I Don't Miss Work

I don’t at all. It’s not like I didn’t have good jobs. I worked as an engineer for a defense contractor right out of college, then later after earning a masters degree, I toiled away as a computer scientist for a small software company. Both these disciplines were lucrative and interesting, but they came with a few odd moments.

There are many aspects of work which I don’t miss like numb-nuts meetings, feigning interest in my boss’s leisure time activities, keeping my mouth shut while absorbing mindless company policies, noises emanating from my colleagues bodies including middle school level banter about current events. Some people have told me that they just love what they do and can’t see how I don't go to work every day. Here's why I don’t miss work.

Unwitting Bathroom Monitor

I used to sit in a cube farm just outside the men’s bathroom. From my vantage, I could hear colleagues dropping friends off at the pool. I bore witness to the sound of the flush, followed by the sink shortly thereafter. This last part was optional. About half the men I worked with did not wash their hands after pinching cocoa. These same people would reach into a box of donuts on Friday mornings to retrieve a favorite crumpet only to return it after determining it was not what they thought. I routinely passed over the donuts at work.

Spend a Penny Like a Wee Boy

I worked with a guy named “Ted,” who urinated while standing up with his pants and underwear down to his ankles. The first time I went into the men’s room and saw Ted’s big, rugged ass staring back at me, I thought that I would never be able to unsee that. Ted's butt was so large that his drawers would slingshot to the floor under tension when his belt was released. I suspected he was one of those guys on YouTube who while dancing at a wedding reception, spontaneously lost their pants. Others in the office noticed the same odd appearance of Ted’s flank steaks so my boss called a meeting. None of us knew why we were all in the conference room.

Boss: Does anyone know why I called this meeting?
Me: You’re leaving?
Boss: No.
Me: We’re leaving?
Boss: No, it’s come to my attention...

My boss went on about Ted’s bathroom reveal. Everyone at the table voiced their tragic encounter with Ted's ass. When it was my turn, I said,

"I think we should get HR involved."

"No, I think we can handle this at my level," my boss declared.

“So what are you saying, one of us should just tell him?” I asked.

With that he announced,

“Great idea! You do it.”

Everyone abruptly got up and scrambled for the door. My boss pushed through the minions to get out first. I was left sitting alone thinking that I had to tell Ted that his fundament was something his colleagues didn’t want to see with any measure of regularity, and he should get that boil lanced. Ted was clueless when I bridged the topic so I brought him in the loo and told him to use the urinal next to me. When his pants and briefs hit the floor I said,

“Now look at my pants then look at yours. See the difference?”

“I think so,” Ted answered, “Mine has pleats. My wife says pleats are out.”

“No, look where my pants are,” I insisted, “you know, relative to yours.”

Ted looked at my pants as I pretended to wiz in the upright, porcelain urinal, then he looked to his slacks at his feet, bunched up like a theatre curtain.

“Oh!” he exclaimed.

Ted thanked me since as he put it, no one had ever told him. Talk about discovering a loogie in the mirror at the end of the day. A month later, I was called into a meeting with the head of Human Resources and my boss. They were both frowning when I entered. As I sat down, the VP of HR said,

"It's come to my attention that you spoke to an employee about his use of the facilities."

I looked to my boss, waiting for him to explain that he instructed me to do so. Instead, he kept curling the corner of the paper in front of him as he frowned. Apparently, Ted filed for disabled status under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The HR robot admonished me for not involving management. My boss dropped his frown in favor of a look of pure guilt. When the Human Resources douchebag finished, I thought there would be no repercussion, then she told me,

"That's strike one for you."

Professional Phonies

Some people in computer science exaggerate their skill set. Once I was assigned an older woman who was newly hired as a senior software developer. I gave her tasks that a high schooler should have been able to complete in an afternoon. She never finished any of them. I chatted with her during the course of her day even though I was busy as fuck, being one of the few productive developers employed by this shithole of a company. I sat with her at a cookout as she pawed through her pictures of her grandkids. She never asked me about my family even though William, our youngest, was sitting next to me. The fact was that after three months she hadn't done anything to advance the project, but instead absorbed so much of my time that I was completing my tasks from home at night.

I met with my boss when I began to suspect that something was amiss. Frankly, this old biddy seemed senile to me. She barked at me some mornings then moments later was pleasant as can be to others. I think she suspected I was onto her overblown credentials. I told my boss,

"I don't have the skill set to deal with her."

He instructed me to "go back to my desk and try harder." When she up and quit, I was relieved until I learned that she blamed it all on my lack of skills and knowledge. She claimed our architecture was "all screwed up," and I personally didn't know what I was doing. All this went down without my boss or HR ever consulting with me. In retrospect, I learned a very valuable lesson.

If your input is not being sought out, then they're blaming you for everything.

