I got a little magnet in the mail from my health insurance company the other day, with a “Nurse Line” phone number on it. I’m supposed to call the Nurse Line when I’m sick to find out if I should go to the doctor. Or, as the card says, to help decide if the “doctor’s office, emergency room, or just self-care is needed.”

Suuuuure. I’ll call my insurance to ask whether I should accrue costly hospital bills for them to pay. Or not.

I’m sure it might depend on whether I had paid my full deductible yet, but I imagine the call to go something like this:

Me: Hi Nurse Line? I’m having some chest pains?
Nurse Line: Chest pains are more common than you think, don’t worry.
Me: But it’s kind of [gasp] stabbing? Oh boy. There it goes.
Nurse Line: Have you considered self-care?
Me: Tingling . . . in my . . . left arm . . . [thump]
Nurse Line: Advil should clear that right up.

The information I can get by calling Nurse Line, the card assures me, is “physician-approved.” How do the physicians know what the phone operator is going to say? Does a physician come in and bless the phone with a wave of his or her stethoscope first?

In other health insurance news, I also found out that I could get $50 from my health insurance comp by filling out an online questionnaire. Woo-hoo! right? The questions were a wee bit personal though. They moved from my diet and exercise regimen, to my mental health and family history, right down to the nitty gritty: height and weight please, marked with the dreaded red asterisk — required.

So I lied my suddenly-smaller-on-paper ass off, of course. Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not raising your premiums . . .

But even after I added a full inch and took off 20-25 pounds, the interwebs still said I was fat! Which almost scared me enough to call Nurse Line to see what I should do.

Today, I got an e-mail from somebody needing technical help. It was like somebody changed my job description to IT Support and forgot to tell me, which is nothing out of the ordinary where I work.

Hi, I have a login with ‘Editor’ privileges but can’t import or view images in my groups folders. Please help. Cheers, X

I wasn’t the only one getting the wrong e-mail, proved by the next item in my inbox:

i’d like to know who setup this email address and told people to use this as a support contact.

Yeah, I thought. But what do we do when we find them? Then a third person, the polite opposite:

Please remove me from this thread. This is not meant for me. Thanks.

But soon this was all the e-mail I was getting:

A: Ditto … please
B: It’s not meant for me either. Thanks.
C: Me neither

It might be simpler if the person it was meant for could just speak up instead. But this is the kind of thing that cubicle types like me pounce on whenever we can, since anything is more interesting than our actual jobs. Next came the voice of reason:

It seems the point of all the emails on this are that it went to all the wrong people, myself included. Might I suggest that people assume it was a one-time error and not keep sending emails asking to be removed from the list? It’s only adding fuel to the fire…thanks.

That worker tried to raise the level of e-mail conversation to an afternoon tea in Buckingham Palace, but to no avail. Finally, the only thing that worked — the good old all-caps e-mail of loudness:

STOP REPLYING ALL PLEASE! THANK YOU!

I really wanted to reply-all, “I WILL STOP REPLYING ALL NOW,” but I was able to resist the urge.

In one of those motivational 37-way conference calls the other day, a big cheese told a story about two guys in a boat:

“A leak springs on a boat, and one guy thinks he’s OK, because he’s on the dry side — but they’re both going down. Just because we’re in good shape doesn’t mean we don’t have to circle the wagons.”

I have at least two things to say about this. First off, that guy on the dry side who thinks he’s OK is really stupid. I mean, how big is this boat? The story starts: “There are two guys on a boat.” This is more dinghy than ocean liner. This guy is staring at a leak springing up six inches to his left and thinks, “Whew!”

And the other thing. Is it just me, or does “Just because we’re in good shape doesn’t mean we don’t have to circle the wagons” remind you of that Nirvana lyric, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you”? Just more lame?

I think there was also something about “a mission-critical window of opportunity,” but I was too drunk off the mixed cocktail of metaphors to pay attention.

I just got a new laptop from work. This is a joyous, joyous day.

My old laptop was five years old, which is 127 in laptop years, and my 2002 vintage RAM had gotten very tired. To be brutally honest, it had lost some of its mental capacity.

Sometimes I would try and load a Web site and the hard drive would spin and spin and the laptop would shake and I’d stare at the green bar at the bottom right, never quite filling all the way up, and a bird would chirp outside the window and I’d look out at that and get lost in a reverie about the wonder of nature and, before you knew it, it was lunch time and I had forgotten what Web site I was trying to load. And then it would cough to life and I’d remember, oh yeah, I was going to look up that song on All Music, and I’d hit refresh and soon enough the workday would be done. My productivity suffered slightly.

