Money for Nothin' and Your Chicks for Free

Who would have thought that a mere 12 hours a day of sitting on my butt in front of a computer could cause major league tendon issues? Certainly not Mr. Offramp, who did 12 hour shifts of hard core heavy duty physical labor under hazardous conditions for 13 years befor going on disability, non-related. In his words, roughly translated:

"You wuss. You've found America, you just sit on your butt all day 60 seconds from the bathroom and 30 seconds from the coffee machine. You can make phone calls whenever you want and surf on your break. You've got it made. If I had your job I'd pop out of bed and run to work!"

(I didn't have the heart to tell him I don't have to wait for a break to surf. )

Money for nothin' and your chicks for free.

I'll be photoshopping the backgrounds out of 70+ photos over the next two days. He doesn't get it that there could be any pain involved.

So I haven't been online much. Taking it easy. And now I have to post without taking this item anywhere, since I accidentally hit "post" already, and un-posting causes problems.

Potty Habits of the Ancients

To those of you who have had a ridicuous amount of snow this year, 50 degrees F. probably sounds good enough to put on a bathing suit and yell for a shirtless hula boy to bring you a drink with a paper umbrella in it. But you'd be surprised how damn cold 50 degrees F. is when your jeans are down around your ankles.

Our employer does not believe in heating the ladies' room. We are not enriching the shareholders while we are having a bathroom break, so we cannot enjoy heat during the interlude. I guess they figure it will get us out of there sooner. It works. We avoid the detested trip and wait for the earth to warm naturally as the sun climbs higher in the sky, thus improving conditions in the ladies' room.

My heart goes out to the ancient Native Americans, the Vikings, Druids, and other ancient people who probably did not enjoy heated facilities. Imagine waking up at 3:00 a.m. on a January night in 200 B.C and it's 2 degrees F., snowing big time, and there are wild animals roaming around. Even much more recently, how did the early settlers manage it? The little room with the little half-moon on the door was not heated at any time of the day. How did they manage?

The ancient Romans had public toilets with running water. I saw that on the Discovery channel, or maybe it was National Geographic or the History channel.

The ancient Japanese had some sort of sophisticated setup also. Shogun, the book. The miniseries glossed over that. Anyway, I think it was outside and it gets pretty cold over there. The ladies' room and mens' room was one and the same, kind of like the youth hostels in Holland. One sure-fire recipe for constipation.

The Essenes, who lived about the time that BC changed to AD, had their toilet rituals perscribed for them and written down. There was no mention of any facilities, just something about using a stick to dig a hole in the ground, and digging holes before the sabbath so they'd be ready and not require digging on the Sabbath. That's from Flavius Josephus, ancient Jewish historian. He was blogging without a computer at about that time.

So our situation in the ladies room is not much better than theirs, weather-wise. But whatever possessed the folks in Africa 100,000 years ago to leave that nice warm weather and go to Europe before the onset of heated restrooms is beyond me.

Alex

I just saw Alex in the car next to me, waiting for a green light. I waved but he didn't respond. He may have recognized me though. He's just that way.

Alex is a computer whiz kid. He could troubleshoot and solve any problem. He'd shuffle into work everyday in his jeans and one of two t-shirts, either the one paying tribute to Led Zepplin or the other one celebrating death and a heavy metal band. Alex would never greet anyone or even make eye contact. He'd disappear into his cubicle and just sit there with his giant glasses and weird hair sticking up over the walls, rescuing customers all over the world.

One day Alex realized that he was the axel upon which customer service rotated, and put forth his request for appropriate compensation. The management thought to woo him with a trip abroad. They bought him a suit and sent him abroad to present a course. The course was a disaster. Evidently, they didn't consider that the ability to make eye contact and to speak clearly might be necessary qualities to look for in a trainer.

Alex got a better offer and left the company. The management realized too late that they should have given him a title and the raise he deserved and let him keep doing what he does best.

The job of my manager has come vacant three times since I've started working here but I never went for it. You couldn't pay me to manage our group. For one thing, we're a bunch of perfectionists who like to complain. We can go for 20 minutes having a heated discussion on a comma. The other reason is that I couldn't manage my way out of a plastic bag. Just because someone is good at their job does not mean that they can manage other people. Let me do my technical duties and I'm happy as a pop tart on the front page of the National Enquirer. Luckily for us all, even if I went for it I wouldn't get it because our management is smart enough to know that technical skill does not a manager make.

Alpha Males I

Had a meeting with three alpha males today: my boss, my other boss, and his boss. They are all really nice guys but try saying even one word. The meeting is about whether I can deliver my product on time in that new application I once mentioned being trained AS IF on. My other boss, cutting me off: "Ora, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say blah blah blada blah..."

