Rules for Breakfast Day

Today is Friday. Friday is breakfast day. Friday = Breakfast Day. There is no exception to this rule. Here at my company you are placed onto a team which in turn places you on list of team members and the corresponding date on which they are required to bring breakfast for the entire team. Again, there are no exceptions. Every team has the list. Every team has breaksfast on Friday. Friday mornings smell like a glorious mix of coffee, pastry, and other baked goods. This is the goal of the week, making it to breakfast day. We are like rats on a wheel racing towards a zero goal, only on Friday someone places a carrot within our midst and we are happy. I'm assuming rats enjoy carrots.

Anyway, since most of us aren't far removed from college, we're normally too tired to eat breakfast in the morning or too broke to provide ourselves anything other than coffee (which is free). This explains why a day of free food (or free anything) is so important. In other words, don't eff it up!

You'd think breakfast would be an easy concept, but people can easily screw it up. One way to achieve this is to simply forget it was your turn, which to me is an unforgiveable sin. My trust in your breakfast bringing abilities once lost is lost forever. Deal with that. Sure you might bring it on Monday instead, but I planned for Friday. And don't you dare insult my intelligence by saying "well now you have free breakfast twice next week." That's ridiciulous logic.

The other way to screw up breakfast is somehow much more annoying. Here's the rule: Do not, under any circumstance, try to impress upon coworkers your pretentious knowledge of rare breakfast foods. It's not cool to make a breakfast quiche, okay? Keep it simple. Bagels are universal, as are donuts, waffles, granola, or even munchkins. Hell, I'll take a bowl of cereal if that's what you want to bring. Also, the breakfast is for everyone, that's understood, right? So let's say you grew up in Columbia and it was perfectly normal for your breakfast to be plantains and a packet of sugar. You may be tempted to share your culture with the team, but now is not the time. Save it for diversity week.

Thank you.

Prairie Dogging

From urban dictionary:

Prarie Dogging - In a large, open plan, cubical filled office, this is where one inmate (or employee) stands up in his/her cubicle and looks arround. This is often followed by other office workers standing up and looking around to see what all the fuss is about, in a style reminiscent of those loveable creatures, prarie dogs.

Company

I thought I might take this moment to recommend a book. Perhaps you might read it while you're supposed to be doing something much more important.

Company, by aussie Max Barry takes shots at modern corporate culture by telling the story of "Jones," a twentysomething who decides to ask of his company "what the f*** do we actually produce?" It's a bit quirky and over the top in the way only an aussie could make it, but it's funny and interesting in a way only a true cube jockey could fully appreciate.

Spooked

I hear it is common for some companies to encourage their employees to spend more time doing work and less time scouring the web for innapropriate content. It turns out that my employer is one such company. A company-wide e-mail about appropriate electronic communication (internetz, woot!) (I'm sorry) recently scared me out of updating this blog on any type of regular basis. Apparently our web usage is monitored including "wikis and blogs" and we are not to use the web to post anything innapropriate.

The problem is, even though I keep this site to amuse myself during breaks and most of the posts will be fictional accounts of cube life, I can understand why someone might perceive my sense of humor as innapropriate and why the site's content could be viewed as "about Company X." So, as a precautionary measure, you'll notice a very subliminal-like message which exists in this site's title now which I assume will protect me from any type of corporate harm. I have never and will never use the name of my employer on this site (I don't even post using my real name for Cripe's sake), and I do so because just like most people I live in constant fear of losing my job. I'll also have to clean up any foul language from past posts just in case. This site just got a whole lot lamer (than it already was), but let the posting start again.