But this new laptop! It flies on gossamer wings. I can have my work e-mail running in the background while I play Flash games. Most importantly, without the games freezing up.

The real secret to my new laptop’s success, I realized, is that while my company upgraded the hardware they were perfectly happy with the same software from 2002. I was pleasantly surprised to see all my old friends on my new laptop. Hello Qwark Xpress 5! Qwark 7.3? Never heard of you. And I’ve got Photoshop 7.0, which practically runs in DOS, but by God it’s fast.

Some of my grad-school-persuasion friends, wife, and acquaintances are in serious crunch-time mode; what better time to try out pointless time-wasting free Flash games online?

Double Jeu

Try to keep two balls in the air. Moving the mouse both tilts the inclined plane at the bottom, and moves the Pong-style “paddle” at the top. Keep the bottom ball from rolling off the plane, and the top ball from passing your paddle, as long as you can. My all-time record score is 33 seconds. That’s not really impressive, but I worked hard for that score. Too hard. Simple-concept game, complex fun.

shoOot – (from the main page, choose “shooot” on the 6th line)
You’re the square at the bottom of the screen, moving only left and right, and you have to shoot the circles as they bounce around–and don’t let them hit you. The circles don’t shoot back; when a circle drops a colored pellet down at you, snatch it up, it will boost your firepower, add shields, slow down the enemy circles, or make you temporarily invincible. I thought the circles were shooting at me, and I avoided the power-ups for long time. Boy, does that make the game a lot harder. Oh, and when you shoot a big circle it splits into lots of little circles, Asteroids-style. Damn those circles.

Gimme Friction Baby! – (when the screen finally loads, click the green-ringed button on the bottom left)
The title sounds so . . . dirrrty, but this is a clean, family-fun puzzle game, I promise. You shoot white balls from a rotating canon onto a playing field, and try to explode the balls by tapping them, with other balls, three times. Don’t let them cross the dotted line above your canon. The balls bounce around and expand like hell when they stop. Got it? No, probably not. Try it out, it’s fun I swear.

I was in Salt Lake City for my job thingy. I expected craziness. I expected Mormons proselytizing me at every corner. I expected to have to buy a club membership to get a drink. But it hasn’t happened that way; so far, you get a drink just like anywhere else. And the locals I met have been pleasant and polite.

I wasn’t expecting new modes and methods of crossing the street. Who knew?

First off, Salt Lake City’s Walk/Don’t Walk electronic signs at crosswalks (you know, the white walking man and the red hand) are supplemented with bird chirps and whistles, piped into little crosswalk speaker boxes.

I kid you not.

“Cross now” is translated into bird tweet (which bird species’ dialect, I don’t know), and it sounds like a high pitched “chee.” The “don’t walk” cheep is a lower-register “wee-ert.”

This immediately caused my conference colleagues to make smart-ass remarks. I may have made one or two myself. Good for the blind, right? But what if you hear a bird that sounds like the “cross now” bird, and end up stepping into the path of a semi? What if, God forbid, a mockingbird takes up nearby residence?

And, as my friend Margery said, “Why would you listen to a bird anyway?” Birds, with their teeny-weeny brains, are not particularly renowned for their street-crossing advice.

Well, don’t worry. Because you can wave an orange flag around furiously instead.

In lieu of crosswalks, here and there, there are semi crosswalks. Pseudo crosswalks. They aren’t at lights. They’re in-between lights. No walking man, no red hand. Just the crosswalk hash painted on the street with the word “look,” and little orange flags to carry with you.

Again, with the me, the you, and the not kidding.

The sign says to wave the orange flag as you walk across, “to help increase your visibility.” I tried it out, and let me tell you, I waved the heck out of that flag. I waved that flag as I have never waved anything before.

So if you hear the bird say “go!” in Utah, grab your flag, close your eyes, and run like hell.

Now that I work at home full-time, our cat, Hank, saves me a lot of eyestrain by standing directly in front of my laptop screen when I’m working, sort of a furry anti-glare coating on my life.

Sometimes, I try to work around him, stretching my neck up, up and resting my chin on his back, or leaning way off to the side, sliding out of my chair, still hanging on to the keyboard trying to type, before I snap out of it. Hey! I think. I have opposable thumbs and he doesn’t. Then I use those thumbs to operate the squirt bottle mechanism that never fails to sweep him off my desk. For at least thirty seconds or so.

I’ve read that cats and dogs can help improve your health, and owning a pet can help drop your cholesterol and blood pressure. With Hank, it seemed a simple enough equation. Work is stressful, so he keeps me from that stressor. Take it easy, he seems to say. Don’t work so hard. Here, I’ll stand right in front of your face, this will help you relax.