Fifteen minutes later, the three of them are still arguing, Other Boss turns out not to be a mind reader, I have not asked my question, I'm not listening to a thing that any of them are saying cause I'm concentrating, trying to find an opportunity to ask my very important question, and I'm wondering how anyone has the energy to be an alpha male.

And what reminded me of this was the recent post about going back to work by Wits Bitch who I tried for the first time today, and to which I could totally relate. Except that since they recently layed off 25% of my coworkers, and keep talking about our dreary outlook, kissing corporate ass does not bother me right now. In fact, I am willing to kiss the entire middle and upper management's asses in an ass-kissing marathon, just let me stay. Line up outside my gray cubicle and I'll kiss till my lips fall off.

The Perfect Woman

This is going to sound perverted, but here goes:

We have a newish girl at work. She's a tiny teen, tottering about on 4 inch stilettos. Well, she has to be at least in her late 20's but she is tiny and comes to work looking perfect every day. Perfect clothes, perfect hair, perfect body, and judging from her perfect position, she is intelligent, and she bakes perfect brownies. The type of person you want to drown in the toilet. But she promised to give us the recipe so we let her live.

One day when she teetered by while I was eating with my friends. I stopped in mid-sentence and just stared at her butt. No amount of exercise could give you that butt. Believe me, I tried.

My friends were all "Ora, what's up, what are you looking at, are you OK?" I couldn't believe it. Her perfect butt is the one I ordered when I was a fetus and the Power that Be was showing me the DIY Butt catalog. I know I chose that butt, I ordered it, it should have been mine!

How can one person get it all? Why am I not that one person? Maybe I was a person who kicked dogs in a previous life so I didn't deserve to get that butt. If that's how it works, she was surely Mother Theresa in her previous life.

Anyway, I'd get you a picture but there are security cameras all over and if they caught me running around with a camera, scrunching down to the level of her perfect butt and taking pictures, you know how that would go. Considering the economy, I don't want to risk it.

Of course my friends now refer to her behind her butt as "There Goes Ora's Butt". Yeah, rub it in.

Expert Cooperation in a Bad Economy

My employer has laid off 25% of our workforce at our branch, and besides the effect on moral, it's having other influences.

Our King of Electricity, I'll call him Louie, is a very important and sought-after person. Everyone needs him for various aspects of their work, so getting his time and attention is a bit of a task. I had an urgent assignment to finish. I got everybody's OK and all I needed was for Louie to OK the unit of measure — V AC — in a sentence.

For a week I ran after him by phone and email. He'd brush me off, tell me how busy he was, and outright ignore me. My boss was starting to get nervous.

I was getting desperate, so I wrote Louie a poem and sent it by email:

Louie, Louie,
Thou hast forsaken me
You don't reply
You elusive guy
Do I keep the V AC?

So, I won't be winning any literary prizes. But hey, no one ever wrote me a poem at work! I thought it was a nice touch. But Louie did not appreciate my poem and ignored me even more. My boss was pressing for me to complete my task.

In the meantime, two of my coworkers had filled up another guy's cubicle with balloons as a practical joke. The next day I took half of the baloons, wrote V AC on them, and left them all over his messy cubicle. You'd think something like that would evoke a response but NOTHING! Maybe he didn't even notice the balloons among the mess. My boss asked if he needed to get involved. I still wanted to handle it myself.

A friend of mine suggested offering him a blow job. This may have been a tactic likely to produce results, but now I felt it was only fair for my boss to do the honors. Suddenly he didn't want to get involved, go figure.

In the end, I left the V AC in and declared the item complete. No one questioned me.

Now, months later, when I sent Louie an email about a new item, expecting no reply, he shows up at my cubicle, tells me that we should set up a time and he'll give me the replies directly. I sent him a meeting mail. He didn't reply the same day, but comes to me while I'm standing on line for lunch, APPOLOGIZES for not getting back to me immediately cause he was sick, and then shows up on his own volition at my cubicle, sits for 20 minutes, answers all my questions, commiserates with me about the bad lighting, and advises me about my home electrical issues!

For a while this change in behavior was a total mystery, as I am not getting any hotter as the years go by. But I finally figured it out: All of a sudden he doesn't have much work due to The Economy and is trying to fill up his project hours!

Or maybe he heard about the blow job.

Helping a Coworker

From: Z
Subject: Peer support paranoia: FM hates me.

OK, hands up - who knows why *suddenly* my headers on random pages have GONE ON HOLIDAY. I’m talking FM. I’m talking new template. I’m talking have tried re-importing template. I’m talking PLEASE help me. I passed the end of my tether. My tether is a DOT to me.

---
From: Ora

Sorry, I don't know why. Has anyone replied?

---
From: Z

No! I so feel like crying.

