Lately, our office smells a lot like pot smoke. 3 days in a row, and then after a meeting today it was particularly strong, and my coworker Jill and I tried to sniff our way through the cubicles, like drug hounds, to track down the source.

We got dizzy the closer we got to the stairwell. Looks like somebody thought the office was empty (or empty enough to get high in) and smoked it up on the stairs. Every day this week.

There’s an alternate theory, though. With the reorganizations going on in my company, the four of us left in the Minneapolis office thought corporate might be trying to get rid of us. Earlier this winter, the office heating mysteriously seemed to die. Could they now be trying to smoke us out?

Man, have they ever got the wrong idea!

I find myself working longer and longer hours — and loving it. I now spend whole afternoons standing in front of the vending machines, savoring all my delicious choices. My productivity is about the same as before. What was I writing about again?

Whatever, I’m going to go grab a snack. Peace out!

Here’s an IM exchange between myself and my boss today (who’s a woman):

Me: so the picture is of JOHN and Clinton?
Me: not just clinton
My Boss: correct
Me: go tit
Me: got it
My Boss: HUH?
My Boss:
Me: sorry!
Me: typos gonna cost me my job

A few seconds later I heard a bunch of laughter coming from my coworker’s cube next door, and then this:

My boss: shared that w/ Jill
My boss: could you tell?
Me: I’m catching on

I already put my boss’s name by a sex-line phone number on our Web site, so if I didn’t get fired for that, what’s a little semi-dirty IM-ing?

This guy got trapped in his own e-mail, and then sent himself to my computer. Dumbass!

I got this e-mail and I read it like it was a normal e-mail, and not the deranged musings of a crazy person, until I got to the bottom and the sender literally jumped off the page at me.

But, I think it could make a good 3rd annual caption contest. Like the New Yorker’s cartoon caption thingy, but less prestigious.

So . . . post a comment with a funny caption for this picture.

I’m having trouble typing this because my fingers are just that cold today at work. Yes, it’s Minneapolis, and yes, it’s about 13 degrees outside, but that doesn’t mean that other workplaces downtown have not managed, somehow, to heat their offices above absolute zero.

My office was a sad place already, before the freeze. Due to the demise of one of our magazines over a year ago, there are only four of us left, clustered into one lit corner of an entire floor of office space. Past the bathrooms, empty cubicles sit in the dark — long-ago gutted of any good office supplies. Or candy. It was me, mainly, who took the candy.

The head honcho here is retiring and all the divisions are being “reorganized”, which leads me and my 3 coworkers to think: are they trying to tell us something with the freeze-out? Hope we get the hint? A cold nudge out the door?

We’ve battened down instead, typing in our coats and scarves, and our boss pried open the thermostat-covers with a screwdriver and cranked them up. That hasn’t really worked yet, but I’ll keep you updated.

I love giving quizzes in my writing/literature classes. I find that the less time people have to think, the funnier their writing tends to be. Snippets:

I am very obstinate. And I don’t always like to change my opinion…

As opposed to the more common breed of obstinacy that is dying to change.

The color in this ad is very vibrant and alive. It makes the reader feel calm and serene.

The only explanation I have is that the colors at first energize you so much that you feel alive, but the effort that goes into being alive exhausts you and eventually calms you down.

We cannot censor speech until we censor the words that come out of our mouths.

Infallible logic.

I hate writing. I would much rather use words.

It’s true! Writing without words has always been puzzlingly difficult for me as well.

Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to show Africa had a rational past. African was not a wild ferret.

I have to say, I was stumped by this one. Africa, latest studies have shown, is in fact NOT a wild ferret, and might never have been.

Verbal responses can be equally funny—sometimes more so since students process their thoughts even less. For instance, once this student raised her hand after I’d given about a 15 minute lecture on history and relevance of the Berlin Wall. Her question was, “So is the Berlin Wall the same thing as the Great Wall of China?”

Days like that, I’m proud to be a teacher.

While teleconferencing at work, I jotted down a list of actually-used platitudes and business speak. I think if you take all the “real” words out of the conversation, you can still tell pretty much what’s going on:

Left holding the bag
Dealt a bad hand
Coming on board (many times)
Troubled spots
Didn’t let the ball drop
Coming on board (many times)
Break bread
Swimming upstream
Full-court press
The bad guys have our money in their pockets — we’re going to go after it
Coming on board (many times)
Leveraging the business
I see the light at the end of the tunnel

Try commenting with a quick translation. With actual words.