It’s really a wash, though, since his other pastime, lurking about and sinking his teeth into my feet, tends to raise my blood pressure a bit. Nothing like that surge of adrenaline from the bite of a sharp-toothed fiend to really wake you up and get you going in the morning.

As you might know from reading this blog, my office building shut down and the three employees left in Minneapolis started working from home. That includes me, thank God. I have now worked from home for a full week, or as some say, been living the dream.

Let me tell you, cubicle-bound lackeys, if you’re wildly envious, you should be. It’s awesome!

At home, I can now do anything I want. If I want to get up and do that laundry that’s piled up in my bedroom closet, I can. I haven’t availed myself of that particular opportunity just yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

I can sleep in a good 15 – 20 minutes in the morning, saving the time I used to spend getting dressed, brushing my teeth, shaving, walking to and riding the bus, showering, etc. In fact, I may never have to shower again, now that I work from home.

Now my cat can sleep on top of my work laptop, while I’m trying to type, just like he always wanted to.

When 5:00 rolls around, I’m already home! I just declare myself “off work” and walk to the other side of the room. Or roll over and go to sleep, if I’m still in bed at the end of the day.

I think in my parents’ generation “working from home” was a gentle euphemism for getting the sack. When I told my mom, she asked: “Does payroll know you’re working from home? Will you still get your check?” I thought I knew the answers, but I must admit, those questions roll around in my head around 3 a.m.

It would be a pretty slick way to “downsize”: “Guess what everybody? Mobile workforce! Everybody go home!” And then your employees work for a couple of weeks before they realize nobody’s paying them.

I’ll let you all and Mom know around next payday whether I’m working from home or “working from home.”

At lunch today, my officemates and I huddled around the speakerphone on the back table for a “town hall” meeting teleconference call. Colleagues called in from all over, set their office and cubicle phones to speaker, and proceeded to pay no attention whatsoever.

These folks have got some good microphone pick-ups on their telephones. We heard honking, sirens, closing doors, throat-clearings and a lilting little Irish jig on lute and guitar. This is true. “Break out the Guiness,” one coworker said. If only.

At least one person held a handset up to their head. We know, because he or she breathed into the mouthpiece for the entire 72 minute phone call.

You know those calls in the movies the evil creepy killer makes? Yeah, like that. The accounting department apparently hired a masked guy with a butcher knife. As the big boss talked in New York, we tried to make sense of the platitudes interrupted by gale force winds in the speakerphone.

“Not in every one of our markets, but in most of our markets, we’re facing the challenge of . . . BRCHTHEB . . .”

“Who? Which challenge?” we asked ourselves, our own speakerphone on mute.

“The second piece of it is, now that you understand the market . . . BRSHCHSBR . . .”

“What’s the piece of what now?”

Finally, a half-hour in, somebody somewhere had enough.”Excuse me, I don’t mean to interrupt, but could everyone remotely put their phones on mute? There’s breathing and there’s music and it’s distracting.”

There was silence on the line except for the Irish folk tune. (What was that guy thinking? “Wait, you mean this Irish jig? Oh, my bad.”) But there was no breathing. We waited and listened . . . no breathing, no breathing . . . Ok, the heavy breather must have got the message. Probably a little embarrassed right now.

“We want plans that are going to stimulate growth, obviously, but the nut of the strategic process is . . . BRCKSHSBRHK . . .”

Since nobody could hear anything anyway, my coworker in Virginia IMed me — “OK, I’m gonna cough . . . ready?”

“John’s gonna cough!” I told my officemates in Minneapolis.

He did, and it was awesome, let me tell you.

My camera-phone takes pictures on par with grainy photos of UFOs or the black speck of the Loch Ness Monster, but if you look closely, that is actual weed on the back stairway of our office-building.

The pot smell came back today with a vengeance, and again we tracked it down to the back stairway. We just missed them — the smoke lingered in the air, cigarette butts lay on the floor, and on one step, a spilled bag of weed.

When we came back, our boss told us he’d caught them — five minutes earlier he opened the door to the stairwell and found 3 early-20s types standing around smoking.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Smoking marijuana,” one guy said. Truer words, my friend. Truer words.

Our boss closed the door and that apparently scared the misguided youths away — scared them enough even to leave behind $12.63 worth of Mary Jane. The ethical question remains: what do you do when you stumble upon some weed in the workplace? (Or “free shit” as one of my coworkers called it?)

Best thing to do, I think, is take it down to the police station and turn it in, as I’m sure they will pursue our truthful pot-smokers with all due diligence.