employablog

I was a little nervous this weekend as I prepared to do my taxes. I made a cup of tea and found my calculator (previous use: Tetris, 12th grade calculus). I found a pencil, purchased a pencil sharpener, and I would have taken the phone off the hook, except I don’t have a phone with a hook. I settled for ‘Silent’: These were the steps I could recall from watching my parents do their taxes until sometime in the mid 90s when I guess they hired an accountant. The whole thing seemed like quite an operation.

Of course, my parents never had the benefit of tax software with deduction maximizers, so I had that going for me. I plopped my laptop on top of all the papers and fired up the software. It asked me a series of questions and the deduction total kept climbing. “Awesome,” I thought. “Doing taxes is fun!” About an hour later I was nearly done. As I was only fully employed for around 25% of 2006, the federal government apparently considers me basically impoverished and I am going to be getting back a lot of what was withheld from each paycheck over the past few months. What success!

I felt confident, I felt grown up. I had done it.

“There are only a few more steps to ensure you’ve maximized your deductions!”

“OK!” I was in a great mood.

“Good news!” the next box said. “The Telephone Excise Tax Refund (TETR) is a one-time payment available on your 2006 federal income tax return. It is designed to refund previously collected long distance telephone taxes. Almost everyone is eligible!”

Everyone except those who have never had a home phone. “No,” I answered, and clicked my ringtone back to Final Countdown.

“Were you affected by Hurricane Katrina?”

Wow, buzz kill, tax software. “No.”

“Did you become a widow/er this year?”

There’s a box I hope I never have to check. I was beginning to understand why people don’t usually think of taxes as awesome. The thought crossed my mind that a real deduction maximizer would be a pretty tough character: “Not a widower, eh? BLAHM! You are now! Oh, and I signed you up for AT&T. In Biloxi.”

“No.”

A couple weeks ago, the viscous necessities of all sorts in my apartment began to run out.

I first noticed this when I was doing the dishes. My dish soap formerly featured an omnipotent blue luster, as if to say “I dare you to use me all.” Each day I squirted a small bit onto my sponge—taking the “ultra-concentrated” label to heart—and watched as the rest of the soap confidently oozed back into place until it appeared I had used none at all. Now, what’s left of the dish soap cowers at the bottom of its clear plastic container stained with faint traces dirty dishwater and dried suds.

There are other things too; laundry detergent, tooth paste, shampoo… all of a sudden items I formally dosed with abandon I am now rationing out in impossibly small quantities with the hopes of recreating my own personal Chanukah-style miracle.

Of course, this was bound to happen. With enough loads of dishes, trips to the laundromat, hair washings, teeth brushings, window scrubbings — eventually these things run out. The strange part is how they are all giving out at the same time, almost as if they were designed with my particular patterns in mind. But how could they know that the guy who uses a little dish soap and a lot of shaving cream, a tiny amount of laundry detergent and a copius amount of windex would have arrived at “empty” with so many products at the same time?

For lack of another credible explanation, I’m tentatively blaming Google. They know everything.

I got an important call on my way to the bathroom. A 612 number not in my library, so I picked it up, because there was only one person it could really be, somone very, very important.

It was the University of Minnesota Medical School, and they were just calling to tell me that they like me.

I interviewed there in mid-December, and I had heard nothing from them. Time passed and hurried, and it felt like I was being broken up with through silence: the easiest way to break someone’s heart.

But even though I’m a member of the Minneapolis Chapter of the Bleeding Hearts Club, my heart instantly recovered.

“I wanted to congratulate you on your acceptance to the University of Minnesota Medical School,” the University of Minnesota told me. I told them that they made my week, and they did.

Now, I am also in at a school in Brooklyn, where I keep my life, career and happiness, but I have to cosign that away, because the University of Minnesota is too good to turn down, maybe. So I have a nice interal 3-month debate to have, but overall, not a bad debate, more like choosing between Neapolitan and Spumoni, both good things.
But now that this medical school business is over I have six months to live life, save money, ferret it away, and blow it all on a summer of surfing, planting seeds of bleached hair and skin cancer and happy.

Then I will start to be a doctor.

