But that’ll never happen. So you busy yourself with more mundane tasks before you go to your job, like a lamb to sausage (I’m a consultant, not a shaman at a Bible college, alright?).

If you drive to work, maybe you listen to NPR. I bet that’s soothing. But in my daily work, it’s all about multi-tasking! So when I’m driving I like to pretend I’m texting someone. Actually texting someone is dumb, because you can’t write a snappy comeback fast enough when you’re trying to turn the wheel with one knee (way harder than it looks!), but it’s fun to just tape a Blackberry to the top of your steering wheel and watch how much room people give you. Also it’s a good tip for shaving five minutes off your commute!

If you’re taking the bus or subway you might busy yourself with a crossword puzzle (I prefer the game “hangman” with my own picture, but maybe that’s too literal for others). But a fun game I like to play is “Bundy/Gacy/Manson.” That’s right. I like to stare at people and imagine which serial killer they would be, and then how they’d dispose of the body. What’s kick-ass about this game is that a long studious stare can result in a free seat! (Or a restraining order.)

Another favorite seems to be reading a book. I’m an adventurer, so I prefer reading when I’m walking. I feel that an elbow to the rib from a passerby prepares me for the metaphorical beating I’ll receive later in the office.

Sometimes, when I ride the subway, it’s pretty packed and I imagine that I’m a game piece in a mighty game of Tetris! Can I fit my professionally suited body, purse, emergency purse and satchel of Tupperware through the heaving waves of human misery?

Damn right I will, because I am the strongest of tetrominoes!!

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Alison Burke is a writer from the Washington D.C. area, and has been a past Defenestration contributor. She enjoys cake and male models. She wishes her life was more like a Baby Bash video — save she would be the douche wearing a sideways cap as bikini-clad men grooved comedically for her viewing pleasure.

One of the annual training gems is the Professional Conduct Sexual Harrassment training – and no, despite the misleading title, it isn’t how to best harass the interns – you have to figure that one out on your own.  After all the time I give to this company and late nights, you’d think they’d show me more appreciation and tell me how to really make a fellow staffer more uncomfortable than I normally do with my “Hi, I’m Alison. Nice ass.” introduction.

The training, in all seriousness, is imperative to  advancing one’s career – and I am pressing hard for an upgrade to trash can emptier. They cover things like:

• Not making uncomfortably long eye contact ( Starring contests are signs of a client pleasing listener with a deep-seeded desire for fresh blood.)
• Not making any physical contact outside of a firm, professional handshake (But what about Victorian-era enthusiasts like myself who prefer a dainty kiss on the hand?  Surely, an era most well known for sexual repression, hand fans, and vapors couldn’t possibly be pushing me into the corporate danger zone of sexy unprofessionalism. )

Another little nugget of amazingness: brand selling.  Brand selling is basically building business for the company. Leveraging brute-force elevator speech tactics not seen outside of North Korean prison camps, staffers are drilled repeatedly in a series of situations where they must prove that they can AND WILL create work even when the company is ill-prepared to handle said tasks. Resource shortage, lack of particular talent?  Not if you can fake it mo’fos!

An example of this would be: you walk into your client office and the client says, “we need to remove the oceans and sell these brand new plastic haircomb thingies door-to-door without leveraging any new technologies or improving the product.  It would take a miracle.”  A well-trained company employee would say something amazing, something to ensure the overpriced contract reward to line the deep pockets of the corporate overlords, something along the lines of: “Well Jesus works for my company and it’s said he can turn water into wine, surely he can turn a profit on your shitty product.  So, I’ll call him up and have him take the sexual harassment training and we’ll get in on board to sell those stupid combs. Just FYI, I hear his second trip down here won’t be as love-and-peace as the last one, but in a sales environment, we need to break some balls.”

You know, lie.

Also, I can’t bring pets to the office.  Now who will train my pet kangaroo Scribbles to box between the hours of 9am and 5pm??? Even Rockey Balboa needed a trainer!  Without one, he would have just been some guy beating his meat in an industrial freezer!

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Alison Burke is a writer from the Washington D.C. area, and has been a past Defenestration contributor. She enjoys cake and male models. She wishes her life was more like a Baby Bash video — save she would be the douche wearing a sideways cap as bikini-clad men grooved comedically for her viewing pleasure.

Alison on getting ready for work in the morning:

After waking up an hour late – I must have snoozed too many times and my alarm clock was like “F it, sleep all you want.”- I was rushing around to get dressed.  As I put on my vest, the button came off and then I zipped up my skirt (one of those invisible tiny zippers) and the zipper broke open with the top stuck together by the broken zipper.  It wouldn’t move up or down and I couldn’t pull the skirt off in either direction.

