I can only hope that after 10 years of marriage, Amy & I have gift-giving fights as good as the one Judd Apatow has with Leslie Mann.
A new personal best/worst!
Thanks, federal government and state of New Jersey! I didn’t really want the other FORTY-FOUR PERCENT of my holiday bonus and online sales commission anyway!
Maybe in another year or two you can take more than half of my cash!
Holiday Bounce
On the way out Friday, I set my outgoing voice-mail message to let callers know that I won’t be back in the office till January 2nd. Usually, I end that sorta message with, “If you need immediate assistance, please call my associate editor [whose name I don’t wanna give out] at extension 326,” but she’s going to be out till Jan. 2, too.
That’s when I decided that anybody who calls next week surely can’t be taken seriously.
So, till we get back, my associate editor and I have both set up our voice-mails to instruct the caller to contact the other one “for immediate assistance.”
That’ll learn ’em!
Jingle blorch
Well, I didn’t embarrass myself at the office Christmas party (or “holiday party,” if that’s your preference) yesterday. However, our office drunk managed to deliver, getting positively RIPPED within the first two hours. The party started around noon, and by 2pm, he had mistaken me for a coworker’s spouse to tell me a joke. Now, that guy and I are both tall and gangly, but the other guy has a big bushy moustache, in contrast to my whiskerless face.
And since our office drunk spent almost 30 seconds trying to tell me how much I resemble Borat before he realized that I don’t have big bushy moustache, I was convinced he was headed toward Top Three status for his drunken office party escapades.
Certainly he would rival the year he loudly (and drunkenly) rambled over the address from our company’s founder and the editor emeritus (#2 all time). I doubt he’ll ever top the year he accidentally (and drunkenly) broke a small serving table by leaning on it. That one became the stuff of legend because of the George-&-Gracie aspect of his wife pointing at him on the floor and cackling (drunkenly).
But just when he was getting ready to make 2007 a party to remember, something funny happened: he disappeared.
No one can recall seeing him after 3pm, shortly before the beginning of our annual state-of-the-company jokefest, new employee Jingle Bells singalong, and Carnac routine (known as Rodnac). I was amazed that an obese drunk in a pink dress-shirt could vanish right before the very eyes of a room full of people who were waiting for him to make an ass of himself, but he somehow pulled it off. Our search parties came up blank, even after checking the floors of all three men’s rooms in the restaurant.
I went all CSI: Miami and tried to reconstruct the scene. Even doing my best David Caruso impression, all I could come up with was that he kept asking coworkers at his table to go up to the free bar and get him his fifth martini, but was turned down. One witness said that he saw the guy stumble out of the dining room around 2:45, which would’ve put him in proximity of the restaurant’s main bar.
I assumed he was looking to continue getting himself loaded, but in the privacy of a room full of people who weren’t waiting for him to make an ass of himself. However, the bartender had no recollection of him, so we had to conclude that he either
- got his car from the valet and drove home early enough not to put the rest of our lives at risk,
- got his car from the valet and drove to another bar,
- passed out face-down in a snowbank behind the restaurant, or
- decided to head back to the office and work on some of his sales accounts before the holiday break.
Maybe I’m being charitable with #4, but it’s the giving season or something.
In true cliffhanger style, we won’t find out the answer to this one till we get back to the office in the new year, but I promise to find the truth, dear readers!
VM bonus! The owner of our company in his Rodnac regalia:
Unrequired Reading: Dec. 21, 2007
The year-end 400+ page issue is finished at last! This one is dedicated to QuarkXpress, the layout program that includes such features as “This file cannot be opened by this version of QuarkXpress” and “Why would we bother making our font-handling system compatible with Mac? It’s not like the Mac is a computer of choice in the publishing industry!”
Time to embarrass myself and others at our office holiday party!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 21, 2007”
Changents
David Byrne on the economics of the music industry:
Of course, not everyone is as smart as those nerdy Radiohead boys. Pete Doherty probably should not be handed the steering wheel.