And what follows is cryptic: I fought the law and I won.

At noon today came a note from the director: “Guys, please stop all work on Project Stingray effective immediately.”

Yes, we have codenames for some of our projects. No, I don’t get to assign them. Yes, I know assigning them would be awesome.

Projects get codenames when they relate to highly sensitive mergers and acquisitions. In fact, they’re so secret that Stingray isn’t even the real codename.* These sorts of assignments are different than the work I’ve done before in which the projects have a clear plan about what work will be performed in what amount of time. They are shorter, faster and more intense, and they have the potential to end at any time. Maybe this is what being on reality TV feels like?

“I’m fired,” and it feels good.

*Note that in the event that I did get to assign the real codenames, I would choose something better than stingray, but I wanted this particular example to be more reflective of what the actual codenames are like. If it were up to me, there is a strong possibility this project would be dubbed Project Team Discovery Channel.**

**Obviously, that’s just an example, since I couldn’t actually tell you what I would name the project, if I ever was able to do so.

In the midst of a soul-crushing project that continues to grind forward despite a lack of necessary data, I received this in my email today. The fruits of my labor have finally come to fruition! Oh glorious days of harvest! Reap!

Fittingly, I sealed the deal on a red-eye back from Silicon Valley. Unfortunately Elite status does little to blunt the trauma of starting a work day with a 6:30am touchdown at Logan.

Taking it back to Freud, back to basics, there are two kinds of people—those who hold it in, and those who fling it at the walls of their cage.

I am expulsive, or more palatable, exceptionally regular. And right now this is my salvation. I go to the bathroom fingers crossed that the handicapable (though their capability is lacking ability) stall is free. And if it is, I am set. This stall has it all. Room, a sink, a mirror and paper towels, though, curiously enough, no soap. So if I ever see some relieved guy wheeling out of the men’s room, I’ll know not to shake his hand.

So I wash my hands outside of the stall.

But I have learned two tricks to deal with slow times at work, and they have two logical handles:

No. 1

No. 2

Number one is an easy game.  I drink as much water and coffee as I can and see how many times I can urinate in one day, and as I am a runner, it’s also logical.  Number two, well, I’m just really, a really regular guy.

My twosies have become a form of yoga.  Western yoga.  I zen out, punching the middle out of the toilet paper seat guard and TPing up any other yogi’s leavings.  Then I sit, and think, and push a little until inspiration hits.  Sometimes it’s a way to wake up, sometimes it’s an excuse to leave the chair, and sometimes it’s a way to just get out when my area is too hot, too cold, too crowded, too something.

And the best part is, that legally, technically and morally I am getting paid to do this.

So for five to seven minutes a day, I have the best job ever.

And I drink a lot of coffee, see No. 1 for more information.

I bring my lunch.  I resolved recently to do this every day when I realized I had dysentery, only with money and not poop.  That’s what trying to buy lunch in Times Square is, and it’s also crowded.  But this coincided with one more thing too, tv-links.co.uk.  If you haven’t seen it, do it now, and, especially if you don’t own a television, you will be able to just watch your free time whittle away.

Now I had a lunch mission, and if I brang lunch there was enough time to watch an hour-long show (House M.D., Heros, Studio 60, etc) multiple cartoons (Bucky O’Hare, Ed Edd and Eddie, Captain N the Gamemaster) some combinations and still have about 10 or 15 minutes of putzing around *cough* bathroom time.

But bringing lunch was the hardpart.  Making it before work was folly, and never happened.  Packing lunch in the morning means ordering sushi at lunch.  I needed structure.  Like a true Catholic, I needed ritual.  So I made one, and it stuck, like a true Catholic.

There is a science.  I work out, and have hollow legs *man:Kevin Bacon*, so I eat a lot.  If it’s a sandwich day, there need to be two, one larger than the other and some sort of fruit item, bananas are a safe bet.  For instance, something with turkey, tomato, honey mustard, cheese and lettuce would be a good main sandwich and hummus and tomato would be a good sidekick.  I assemble them and send them home, in their neet little bags, pressing the bag shut, turning yellow and blue into something special, green.

