who are caught off guard by my asking them for it. Embarassed, they will eventually work up the courage to give it to me, but they won't talk about it and 9 times out of 10 they rush through it and avoid my reading it back to them. Usually these are aol or yahoo addresses like spoonylove@aol or xxhottchickxx123@yahoo, but I've noticed most google users have the good sense to make their e-mail address a bit more professional.

The New Lexicon

Does your cubicle contain a computer? How about the internet? In 2008 it's safe to assume your answers are yes. If not, you're probably just sitting in a corner somewhere. Get a job.

Anyway, just because you're trapped at your desk doesn't mean you can't still have the world at your fingertips with this wonderful application they call "the internetz." In between your monotonous work and incesant e-mail checking, you find solice in the work of other people whose jobs are infinitely more interesting than yours: people who write for and maintain interesting websites. If you're anything like me you have a whole lexicon of websites that you visit over and over until the work day ends, checking and refreshing so often that you actually get upset when AbsolutePunk.net hasn't added a new post in 15 minutes.

At the bottom of this page you'll always find a rotating list of some of my favorite websites to obsess over, each with attached text which indicates how recently they were updated. This way you'll only have to refresh one page...THIS ONE.

What are some of your favorite pastime websites?

Hi.

No mission statement, no expectations. Let's just get through the day with office-related posts until this site inevitably jumps the shark. There's certainly a lot that goes on working in the cube environment that simply cannot go overlooked, but really how much fodder can I possibly have? I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Oh, and this blog's title? I have no idea what it means but my reason is that Rubik's Cubicle was taken by another blogger who updated twice and failed. So here's to hoping we here at Cubsicle can outlast, outwit, outplay. Survive the Cube and write about it daily.

This is a Test

Test post.