Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Archives for April 2003

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Say what you will about being a corporate employee, but there’s something to be said for the feeling you get when you enter your boss’s office to discover her scrambling frantically to locate the report that you spent the last weeks compiling because it’s absolutely key to her three-thirty presentation, which is to say: you are somewhat dismayed that your spiffy white binder of findings had been so easily misplaced, empowered to see that your work is indeed an important keystone in your departments archway of communication, and secretly jealous that you cannot tag along to reap the obviously forthcoming compliments on your deft handiwork.

In other news, i learned that an employee is “absolutely prohibited from developing her personal website while at work even if she does so during her lunch hour.” Lucky for me, the policy seems to only apply to female employees. In your face, female employees!

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/04/200200388/

200176393

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It’s very corporate. I remember the qualifications that i set when i started college: nothing where i primarily spend time with computers, and nothing too corporate. I cannot help but wonder: did i compromise, or just change my mind?

I am usually the first in the building from my department, save for the other intern. At eight fifteen i dutifully check all of my email accounts and scan CNN and Metafilter for news as i drink my Paradise Lust, though i tend to stretch my muffin (alternately blueberry and chocolate) until quarter of nine. Really, though, my working day starts the previous working evening, because i have been staying late. Not obscenely, workaholic late. No. Just late enough to finish whatever i have in front of me. It is the business world’s version of the Clean Plate Club. Which means that the next morning at nine, after i have resolved my urgent emails and made myself some tea, i have to start the process all over again. From a clean plate.

The hours between are immaterial, marked by endlessly attentive hard work punctuated by trips to the water cooler, bathroom, director’s office, and outside world. To the latter there is but one venture, which i prefer to enjoy in solitude (though i am not rude enough to turn down anyone’s invitation). My co-workers are adamant about this: you really ought to escape while you can. For lunch, that is. I found their warning ominous at first, but i understand it now. Air is out there; air that we can only look at through our reinforced unopenable windows. Yet, once i am outside i always want to return — how is it that i can feel so lost and alone in the middle of my city during my hour of lunch?

Thus, every day i return with a half an hour to spare, always with some iteration of chicken caesar salad. One day it was in a wrap, the next on a sandwich, the third with a side of salmon sushi. Somehow the predictability cheers me in how it thwarts the tiny “what did you have today” conversations that crop up around three-thirty when everyone is sated and ready to leave. I am usually ready to leave at ten thirty, but i change my mind by lunch, opting instead to stay late… to power through… to clean my plate.

In my first paycheck i cleared eighty two cents on every dollar, which is one and a half cents better than i did in Admissions. I do not get upset; i do not tithe on the behalf of god, and so i tithe to capitalism instead. Even after that, i am left with an unreal amount of money. Did i earn that? For my work? Really? I boggle myself for a second, too excited by the spending possibilities of my modestly large check, and marvelling that i could be worth over fifty thousand dollars a year with a bachelor’s degree.

I have yet to deposit it. There are so many things to buy, to see, to hear, that i am afraid to turn their numerals and decimals into cents and dollars that i can spend. At the top of my list are a four-track, a laptop, a guitar, and trips to the movies. I imagine a different list superimposed on top of my own: a mortgage, a washing machine, car insurance, and trips to the movies. People making less than i am have that list rather than my own, yet cannot afford to be paralyzed by indecision between buying an actual four-track or simulating it with mixing software.

Indecision is a priceless luxury that earning potential can often afford, and i am indecisive by my very nature. So, did i compromise, or just change my mind?

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No, I don’t know why it is snowing in Philadelphia in April.

Someone actually asked me about it this morning – in disbelief that it was happening, i suppose. Unless they thought that i might somehow know something Philadelphia’s meteorologists don’t. And, well, i do know things that they don’t, but those are all about responsible journalism, and not about explaining the weather.

It wasn’t so much snowing as the wind was blowing about a frigidly icy mist, which i encountered at length on my lunch break. This should not have been the case; i did not have any reason to get so well acquainted with today’s weather. All i wanted was a salad. I thought, Surely there is a salad to be had in close enough proximity to my office building that i will not have to encounter enough weather to be forced to comment upon it when i return to my desk.

Actually, there was (a salad to be had); my coworkers recommended me to the “Oh-So-Good” eatery, which sits directly across a relatively easy-to-traverse intersection outside of my building. In fact, someone had just come back from there, and none of us even bothered to ask her about the weather. Perfect.

