an ever growing number of home offices

Remember how, as kids, you would play office? Scribbling on pads pretending you were writing some very important memos, stuffing papers and pens into lunch boxes or old briefcases as if off to some important meeting, and then hopping into your pretend car to drive home to a dinner of plastic food? Well it seems more and more that the place I work for is merely a ‘pretend’ business.

For starters, as an incentive program, my old twit boss has developed a completely inane ‘point’ system to gauge the amount of work you’ve done each day. Normally, this would be fine, except for the fact that her system doesn’t accurately reflect the amount of work you do…not even remotely. Then, if you achieve a given number of points, you receive a fake dollar bill with her picture on it. This dollar is awarded to you in a mandatory meeting where a sheet is passed around with the number of points everyone totaled the previous day. The goal, as I’ve come to see, is to shame those who got low points…much like the dunce cap of old. The ‘winners’, as she calls them, who achieve their point quota get their dollar and everyone else must sit and clap for them…yes, clap. Originally, these dollars were meant to buy time off. But upon seeing that people were actually using them to leave an hour or two early, she has decided to begin phasing this out. Instead, you can now purchase things like Pop Tarts and an apple juice with this fake money. Of course, she has instituted a new office policy that you are not allowed to eat at your desk…which means that your apple juice and pop tart must be eaten on your break time…unless you want to confiscate it on a trip to the bathroom and gobble it down while hidden away in a stall.

To go along with the whole ‘pretend’ theme, the senile twit has allowed one of her ‘office pets’ to now work from home. This girl has moved with her husband to State College and, while the old twit would never let any other manager work from home, this girl is somehow favored among all else. A new computer, modem, fax machine, telephone, scanner, and even her own 1-800 number were purchased for this girl. And the very next day, upon the company website, it now appeared that instead of two offices across the USA (for we have an office in California…it loses money hand over fist, but this office helps the old twit believe in the illusion that she has a ‘big’ company) we now have three companies spanning the nation. The Pittsburgh office. The California office. And, a new star placed atop State College, marking our new office there…which, interestingly enough, is the home address of Laura…the manager granted permission to work in her pajamas while watching Regis and Kelly on TV.

Let your employees work from home, declare each personal residence a new ‘branch’ office, and watch your business grow! You’ll be amazed at the pretend profits from the pretend offices that start rolling in! And if nothing else, buy a Pop Tart, chase it with an apple juice, and drink your worries away.