death by her own design

As a rule, I try to avoid office gossip. In truth, however, I try only to avoid spreading office gossip but whole-heartedly condone listening to it. With this being said, the following events from Monday, October 23 have been reconstructed from bits and pieces of overheard conversations around the office.

11:00 am: Cara, the other salesperson in the office, had two appointments scheduled for the day. She called in after her first meeting had ended and spoke to our receptionist. Things went ‘awesomely’ she reported, but was too busy to speak with the boss and promptly hung up.

11:05 am: The company that Cara just left called the office asking where she was. “She never showed up for the meeting,” they told our boss.

1:00 pm: Cara’s second sales call of the day is scheduled to begin.

1:10 pm: Our boss, now skeptical of Cara’s whereabouts, calls the company to see if she is actually there. The answer, he is told, is ‘no’. “She cancelled the appointment this morning.”

1:45 pm: Cara calls back into the office. “My second sales call today was awesome!” she tells our boss, who made it a point of answering the phone when she called. “I’m going to grab some lunch and will try to make it in later this afternoon,” she continued.

It was at about this point when our boss told Cara to ‘cut the shit’. “I know that you didn’t go to either appointment today. You better get into the office immediately.” Cara’s response was that her car broke down and that she had been too embarrassed to say anything earlier.

2:15 pm: Despite the broken down car, Cara makes it into the office surprisingly fast. She is quickly dragged into a meeting with our boss and the office manager.

2:25 pm: Her story has changed from 40 minutes earlier. The new and improved story involves a friend with personal problems who was at Cara’s house the night before. Cara stayed up all night consoling this friend and didn’t get any sleep.

“You’ve told me two completely different stories,” our boss is rumored to have said. “Which am I supposed to believe?”

2: 33 pm: It is unclear which story Cara asked him to believe. Some around the office say the former. Others, the latter. Still others think that a third story, involving alien abduction and mysterious crop circles surfaced. Whichever of these Cara stuck with, she broke into tears and said that ‘this will never happen again.’

2:34 pm: Cara was right, it will never happen again. She was fired. It has been reported by people who sit near the boss’s office, that Cara stormed out declaring how ‘unfair’ this was and how he would ‘be sorry’ for letting her go. Unfortunately, my boss does not value ‘pretend’ work.

2:35 pm: I become the top sales person in the company…by default, of course, yet who am I to deny the title?

american idle

We had a luncheon staff meeting earlier this week, a mixture of food and business which inevitably led to heart burn. And, as if to add to the gastronomical distress, the food that was ordered consisted of greasy buffalo wings and even greasier pizza.

When the last slice of pizza was consumed and the final wing was eaten, we all settled in for the business portion of lunch…decreasing sales, decreasing morale, lack of team spirit and, in essence, what the hell was wrong with all of us?

As the meeting wound down, Cara looked at me and said, “You are such a fidgeter!”

Which is true, my hands are constantly in motion. During college, I always drew pictures of my professors and classmates in each and every notebook I owned. Pen caps get flicked and paper clips get linked together. And, right before Cara made her comment, I had been creating a work of art with my fork on the remaining buffalo wing sauce that was left on my plate. A masterpiece that, while getting me labeled as ‘fidgeter', would have been proclaimed ‘genius’ if done by someone like Andy Warhol.

“And you know how the saying goes,” Cara continued, “Idle hands, busy mind. Busy hands, idle mind.”

“Cara, what are you talking about? The saying goes, idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” I responded.

“Whatever,” she said, “you know what I’m trying to say.”

Which was also true. I knew exactly what she was trying to say…despite my ‘idle’ mind. But as I opened my mouth to respond, I saw that Cara had already turned her back on me and was busy talking to an overweight lady that works in the office.

“I love cooking and have some great low calorie recipes that you should try,” Cara was saying. As far as I knew, this lady had never expressed a concern about her weight. Complimenting herself while simultaneously insulting the person she’s talking to is very typical in Cara conversations.

And watching her reminded me of another non-existent old saying. Open mouth, empty head.

an overheard conversation - in three acts

I was at the supermarket yesterday, waiting in line at one of those self-scanning stations. The guy ahead of me was scanning his groceries when his cell phone started ringing. He answered the phone and, unlike the hushed tones that some people use to speak on their cells, this man was an extremely loud cell phoner, speaking in a booming voice as if he was alone in his house rather than standing in the grocery store at 8:30 pm on a Monday night.

As he continued to scan, it became clear that the entire store would be audience to the call.

Act I: The Meeting

“Phil, how are you? I’m fine. Yeah, the flight back was great, but I just gotta tell you about what happened. You won’t believe it. I was sitting in the airport bar since I had about two hours to kill, and this lady comes up and sits next to me. We start talking, I buy her a drink, and before you know it, we’re both sitting there doing shots of tequila. So I slip off my wedding ring..."