---
From: Ora

Maybe you should contact Tech Support?

---
From: Z

Problem solved by the old cut and paste into clean document workaround. I then had to repeat the procedure on three other infected chapters. And now my chapter files are coming out A4 when the rest are custom. Vent vent vent.

---
From: Ora

How can I cheer you up?

• You are not a resident of Dafur.
  
• The cable selection is so bad it can only get better .
  
• You can get up and go get coffee whenever you want to while policemen and skyscraper window cleaners cannot always do that.
• You don't have to cut up dead bodies to make a living.

---
From: Z

Its ok. There is more:

• I don't have to run around flea infested and fight for food like street cats.
• I didn’t have to guess the obscure name of a silly little man who spun straw into gold for me in return for my firstborn in order that I get to marry the king.
• I am not Britney Spears.

---
From: Ora

• Your husband is not the costar of Angelina Jolie.
• No one has tied you to your chair and forced you to watch America's Next Top Model.
• You are not married to Amedinejad.

---
From: Z

• Somebody somewhere has to do far more for their husband than I do.
• In Jamaica, your afro is a fire hazard when lighting your ganja


• I have never been bitten by a crocodile.

---
From: Ora

This reminds me of the scene in 8 Miles with Eminem where they rap-joust.
I concede, yours are better than mine.

Picking the Perfect Program

A few days ago I told you about the first day of training on a new software program, during which I decided that I had AOADD. I still think I have it, but I'm beginning to think that this particular software is not so innocent. This program is painfully slow and has no advantages visible to the human eye.

The developers of this "suite" were on drugs. I can imagine the process:

"What's the easiest way enable copying a file - copy/paste?"
"That's so unoriginal. This package will have three different programs open at the same time. You select the folder in which you want to paste the file, jump into a different program to give it new parameters, go to back to the first program, locate the file to be copied, open the Action menu, and click Clone."
"What's the third program for?"
"I haven't figured that out yet, but it'll be really awsome when I do"
"Dude!" (high five)

The Comittee for Synergizing Application Implementation was on a budget. I imagine that the selection process went something like this:

"Application A is the Rolls Royce of its kind. It will not only resolve the issues we were having, but guarantees increased throughput and a smoother workflow. If we go with this, we'll receive on-site assistance throughout every step of the move, full training for all users, and a five-year warranty!"
"Whoa, but look at the price tag! That's out of our league."
"Well, application B has ten satisfied beta customers from companies just like ours and they'll provide training for the administrators."
"Still pretty steep. What are the other choices?"
"If we go with application C, we'll get a free microwave."
"Dude!" (high five)

Adult Onset Attention Deficit Disorder

I was recently self-diagnosed with Adult Onset Attention Deficit Disorder (AOADD). The disease presented in a session in which my boss was teaching us how to use a new software. Normally we have to figure these out on our own, but this one is a tricky little devil and my boss likes to lecture so it was the perfect opportunity for him to get attention without showing up in public sans underpants. He scheduled three consecutive all-day sessions.
An hour and 15 minutes into the session, we had theoretically learned how to check out a file. This procedure consists of 5 mouse clicks, but with my AOADD I was unable to follow the lecture. His pointer was going, his mouth was going, words were coming out, small words, English words. They floated right past me where I could almost reach out and touch them, like the monster in Young Frankenstein, trying to catch the music, but I couldn't seem to grasp them. I found myself making a grocery list and building my own Sudoku.
My coworkers seemed to be following. I hated them as they smugly blurted out their comments and questions. I hated them for having a higher boredom threshold than mine.
My husband agrees that I have a problem as I get fidgety during simple instructions such as "Do not go shopping", and cannot sit still throughout the daily lecture on topics such as Turning Out the Lights as the TV/Computer Screen Provides its Own Light Source, and Why We Don't Need Someone to Paint the House Since it Would Cost Less if I (Lady Offramp) Took a Day Off Work to Do It.

Hitchin' a Ride

What do you do when a co-worker who is asking for a ride on a regular basis smells like a decomposing body in an outhouse? I don't know what to do. I know, I'm too stupid to tell him he reeks so I deserve him. But I can't just tell him that. Having an innocent monolog about a great new deodorant will not do the trick, as it is a multi-orifice issue. Should I just go on and on about the various hygene products on the market every time I pick him up, and hope that he'll take the hint?

I hate to admit it but yesterday as I was leaving I saw that he was calling me and I simply didn't answer the phone. I felt guilty about that all night, so when he called this morning I picked him up and now I'm sorry I did. It's a long ride and I could hardly breathe the whole time. It was too cold to open a window so I was driving with my face pointed 15 degrees to the left and taking shallow breaths. It was actually giving me a headache. When we got to work, in order to breathe a.s.a.p., I avoided getting into the elevator with him and told him to go on ahead as I had to check something in my car. I hung around the car for 5 minutes to make sure that he wouldn't be still waiting for the elevator when I got there. Even though the parking space I found was near the garbage containers, breathing felt nice.

