Today we got our new phone books!
WOOOOHOOOO!!!!
I don’t know about you, but since I’ve been an adult, New Phone Book Day rates third next to Birthweek and Martin Luther King Day. I love Martin Luther King Day not only because it’s a great thing civically to recognize Dr. King for his contribution to the world, but also because we get the day off and it’s this free day in January. That rocks.
Anyway, I love New Phone Book Day. It’s the one time of the year where the phone book is as up to date as humanly possible. It’s the best chance you’ll ever have of finding the correct phone number for your calling intent.
I know I’m a freak, but I just love to go through and look up the names of people who moved throughout the year. I love knowing that I will now be able to call them if I should so desire. It’s security in an uncertain time.
Mock me if you will, but I’d be willing to bet that the Taliban doesn’t have an updated phone book.
It’s just one of those anal-retentive things that makes me insanely happy.
I’ll get over it the first time I look up a number and it’s not in the phone book, though. Then I’ll be bitter at Ma Bell once again.
I’ve been hit off the strangest Google searches in the last few days. ‘Thongy’ ‘Right Guard deodorant’ ‘singing belly buttons’ ‘garter belts chez’ ‘Faith Hill’s feet’ ‘peeing into a urinal’ ‘squashed her breasts flat’ ‘when your nose itches your butt itches’ and ‘boobage’.
That is the strangest group of Google hits I’ve ever seen in one 24-hour period. All body or personal undergarment related, too. I always try to look for meaning in these things, but apparently, all this means is that I’m obsessed with my various body parts. I mean, if it were poop and farts too, it would pretty much sum up this whole diary in a nutshell.
I know you could probably care less about the odd Googles this page has gotten but it amuses me all to heck.
We had a ‘Town Hall Meeting’ at work today. Basically, it meant that they walked us all over to the hotel a block away from the office, stuffed us into a room that was roughly 95 degrees and filled with pillars so that 85% of the people could not see a thing, and then sent us on our way. We sat through a two-hour PowerPoint presentation on the state of our building. I was keeping track of corporate stereotypes’. There were two incidents of a person making the quotation hand signals, and the phrase ‘Grow our Business’, which always sounds like poor grammar to me but I suppose it isn’t, was used a whopping eight times. They even tried to spin the loss of a fairly large client by saying ‘We refused to lower the price of our service just to retain business as that’s a poor business strategy, which is a good thing.’ Then came the Q&A period when 295 people all silently wished that no one would ask questions so we could leave the sweltering room and eat our catered lunch while 5 people were oblivious to the group vibe and endlessly asked obscure questions of the upper management honchos, who gladly jumped on the chance to press their own agendas.
‘Are we going to be moving to a larger facility.’
‘I’m glad you asked that question. Currently, we have a lot of real estate, meaning leased facilities and it is possible that the corporation would consolidate into one facility but they most indefinitely would not touch the Green Bay production facilities because we managed to come under budget and grow our business, particularly in my division of Concrete Operations and Customer Retention, maximizing our growth potential and we couldn’t have done it without you people here in Chic’Green Bay Wisconsin’. Give yourself a big hand!’
They’re fond of encouraging us to applaud ourselves. I think they believe that this is a good exchange for a cash bonus. And while we’re all clapping like fools, they’re up there, grinning from ear to ear as though the applause was for them. They don’t even clap, they just stand there, sucking in all of the applause.
Later, we were treated to a lovely catered meal, which was served buffet style. Buffets for 350 people don’t work. Write that down. I busted over to one of the front tables, as we were told we would be sent to the buffet line by table, so I was figuring, hey, front table, first through the buffet line. The Holiday Inn wait staff thwarted us as we were dead last. What is more, the Vice President and my boss’ boss ended up sitting at our table, so we had a bunch of really lame small talk. At one point, the VP asked us for the salt and when he said ‘thank you’ I almost started to applaud myself for the splendid job of salt delivery.
And I wonder why I don’t get a cash bonus.
I shouldn’t complain I guess. After walking back to our offices, I spent the next two hours reading my new phone book and chortling to myself with anal-retentive glee.