Oh-So is one of a new urban trend: it is like a lunchbox that packs everything … salads, sushi, soup, sandwiches, and also some things that do not begin with S. I not only gleaned this from my coworker’s description of it, but also because it proudly proclaims its one-shop-feeds-all nature in a series of simple-to-the-point-of-being-semiotic advertisements along their outer walls — they had vaguely registered in my memory from my walk to work, but i didn’t really connect them to whatever they were meant to advertise.

(Knowing me as well as you do, i’m sure you can sense that i’m about to complain about the advertisements. It is rather obvious that that’s where i am heading… why i even both to set these things up so dramatically is beyond me.)

As i exited the lobby of my building, the first advertisement to enter my field of vision was (yes) semiotic in nature. It was so effective that the pictographic on it screamed one and only one thing at me: PENIS!

Yes, it screamed penis. And, the picture that was shouting was not some virile erect vegetable of a penis, that carrot or cucumber that i might have expected since this was meant to be a sign for food and not for… well, not for genitalia. No. It was a remarkably unerect little penis.

Actually, it more resembled a shrimp…

A-Ha!, i thought, it must be a sign for shrimp!. Then, thinking some more, i thought: Surely their advertising people realize that the shrimp looks like a prepubescent penis that just participated in a Polar Bear Club activity. I mean… it barely even looks like shrimp. Or, at least, it definitely does not immediately register in the “yum, i want to eat that” category of my brain.

I continued with this line of thought as i neared Oh-So and it’s Oh-So-Shrimp. Something about the situation bothered me; it wasn’t as if i was suddenly (and uncharacteristically) having a typical male homophobic moment that lead me to fear or revile the shrimp. No. And, i wasn’t experiencing some sort of intelligence deficit that would suddenly render me offended based on some sort of right-wing moral obligation to the public to protect it from lude imagery. No, not that either.

Ah, yes, i had it. It was simply that i was bothered by the fact their advertising people were either too moronic to see that their primary food-glyph looked like an underdeveloped sex organ or too excited by its implication to make it look a touch more shrimp-like. Despite having isolated this, my problem, i found myself physically incapable of entering the building; every time i approached it i was overwhelmed by a lingering contempt by their idea of trendy advertising.

Long story short (too late), i learned all about today’s weather as i walked the two grueling ice-mist filled blocks to Lindsay’s favorite deli to get a salad there, and then another two blocks back into the wind to get back to my building so i could actually eat.

Despite this enlightening journey of the body and mind, i still have no idea why it was snowing in Philadelphia in April

In other cock-related news (ha! a pun!), i went rooster hunting when i returned from work this evening, after an unbelievable alarm-clock-like round of crowing this morning that ran on regular half hour intervals starting at five. I was unable to locate the foul fowl, despite some leads indicating that what i previously thought to be an errant chicken walking around behind CVS was actually said rooster, a pet of the man who lives on the corner. A thorough stalking of his premises revealed no such terror of a bird. I have resolved that if i am woken up at any point before 7am tomorrow by its crowing that i will go outside, find it, and shove it through its owner’s mail slot.

And still i’ve managed not to talk about my new job. Shocking. Maybe tomorrow i can squeeze it in between a discussion of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings and my discovery of an Oh-So-Sign that is implausibly meant to resemble a peach.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/04/200111619/

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My spectacular view from the 35th floor has proven itself to be no solution to today’s pervasive dreariness. A panoramic image of my city opens up just past the faux-mahogany lip of my cubicle, displaying clearly every still, gray eave and chimney from here to the nearly-obsolete Stadium (a distance that was almost infinite to me as a child, now seemingly so simply to fly across).

Honestly, the view left me longing for my lunch break; i’d much rather be inside the fog than above it.

In other news, Elise has confirmed the existence of my rooster after the debut of its new 7-7:30am time slot. Not only did Elise hear it in person today, she kindly offered to strangle it with her bare hands. At least now the crowing actually overlaps with a time that i have to wake up. Meanwhile, corroborating reports have emerged from Meg and Amanda, the former of whom lives over two blocks away.

Lindsay and I conducted a sparkling discussion on the height of cubicles as a status symbol over a health-conscious lunch of salads & Snapple. (Oh, the difference a year makes). In my first nearly coherent attempt to describe our director, i claimed she was “Like Karen from Will & Grace (except not shrill or drunk) if she was surreptitiously being made to listen to Strange Little Girls in her sleep.” Not the most succinct description, but i’ve only been working on it for five days now.

Life isn’t so bad, is it?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/04/200098268/