Someone brought saltwater taffy to work yesterday and left it out so everyone could have a piece or two, and—not one to pass up an opportunity—I helped myself to several. Well… I might as well have been bouncing off the walls and making cattle calls after that; I was so high on sugar, I ran around the building like a maniac. I simply couldn’t sit still, and my co-workers noticed. One of them feared that I would overdose on the…
Appearances can be deceiving. Take, for instance, Mike Tyson—ear-biting rapist who boxes. He’s a menacing, grimacing, muscle-bound meat-head you don’t ever want to meet in a dark alley alone. Yet when he opens his mouth, you’d swear it was Dr. Evil’s Mini-Me talking. With a voice like that it’s no wonder he went into boxing; he had to defend himself against those who assumed he was as mousy as his voice. Key lesson? Never assume. I used to work as…
Our web programmer says the darndest things sometimes. Like some of the guys upstairs, he’ll get into a junior high mode and make farting sounds with his mouth. Today, he did that, and I just sat there, wrinkled my nose and said, “Ew, ew, ew.” Then, absolutely straight-faced, he told me, “It’s okay. Every time a person farts, a little bean goes up to heaven.” I can’t even imagine the comical look that must have been on my face. I…
I’ve recently been thinking about one of my past jobs—one from about 5 years ago, when I was young, stupid, overworked and underpaid. It was actually my first “real” job on my own … and probably also the best ice-breaker I have on my résumé. Before that, I’d been living at home and working part-time at a movie theater, part-time as a piano teacher, with maybe some writing on the side. Oh, and I’d also been working full-time at a…
Whoa, Nelly! More adventures in marketing and advertising. It’s clear to me that the slowing economy is doing damage to businesses. They’re having to let their good people go, so there’s no one to proofread their advertising copy or to put their marketing plans into action. Woe is them, eh? Last week, the web guy and I were doing research on the net, checking to see if our cookies and banners were working the way they were intended to work,…