Freaking awesome.

So next, I decide to break the zipper and free myself from my tweed pencil skirt prison and apparently, although there are no strength in the teeth of the zipper, the actual zipper could not have been pulled apart my Hercules himself.  FINALLY, it budges just an inch or so and I can squeeze myself out of it like a hamster squeezes under a door. I think I might have gotten the vapors as my blood supply was temporarily cut off like being wedged between a metro platform and train.

I thought I was going to die in that skirt.

Freed from fashion’s death grip, I then grabbed my work bag which got caught on something and the strap broke.  If my day continues thus, I should be fired by 10 am and dead by noon – horrible accident with a hole puncher? I should have thrown on sweats and stayed home…

Alison on plastic flatware in the office:

Disposable flatware is to offices as cigarettes are to jails.  I innocently discovered this upon the departure of a long-time employee who left me a literal treasure chest of office currency – suddenly, I was the Chinese and the Americans were banging down my door for “funding” and I was giving it, for large interest rates and short turn around times.

“Sure, you can have this plastic spoon made for the fine chain of Wendys, but it’s not free.  I expect an ice cream scoop no later than next Tuesday, or I’ll make it a refrigerator!”

“But…but…Alison.  My children – they need food,” pleaded these other office urchins.

Throwing the spoon I spat, “Let them eat cake!…WITH THEIR HANDS!!!!”

I laughed monstrously, the kind of laugh only someone who just made a life-size sculpture out of rare Chipotle forks and knives could laugh.  “Who’s the boss now TONY DANZA?!?!?”

Despite my Pol Pot-esque dictatorship stylings, I still sometimes give away a free knife or the occasional spork when I’m feeling generous, or just want to flash my enormous office wealth in all their little office faces!

Alison on open and honest communication in the office:

“What should I say about you to the review board?”

That’s right, my boss was asking me….and yes, the review board was obsessing over me – probably jealous (see above for the story of my newly found wealth).

“Should I go with you?  We could do a tandem magic show: watch as I make these low scores disappear – into the shredder…”

Pity laugh. “I think it’s better if you stay here,” Translation: Alison, you are way too awesome to come to this full-on review of your excellent work and amazing talents, just take off the rest of the afternoon while I’m gone and enjoy yourself.

“If it doesn’t go well, could you let me know if I am fired early, so I can go home and catch the rest of Dr. Phil?”

Without even missing a beat, my boss looks at me and says, “I’d never fire you, I’d ask my boss to do it. And since I don’t control her schedule, I can’t promise you’d make the tail end of Dr. Phil, but I assure you that you’d catch most of Oprah.”

At least if things don’t go well today, I can always look forward to the trash daytime TV I will finally be able to enjoy with my newly found unemployment.

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Alison Burke is a writer from the Washington D.C. area, and has been a past Defenestration contributor. She enjoys cake and male models. She wishes her life was more like a Baby Bash video — save she would be the douche wearing a sideways cap as bikini-clad men grooved comedically for her viewing pleasure.

My job is stupid.  Don’t get me wrong, I like pay checks and employment, as I lack other methods for collecting said pay check, but working is just dumb.  To clue you in to the environment of my mental personal hell, I’ve included a scene from this mornings antics:

Method One:

Boss: “Did you print something on the color printer?”

Me: “No, I’m not printing and my work doesn’t involve printing, so you won’t find me doing any.”

Boss: (holds up 20 sheets of paper and waves them around) “Look at this, it says ‘draft’ and they only printed on one side.  Drafts should only be in black and white and printed on both sides.”

Me: “That’s good to know, I’ll send out an email reminder, so that no one will make the mistake again.”

Boss: “Who printed this?”

Me: “I don’t know who printed it.”

Boss: “Don’t worry, I’ll find out who did this.” (Don’t worry?  Was he fucking kidding me?!?!)

Me: “Good, it would have kept me up all night.”

(Boss walks away and I ponder for a moment my ability to hang myself on my badge – too cheaply made to hold my body weight.)

I swear that this is the actual conversation that I had at 6:50am with my boss and I have even cut it down to size not to include his return after he unsuccessfully attempted to track down the rogue printer bandit.  Clearly, going to “Start” opening your “Printers and Faxes” and choosing said printer and then seeing who printed it is well beyond his abilities.  Did I mention that he leads the largest and most advanced technology unit of our agency?  Welcome to the banality of my existence: the soul-raping, blood-coagulating, brain tumor-inducing world of pointless spreadsheets and process flow diagrams.