Andrew Wylie on the economics of the literary publishing industry:
Um, it’s a very small business, there’s not that tremendous interest available at any given time, so people are interested competitively in what you have, especially if you’re only looking at quality. If you’re playing a higher-risk game, being in the business of quality is a fairly low-risk game if you do it right. The high-risk game is the commercial end. It’s high-risk for everybody, because if it doesn’t work, there’s a tremendous loss to be made—a loss of face, a loss of money. With work of quality, if you don’t make your money back right away, you will over time anyway. So I think we’re the soft and gentle side of the business. We’re the affordable shop in the industry. What we’re selling is going to earn out sooner or later, anyway.
Michael Lewis (a prof at WashU) on the economics of baseball:
The problem is that the teams receiving [revenue-sharing] payments have come to use them as a primary source of income — rather than to build winning teams. The most extreme example has been the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. In 2006, this team had a payroll of about $35 million, $42 million less than the 2006 league average. Not surprisingly, it won only 38 percent of its games and filled less than 40 percent of its seats for home games. It also collected more than $30 million in revenue-sharing transfers. This past season, the team reduced its payroll to $24 million and had about the same level of success. [. . .] The problem is that transfers are based on local revenues. Teams that receive money are encouraged to invest it in their payrolls. But if a team actually attracts fans by fielding a winning team, its revenue-sharing receipts will be reduced.
Bookseller, bookmaker: whatever!
The most amazing thing to me about this news item isn’t that Michael Jackson’s face is covered with bandages, nor even that he has custody of three children. No, what amazes me is that there’s a Barnes & Noble in Las Vegas.
Seriously, I’ve been to Vegas 4-5 times now, and I haven’t come across a single bookstore yet.
Dishing and swishing
In my office, the men take out the mail, and the women clean the kitchen.
No, seriously. Everybody’s got 1-week rotations of one of those duties, and it’s split by gender. I guess it’s because guys are able to carry more mail-crates down to their cars and over to the post office. Or because the owner’s a guy and he doesn’t want to wipe down the kitchen and load/unload the dishwasher.
Myself, I don’t use any of the office dishes, silverware, glasses, mugs, etc. No, I’m content to use only my own stuff, wash it myself, and spend as little time as possible in the kitchen. If you smelled our ‘fridge, you’d do the same.
This morning, I noticed a big pile of dishes in the sink. The dishwasher was running, which was odd, since we normally run it at the end of the day. Maybe last week’s kitchen patroller forgot to run it, I thought.
Around 90 minutes later, I refilled my water bottle and noticed that the dishwasher was still running. Now I was puzzled. Around lunchtime, I found out the horrible truth: I am living in a world of cretins. I’ve always suspected it, but now I have proof.
See, whoever had kitchen duty last week — and I’m afraid to look on the calendar to find out who it was — did her work as charged: she rinsed the dishes that our less considerate coworkers left in the sink, loaded the dishwasher, and added the two Electrasol detergent tablets per cycle.
She just didn’t think to remove the tablets from their individual plastic wrappers.
So, for a week, the dishwasher ran hot-water cycles with a pair of plastic-sealed tabs sitting in the detergent container. They melted. Again and again. And you wonder why NJ is the cancer capital of the northeast.
Years ago, the guy who hired me once described one of our coworkers as “the stupidest person still able to feed herself.” I think we’ve lowered the bar.
Happy Birthday!
Official VM bestest pal Tom Spurgeon turns 39 today! Go celebrate by reading his great interview with Joe Sacco!
Now that he’s opened his birthday package that I sent last week, I can finally reveal the single greatest gag gift I have ever stumbled across. Before you flip out over this, please note that
a) I found it on the used DVD shelf at GameStop, and
b) it cost $1.99
(Click on the pic for a larger version of the image)
I can’t tell you how difficult it was to keep a straight face when I brought the case up to the stereotypically pimply-faced cashier.
This present doesn’t come anywhere close to the magic of the one that Tom sent me for Hanukkah earlier this month: The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen
Here’s an incredibly out-of-context panel:
Thanks for being a great friend, Tom.
Unrequired Reading: Dec. 14, 2007
Even the annual slog through the Contract Services Directory won’t stop me from delivering my weekly oddball links, dear readers! Enjoy!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Dec. 14, 2007”