At work, we just got done with a 134-minute teleconference meeting where absolutely nothing was decided. I mean no one decision could be said to have been made, per se.

It’s times like these, which is pretty much every workday, when I like to read a daily helping of meta-Marmaduke, where Joe Mathlete explains today’s Marmaduke cartoon (in 500 words or less).

I’ve always joked that every Marmaduke cartoon, throughout histroy, could be paraphrased with the same 6 words: “That is a really big dog.” But Mr. Mathlete proves that there is much more going on in those single-panels than you might have thought.

Here are three gems:

Marmaduke and the Dog-Catchers
Marmaduke Ruins his Owner’s Life
Marmaduke and the Elevator Repairman

I couldn’t find any. At least not when you’re working 7 to 7 at the convention center. I did eat at the Appaloosa grill downtown, which was pretty good, but I made the mistake, out of overwhelming curiosity, of ordering the crawfish etouffee. In Denver.

I also saw a large blue bear menacing the Colorado Convention Center, and got the above pic, so all is not lost.

Sometimes I get weird calls at work; this was one of them.

The guy started out simple enough; he had seen an ad in a magazine for a free business book, and he had read to call our number — had he reached Riverglenn Publications*?

No, we used to be Riverglenn, now we’re Streamfield; sorry, sir. Yes, we’re still located at 412 Winterset, Minneapolis. No, we don’t offer that book anymore. Must’ve been an old magazine!

And that would normally have been that. But the guy went on. He was talking from somewhere noisy; I heard clacking shoes, clanging, conversation in the background.

“OK, right. Well, I saw the ad, and I was interested because I’m going to start a mail-order business out of my home, and I was interested in how somebody sets one of those up.”

Uh-huh. I don’t really need to know this, do I? But he seemed nice enough.

“We pretty much only publish Airline Weekly, now,” I said, “so I don’t think we’d be able to help.”

“Right, I understand,” he said. The conversation in the background echoed over my end of the phone. “Well, I’m incarcerated right now, but I’ll be out in six months. I should be out in six months, if everything happens OK.”

Holy shit! No wonder he didn’t want to get off the phone. This was like his one phone call for the whole damn week.

“Oh, yeah?” I said. I wanted to say, “What’re you in for?” but that would have been just wrong.

“You just have to take each thing as it comes and try to work it out for the best, you know?,” he said. “So I have a plan, I have a couple of ideas, and I’m just taking it as it comes, you know.”

“That sounds like a good attitude to have.”

“Well, thanks for talking to me.”

“Good luck.” What do you say? “Hope you get out soon”? Sure, unless you’re a murderer or something — then I hope you don’t.

But I do hope he’s the kindly-type convict, maybe wrongfully accused by a one-armed man, and not a Hannibal Lecter-type, because he has my work address, which I confirmed for him.

* the names, addresses, and magazine titles have been changed to protect the innocent

The other day, I accidentally put my boss’ name and a phone-sex phone number on one of our Web sites at work.

This isn’t one of those passive-agressive things, like Oops! I “accidentally” watered all my annoying roomate’s houseplants with beer — this was an honest, if exceedingly unfortunate, mistake.

The Web site read: “For questions, contact [my boss] at 1-800-[number very similar to our 800 number]“.

If you happened to have questions last week, you called and a recording of a woman answered: “For some stim-u-lating conversation, call 1-900-[some sex line].”

My boss is a woman. Like the woman on the recording. Well, most likely nothing like the woman on the recording, but you, a customer with questions, wouldn’t know that. You could easily be confused. And much more confused after the phone call.

God forbid some dunder-headed somebody took the next step, oblivious, and called the 900 number, and will soon sue us for phone-bill damages. “But I had questions! It said to call 1-900 . . .”

The wrong number was up terrifyingly for about four days. That’s a whole nother story, about how our IT department is in New York while we’re in Minneapolis, and about how you have to send painstakingly detailed e-mails explaining changes to the Web site. Rest assured I asked, requested, encouraged, and demanded them to change the number every ten minutes or so.

Luckily my boss is super cool and understanding. Even if she’s not reading this right now: still cool! She actually found it funny. Funny and disturbing. We’d called the number a couple of times: we’d call, and she’d laugh heartily, and then I’d laugh a little, and then she’d stop laughing and say: “This has got to change.”

“Definitely,” I said, nodding vigorously. Then we’d listen to the recording and laugh again, etc.