Thursday, October 26, 2006

A day at Acme

Today was a relatively pleasant day at Acme. I did have to spend an hour in the most horrible work imaginable; I know, you're thinking killing some hideous insect or fending off rats, but it's really releasing service tickets. This is a computer data entry task that requires using odd parts of the keyboard, interpreting the cryptic handwriting of our technicians, and coping with mistakes by other folks previously releasing tickets.
You basically enter numbers and amounts and times over and over and over and over. Mice and rats and ger roa, mice and rats and ger roa. Siege, glue, maxforce, siege, glue, maxforce, until the end of time or perhaps an hour. One of my technicians, Albert, was a graffiti artist back in the day. Buddies with Keith Haring. His handwriting strongly resembles Turk182 or somebody else from 1981 or 83 in the Bronx and the 3 train looking like a train to hell with really garish cartoons. The problem is this isn't art. It's how many glue traps Albert put down. Hard to say but the number looks real good.
Finally Peter reads a joke from the internet. Here's the joke. It's mildly sexist and offensive and probably in a normal workplace environment would get him canned. But what the hey, he's close to retirement. Peter read it out loud and changed the names as I have here to reflect our actual staff:
Luis was in quandary. He had to fire somebody. He had it narrowed down to one of two people, Willa or Jack. It was an impossible decision, they were both super workers. Rather than flip a coin, he decided he would fire the first one who used the water cooler the next morning.
Willa came in the next morning with a horrible hangover after partying all night. She went to the cooler to take an aspirin.
Luis approached her and said: " Willa, I've never done this before, but I have to either lay you or Jack off."
"Could you jack-off?" she said, "I feel like shit this morning."
This was very funny and we laughed and laughed. It has nothing to do with poetry but a lot to do with my job which I love. I hope it makes you laugh and is relatively inoffensive. But honestly I don't actually care at all. By the way, ever since I started working at real jobs there's always been a real problem when I take a day off. The boss always writes on his calendar "jack off today". Oh well.

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