My eyes are green, and when the sandwich is done, it’s back to blue and yellow again, but that marriage of green comes again for the next day.  I also discovered Edame (shortly after the Japanese).  It’s like chips, but more fun, and cheaper.  It gives me something to do, and fulfills my appetite for both soy and destruction.  Soup is also pretty rad, and lets me in on my office’s microwave ritual, a line of hungry people trying to save money and unfreeze things with aplomb.  It even has its own rules, eg. a soup takes priority over a Lean Cuisine, since a soup just needs a quick blast of atoms while Lean Cuisine needs more of a Chernobyl of microwaves.

All of this will be worth it when I finally saved enough money to travel, and can live off nothing more than soy beans.

I had been looking forward to this day for some time. In a time when a great dearth of interesting workplace happenings has plagued my existence, I saw today as sure-fire material. I mean, is there anything more likely to produce an interesting topic than a mandatory firm-wide sexual harassment (and discrimination!) training?

Our company, as a small and quickly growing firm, has been making baby steps towards full-fledged corporatism. First there was the new office with fancy perks like functioning heat and multiple elevators. Then came the new logo and associated paraphernalia, followed by a new website. But with growth comes responsibility. Or rather, liability. Hence, the firm-wide sexual harassment (and discrimination!) training.

Unfortunately (fortunately?), the training wasn’t quite the comedic gold mine I expected.

I think I was imagining something akin to 8th-grade health class, where we learned that “no means no” and snickered through role-plays about appropriate ways to handle inappropriate situations. In retrospect, it was probably silly to expect that a firm full of overwhelmingly reasonable people would have anything but an overwhelmingly reasonable sexual harassment training.

We learned the history of the federal and state harassment (and discrimination!) case law, and discussed areas where case law is still emerging. We learned that it it is not illegal to age discriminate against someone if they are under age 40. We learned that it IS illegal to ask a disabled person to drive you around in order to receive a better parking spot.

I even found a reason to care about the training. I mean, I’m pretty confident that I’m not going to harass anyone, but I realized this training is important anyways: if the firm gets sued for thousands of dollars, guess who doesn’t get bonuses that year? Everyone.

In conclusion, sexual harassment (and discrimination!) training was not as absurd as I had hoped, and I think that is a good thing.

Hello, work? Are you out there?

It’s me, Ryan. I’m bored. I’m trying to find something to do. I know, we both thought it would never come to this, but short story longer, it has.

It turns out that doing nothing at work is much more difficult than doing something, and infinitely more difficult than doing nothing at home.

Work ebbs and flows, and sometimes its ten-feet thick with floatsom and jetsam, and other times it’s fished out. And while this week is a calm before a storm, it’s a frustrating calm that lasts from 10 AM to 6 PM each day, guaranteed since I am paid hourly.

So while I’ve developed coping mechanisms, they are somewhat maladaptive. I drink water constantly so I can urinate as many times as possible. Same with coffee, only for twosies. I check my email infinitely, and have sparked long-lost, new-lost, new-fangled and spangled conversations on instant messenger. And I’ve been playing with travel websites so much that it’s even a little vulgar.

But now it’s Friday. On my way out the Russian maid will say in a heavy bolshevik accent,

“Thank God It Fridayed,”

And I’ll agree, wish her a happy weekend, and pray that tech spits me something by Monday.

Doing nothing at work is not relaxing, it’s actually high stress. My boss gives me my work, but I’m in direct observation by my boss’ boss. While he is also my supervisor, he does not give me work, nor does he have work to dole. He’s a nice guy, and for that, I do not want to make too apparent, the great stack of nothing, that I am working on.

I’ve even been asking for work, tagging along to irrelevant meetings and being more proactive than pimple wash (oo, that’s a good one).

Thank God It Fridayed.

Every time I fire up iTunes, I am presented with a concrete reminder of the new life in the real world. Where there used to be dozens of shared music libraries with cute names like “mikes hott tunz” or “inda club” or “Untitled Music Library,” now there’s just one: my roommate’s.

Last week, her computer broke down, and there are no longer any shared music libraries in my iTunes. MyTunes are iLonely.