MIS
Mood:  hungry
Now Playing: Garfunkel, Oates & Messina

In response to the previous entry, meaningofhaste wisely cautions: "Watch less TV. Read more books."

Amen, sister!

When I read Stiff and The Brush-Off two summers ago, my family banned me from the living room for disturbing the peace with continuous snorts and howling laughter. Really, you can't blame them. I think my favorite line came when Murray got clocked in the head, and he held his hand up to his bleeding ear "like a harmonising Bee Gee".

Speaking of Shane Maloney...

I used to work in an architecture office that employed the exact same scam as the meat-packing fiddle in Stiff. The owner kept several phantom people on the payroll, including assorted friends, Chinese emperors, and ex-employees, so that he could bill out projects at the partner rate instead of the associate rate. We, the lowly associates, were made to falsify our timesheets by including hours for projects we didn't work on. If we refused, we were threatened with firing and jail time (and the timesheets were falsified later on by his partner). As one of the most vocal protestors, I found myself steadily demoted, marginalized, and abused.

Some months later, as I was gathering up the courage to sacrifice my livelihood and blow the whistle with the government agency, the owner passed away suddenly from a pulmonary embolism, and the firm was dissolved. The issue became moot.

It was a little disappointing, actually. I had this really great resignation letter all prepared. It was called "95 Theses". I had been planning to nail it to his office door late on a Friday afternoon, a la Martin Luther, and walk out of the building forever. A few of the highlights:

1. At my second day on the job, I was called into the owner's office and made to explain the instructions on an enema bottle. The owner was Chinese and didn't understand English. Or pretended not to. Later, one of my co-workers commented, "Well, how often in life do you legitimately get to tell your boss to stick it up his &@*) and squeeze?"

2. I was made to eat fortune cookies out of a box full of cobwebs and mice droppings, which had been living in the basement for five years.

3. My ideas were routinely mocked and spat on and insulted, and then would turn up verbatim in his designs two weeks later (with no credit).

4. At municipal planning meetings, I was routinely introduced as "This is my associate. She's a woman. I hope no one here minds." I then had to sit quietly by while he called the clients "whores" and scribbled derisively on tablecloths and expensively-produced RFP booklets. Not surprisingly, we didn't get a lot of repeat business.

5. One Christmas, everybody else got a $7,000 Christmas bonus. I got two pieces of Chiclets gum. (Now, to be fair, they were unused pieces of gum. Not chewed or anything.)

6. I was often told, "If you don't have anything better to do, you can shine my shoes," followed by a pair of feet being propped up on my desk.

7. When I came in in the mornings, more often than not the presentation drawings I'd been working on would be covered in coffee stains and scribbled doodles, forcing me to start all over again. This was especially likely to happen near a deadline.

And so on, and so on. If only we'd had Murray on the job, it would have saved a lot of grief.

Revenge, of a sort, came a few weeks later when I had to write a letter to the Rhode Island State Minority Board, informing them that we would not be re-applying for minority firm status, as my boss had unexpectedly passed away. Before putting the letter in the envelope, I set it aside for a moment and slit open the rest of the day's mail.

Then I sealed the Minority Board letter and took it outside to the mailbox. As the letter disappeared into the dark innards of the mailbox, I was horrified to see bloody thumbprints all over the envelope. Looking down at my hand, I discovered a huge paper cut caused by one of the junk-mail flyers from the pile of mail.

I had a sudden, vivid image of the person on the other end, opening up a letter covered with bloody thumbprints and alluding to a recently deceased boss. It was about 15 minutes before I could stop laughing enough to go back inside.