That's why they don't want your opinion. Once the ole bag had me in the bag, she went for a double play by trying to implicate my boss as well. He was having no part of that. She lost credibility by trying to tarnish my boss who survived only by defending me. He was fine with throwing me under the bus, just as long as he got a window seat, but the minute it looked like he was going under the wheels too, he put a stop to all of it.

I learned later that she had a panic attack and froze up while filling out paperwork on her first day. Instead of human resources protecting employees from an overt nutjob, they reassured her that we "were all nice people to work with." Of course my boss covered his tracks about our meeting when I informed him that the one psychology course I took in college was inadequate training to deal with her level of dementia. The HR head sent me an email indicating,

"Strike Two for you."

Just another day in shithole corporate America.

Scheduled Morning Dumps


In my youth, I worked for a defense contractor that made submarines. As a salaried professional engineer, I was often baffled by the older unionized workforce. If you called one of them to ask a question at 7:29 am, they would always ask,

“Can you call back at 7:30?”

Then when you did call again at the rightful start of the day, they would be unavailable. I quickly learned that unionized workers hated the company. Many disappeared to the men’s room at the start of the day because they held in their morning constitution so they could shit on company time. Seemed unhealthy to me.

Sick Lottery

A defense contractor makes money by billing the government for the hours reported against a human sitting at a desk. It doesn’t matter what that human actually does as long as they’re breathing. The more humans, the more money the company makes even if most of them do nothing at all. The company, though, pays when an employee calls in sick. Normally, the government doesn't pony up for sick time. So this led management to implement a lottery system for cash and days off for all employees who didn't call in sick over the past year.

The first time this was implemented, I went to work at least once with some contagious ailment emanating from my body. My wife, Christine, worked there also so I encouraged her to go into work after she spent the previous night puking. When the day of the drawing arrived, I thought we were going to win for sure because we had two names in the hat. In fact, I believed we would clean up. As my departmental manager stood before an eager crowd rotating a drum then pulling names from the bin, I was sure I was going to win and win big. The last drawing came and went with no victory.

“What a rip off!” I blurted.

Suddenly, it was all clear to me as I sat in my seat as a sick lottery loser, the person next to me coughing up phlegm. The way to guarantee a win was to call in sick when one wasn’t actually ill; after all, why come in to work with the Nutella squirts just to win a days vacation when you could call in sick and spend the whole day at the beach.

I also accepted that I worked for a company that encouraged it’s employees to come into the office and infect their colleagues with the latest plague that was making the rounds. Each year on the day the sick lottery drawing was held, I called in sick. My wife, always the ethical role model, refused to participate in my lottery rebuke charade. She did stay home when she was legitimately ill, though, eliminating her chances of winning. I, on the other hand, won in my own way every year thereafter.

Trashercise

The leaders at the defensive contractor came up a plan to reduce the janitorial expenses by removing employee's trashcans. One bin was located centrally on each floor. Since what we did at the company didn’t really matter, they didn’t care if a salaried engineer had to walk twenty paces ten times a day to discard garbage. A colleague of mine tipped off Scott Adams of Dilbert fame resulting in this comic strip which appeared in print on September 12, 1995.

Teeth in Lieu of Brains

Once the head of Human Resources of the small software company I worked for came up with a policy, endorsed by the CEO, to ensure that all employees filled out their weekly timecard in a timely manner. At an all hands meeting, she announced,

“All employees who fail to complete their timecard by 5 pm on Friday will lose a days vacation.”

I had two whole weeks per year of “personal time” at this crap company, and a manager who declined vacation whenever anyone put in for it. Now, I was going to lose a day if I forgot to gin up my timecard at the end of the week. There was only a few employees who chronically forgot to fill out their time sheet. Instead of leaning on them, we all were impacted with a mindless rule like often done in middle school. My boss explained at the next meeting,

“We wanted to put some teeth into it so we decided to impact your vacation.”

Being a consummate dick my whole life, I said,

“You should have put some brains into it first.”

While this angered my boss, I knew that punitively removing something of monetary value from salaried workers often results in lawyers invoking provisions in the Fair Labors Standard Act of 1938. I also knew that when a company lumped sick time and vacation together as personal time employees didn’t have to ask to take time off. A short time later I left before the announcement of my third strike.

Today I work for minimum wage, that is, nothing per hour. Christine’s career took off making it less lucrative for me to stay employed as my paycheck looked like a banking error compared to her's. Worse yet, I was taxed at our combined income making my take home as a professional software developer less than a living wage.

So there you have it. Now you know why I have all this free time to pen such quality pieces about vomit, colonoscopies and celebs while turning down lucrative offers for advertisements. Recently, I was contacted by a website that said they would include my blog in their list of top humor blogs for a small fee. The outfit wanted me to pay even though they actively portrayed their site as an independent tabulation of the internet's funniest blogs. Their email read,

"For a modest fee, we'll list <insert blog name> as one of our top humor blog discoveries!"

I explained to them that I would've done it, but unfortunately I didn’t have any money.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on October 2, 2018.