The Girls Discuss Rolling Stones' 500 Best

From: Ora
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/500songs ...
Do we agree with their list?

From: Tina
I've had some problems browsing the list but from what I can see the main players are Rolling Stones (of course) and Bob Dylan. I would throw out many of the oldies.

From: Ora
Agreed! It bothered me that most of it was from the 60's and 70's. They should not call it "Greatest Songs of All Times" they should call it "Greatest Songs of Aging Baby Boomers Who Think They're So Cool Because They Work at Rolling Stone" who made a gesture by adding a few later songs that they either happened to overhear while sneaking into their kid's room to search for drugs while said kid was in the bathroom, and the television was on MTV, or recognized from the theme of some movie or commercial.

From: Z
In other words, you and Tina are way cooler than the people on Rolling Stone magazine.

From: Ora
Tina definitely is. And like naked people running like sheep to be photographed in the town square, their uncoolness bursts out of every pore as evidenced by this list. It's like they're saying "only the music of the 60's and 70's was any good". Lots of people around today weren't even around then, so this list is totally unrepresentative. There is hardly any new wave on it.

From: Sally
Did you notice the list is from 2004?And another thing to consider – I think that when you try to rank “the best” list, you always try to give some time perspective. Meaning – you don’t include NEW stuff since it did not have enough time to mature…so, in 20-30 years or so, songs from our current decade will be included. Don’t you think?

From: Ora
Good insight! I feel better about the list, having had this brought to my attention. In about 40 years Stan by Eminem will be elevator music. I'll step onto the elevator at the neighborhood retirement home for active seniors and hear the faint piping of "Dear Slim, you still ain't called or wrote, I hope you have the chance. I ain't mad, I just think it's f**ked up you don't answer fans..." with glockenspiel accompaniment.

The Girls Discuss Living Off the Grid

Living Off The Grid - How to avoid the spies all around us

From: Ora
That is one freaky article! I don't know if I'd want to live in a tent in my parents garden. My mom has some kinky neighbors.

From: Z
Or do without electricity, sewage disposal, etc.

From: Ora
And why are they giving out infomation on how to defeat the cameras! Normal people won't do that, but criminals and terrorists will!

I think my brother will like this article. He thinks that George Bush personally listens to everyone's phone calls and reads their email.

From: Z
That’s probably how he gets material for his speeches! LOL.

I think off-grid living will become increasingly popular. I have learnt from action films that if I am on the run, go off-grid. No phone calls, no email, no credit-card use. No airports. Wigs. And now living on a boat and driving only at night with an infra-red lit number plate. Can’t wait.

From: Ora
Yes, a lot can be learned from action films. I'm worried about CSI giving criminals too many tips on what not to do. Our police force is lightyears behind.

From: Z
If you kill anyone, remove their fingers and teeth so that their identity cannot be ascertained and no motive can be found.

From: Ora
Yuk!
Also wear a hairnet. I hate those.

From: Z
And don’t dribble!

From: Ora
And hope that our local police are assigned to the case.

At work today I had to sign the following:
"I will not use the software for, and will not allow the software to be used for, any purposes prohibited by United States law, including,without limitation, for the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons of mass destruction."

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

If I knew how to use the software to manufacture nuclear WMD

• Do you really think I won't now, just because I signed the statement?
• Why are you letting me anywhere near it?
• Would I be working here? for this salary?

The Girls Discuss Madonna's Fitness

Jen:
RE: A look at Madonna's 50 yr old legs
Here’s the picture brought directly to your email box…

Ora:
If she was in our airplane and it crashed in the Andes, she could feel safe cause I wouldn't be eating her.

Z:
I would. Imagine selling THAT story to the papers! “I ate Madonna!”

Jen:
Look at her arms too!

Ora:
Her arms are the main reason that I won't be eating her if we crash in the Andes. That, and I don't have Zoe's head for business.

Z:
The arms look tastier than the legs. I wouldn’t want to chew through the tights, but if I were in the Andes, this would be the difference between a hot dog and a sausage. If we could tie this in with a Fear Factor episode, we would surely be onto a winner. I COULD CERTAINLY HACK THE ANDES WITH JOE ROGAN!!

In Which Sam sends Ora a cute little picture

To: Ora

From: Sam

Subject: Mr. Cogs Gets Excited

I

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I

I

I

I

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I

To: Sam

From: Ora

Subject: Mr. Cogs Gets Excited

He doesn't look excited, he looks confused. He should be screaming his head off and swearing never again to get pierced while drunk.