Since I know it’s all pointless anyways, I’ve just decided to completely get rid of my filter and say the first and craziest thing that comes to mind in any situation and to anyone at work.  For the past few weeks, this has actually proved to be the only source of entertainment within my 10-hour typical work day.

Method Two:

For instance: three weeks back, strange bruising appeared on the back of my hands and knuckles, is the stress and inaneness of work actually causing me to bleed out like a victim of Ebola?  The jury is out on that one, but here is a scene from a co-worker noticing this strange phenomena:

Co-worker: “Oh no, what happened there?” (motions toward my hands)

Me: “Fight club.  Shit, the first rule of fight club is to not talk about fight club!”

(co-worker leaves confused)

I guess he didn’t see Fight Club.

Method Three:

Another co-worker known for repeating the same thing in a monotone voice over and over in as many ways as possible to seem competent and knowledgeable, decided to give me lengthy, unsolicited feedback and included this little nugget of gold:

Co-worker: “I’m sorry, I have a little ADHD and I know I have just told you a ton of information.  It’s really hard for me to stay on track.”

Me: “No actually, I’ve counted you saying the exact same thing five times in five different ways very slowly.  Maybe you don’t have ADHD, maybe you are just a carrier, because I am starting to think I have it now.”

Results and Discussion:

Yeah, I just don’t fucking care anymore.  All jobs are stupid.

One might ask, what makes me a skilled artisan of all the fine arts of business?  Long answer: fill in your own lie; short answer: Google.  I don’t actually posses any of the skill sets or competencies that my project suggests, but I do have the amazing ability to type “what the fuck are performance metrics?” into the Google query box and find some passable answers.  I then cut and paste the Googled information and with a little clever wordsmith-ing, thanks to the thesaurus on dictionary.com, turn in what appears to be an almost intelligent piece of work compiled into a report that looks so huge and menacing that no one questions it, or reads it, and thus, I have done my job successfully.

Behold! The consultant at his/her finest:

Before:

The upcoming merger, necessitated by a volatile marketplace and brand position ceilings within our demographic, promises to open new business horizons. By combining the mobile-market saturation of JunoCorp with MegaInc’s own cutting-edge advertising focus, we will be able to optimally leverage our synergy. Extrapolating from the most recent round of performance metrics, MegaCorp will be a paradigm changer.

After:

Juno knew that this tension and maneuvering couldn’t last; sooner or later their passion was going to burst sky-high. He was everywhere she was, as if he knew her better than her own self, and no matter how often she tried to cut him with her witch-blade, she knew all she wanted was to be ravaged. Based on the way he had kissed her just now, Juno knew that she was about to have the merger of a lifetime.

—

There you have it. A sultry report any CEO would salivate over.  I’m pretty sure that this means I can do any job without proper training, and seeing as that I am short on cash this week, I might do a few freelance discount kidney transplants – with the help of Google, that is.

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Alison Burke is a writer from the Washington D.C. area, and has been a past Defenestration contributor. She enjoys cake and male models. She wishes her life was more like a Baby Bash video — save she would be the douche wearing a sideways cap as bikini-clad men grooved comedically for her viewing pleasure.

Therefore, I’ve used all of my amazing consulting skills to create a list of how one can achieve these desired days off – of course they will come with a trip to your local unemployment office, but that’s just you finally getting your refund from Uncle Sam, so have at it!

1. Schedule meetings of high-importance with the senior-most officials in your office, then show up late and drunk – very, very drunk.

TIP: Build up your tolerance to alcohol by adding whiskey to your coffee each morning, reduce the amount of coffee daily until you are finally just drinking whiskey from your mug.

2. Show your appreciation for a job well done with a pinch on co-workers bottoms and be sure to compliment their ability to keep a toned caboose, considering all they seem to do is sit on their ass all day in their cube.

3. Cover your hands in Vaseline and ensure that you shake hands with all team members and various other nearby office employees – to increase disgust, always touch as many keys on their keyboards as possible.

SET GOALS: 20 keyboards every morning.

4. Walk into the fullest men’s room confidently and exclaim that everyone else at the urinals is hung like “a trophy figurine” – this is extremely effective for females and almost totally ensures a long vacation from the desk and possibly one behind bars.

These are just a few ideas – do with them what you will. I can’t supply anything further for less than $400 an hour according to my consulting company.

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Alison Burke is a writer from the Washington D.C. area, and has been a past Defenestration contributor. She enjoys cake and male models. She wishes her life was more like a Baby Bash video — save she would be the douche wearing a sideways cap as bikini-clad men grooved comedically for her viewing pleasure.