Act II: The Deception

"...one thing leads to another, and soon this woman is all over me. We're both pretty trashed by this time and I really have to pee, so I ask her to watch my briefcase and carry-on bags while I go to the bathroom. So she looks me straight in the eye and tells me to hurry because she's got a room at the airport hotel and maybe we could slip upstairs before my flight...no, I'm not shitting you! I'm dead serious man! So I take the fastest pee of my life and head back out to the bar, but when I get there she’s gone, and so are all of my bags..."

Act III: The Mess

"...so I throw some money down on the bar and go running out after her. And not 50 feet from the bar, I find her standing in the middle of the terminal puking all over my luggage! The stupid bitch barfed on my bags! I grabbed them and headed back to the john to rinse off as much of the puke as I could. It’s a good thing I bought her all those drinks, otherwise she would have made off with all my stuff."

As he finished up his story and began talking about the football scores from the day before, I looked down and studied my choice of grocery purchases; a box of granola bars, coffee, and a package of Winterfresh mints. I stood there thinking, ‘Boy, what a boring life I lead.’

I put the mints back on the shelf and replaced them with a pack of the ‘Hot & Fiery’ variety instead. Satisfied that life had become more exciting, I thought, ‘there, that’s better.’

phantom vibrations

My typical packing procedure involves stuffing as many things into a bag as possible. And, as the training week came to a close in Minneapolis, I packed for the return flight in this very way.

Clothes, shoes, books, a bottle of aspirin, and other assorted knick-knacks that were accumulated during the week were all haphazardly stuffed into my suitcase. I struggled with the zipper for a full five minutes before I finally got the bag closed and, once finished, I stood back to admire my work…a suitcase with more lumps than any homemade gravy you’d ever seen.

The zipper was struggling against the sheer perversion of physics which I had just performed…surely no mere zipper could endure the amount of force pressing against it from all the crap that it was expected to contain, yet hold it did. All the way down the elevator, into the plane, and onto the luggage pick-up at the terminal once the flight was over.

Upon getting back home, I unzipped the suitcase and relieved its burden. My unpacking routine, being very similar to my packing routine, consisted of throwing these same (and now wrinkled) clothes into various drawers. The knickknacks were left in the suitcase and tossed into a closet, to be dealt with at a later date.

My packing and unpacking prowess was flawless, and remained flawless until I realized that my cell phone was nowhere to be found. I was certain that it got thrown into my bag at the hotel, though where it could have ended up once I got back home was completely beyond me.

In true sleuthing fashion, I grabbed my land-line phone, dialed my cell phone number, and proceeded to walk around the apartment, listening intently for a clue as to where my missing cell phone might be. This was made more difficult by the fact that I keep my cell phone on ‘vibrate’, having made an unfortunate choice in ring-tones several months back. Having spent $2 on this ring-tone, however, I refuse to replace it with a more normal sounding ring…because this would imply that I wasted $2, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get my monies worth out of the ring-tone that I purchased.

So I walked around for 20 minutes, dialing and redialing my cell phone, carefully listening for the faint sound of buzzing from somewhere within my apartment, all to no avail. Wherever my cell was hiding out, it clearly didn’t want to be found.

And the next day I went phoneless. I felt like a war veteran that lost a limb in battle. And just like these veterans who experience phantom pain in limbs that no longer exist, I kept experiencing phantom vibrations throughout the day, only to reach down and find that no phone was there.

This continued for several days…mysterious phantom buzzing from a phone that wasn’t there. I was positive that I was receiving, and missing, many important calls in my phone’s absence. That call to alert me to the fact that I had won a million dollars was missed. The call from Sarah Michelle Gellar telling me that she loved me was also missed.

It wasn’t until later in the week that the phone was found. Early one morning, as I groggily rooted around in my sock drawer for a clean pair to wear, I stumbled upon something that was neither soft nor sock-like. Confused as to what this hard object could be, I pulled it out and saw that it was my cell phone.

Apparently, in my unpacking frenzy, the phone got mixed and tossed in with the socks. Either that or my low-tech socks decided to wage war on the high-tech gadgets in my apartment by taking the cell phone hostage. Either way, the prodigal cell had returned home.

I plugged it in…for after several days on the lam it had no battery power left…and turned it on, ready to catch up on all those important messages which had been missed. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I was excitedly anticipating what these messages held. Sarah Michelle? Unclaimed fortunes? Six figure a year job offers?

I punched in my pass code and listened as the tinny, Verizon voice told me that I had four new messages. Three of which turned out to be some lady named Fran trying to get me to apply for an American Express card and one from Gary telling me that I could save 20% on a carpet cleaning.

In the future, my cell phone is going to have to fend for itself against the socks.