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)
. . .

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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 . . .

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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 . . .

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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 . . .

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