It’s Tuesday. We’re almost halfway through the work-week. Professionals everywhere look to tomorrow as the day on which they’re “over the hump,” and this weekend seems closer than last weekend. Meanwhile, their work is beginning to suffer due to a lack of concentration. Maybe it’s the absence of Adderall in their daily pill regimen, but it could also be that they’ve forgotten the ten simple steps for maintaining a healthy relationship with their jobs. No worries, the geniuses at MSN and Career Builder.com have come up with a brilliant list of the Ten Things You Should Never Do At Work, and boy is it insightful. I hope whoever creates these lists is making a shit-ton of money, because I’m sure as hell not, and the fact that they’ve hired some retard to formulate these moronic lists makes me want to kill myself.
Just kidding! But seriously, this might be the worst Top Ten I’ve ever found on the Internet, and I’ve seen a very large number of Top Tens across a multitude of websites, including those weird ones where women have sex with farm animals (Note: I can’t wait for the day when I check my web stats and see for the first time a visitor found this blog by performing a Google search for “women have sex with farm animals”).
Let’s see how I fare among this incredibly poignant Top Ten list.
1. Stealing
I’ve never stolen anything of any importance from an employer. I was allowed (I think) to pay for lunch out of the cash register when I worked at the golf range. When I worked at the recording studio I would sometimes borrow CDs. Oh, and I installed their fancy copy of Pro Tools on my home computer once. I’ve also been known to “borrow” pens and pencils for extended periods of time without returning them.
Blaming someone else for your mistake
I’ve never done this, because most of the places I’ve been employed only have one person working at a time. If something gets screwed up and I’m the only one on the premises, I guess that makes me responsible. Of course, if there is another person around, I’d rather blame them and have them get in trouble than find myself in trouble. To me, that’s just sound logic.
Spreading gossip
Who doesn’t do this at work? What if a customer comes in and asks where the owner/manager is, but you aren’t sure, so you just make something up to get the annoying person off your back? Is that spreading gossip? I guess it is if you answer by lying about how your boss is out on a date with that really hot under-aged chick who doesn’t have her working papers in order.
Calling in sick when you are perfectly healthy…
Look, sometimes a weed hangover can be just as harsh as an alcohol hangover, and both of those can be just as harsh as a twenty-four-hour stomach bug or a bad head cold. In my mind, they’re all the same thing, so they’re all perfectly good reasons to call in sick. Also, not wanting to go to work the day before you leave for a vacation is synonymous with “My aunt just died.”
…Or showing up when you aren’t
No, that doesn’t make any sense. If you don’t show up to work, you don’t get paid, and sometimes you have to infect a few people with the flu if you want to have enough money to buy yourself a nice bottle of Knob Creek or a rare out-of-print Blue Note jazz LP on your way home from the office Friday evening.
Abusing office technology
You mean like spending all day on MySpace while watching the Comedy Central Movie of the Week instead of running the cash register software and membership card application while watching “family friendly” television? Is that really abusing technology? What about if I want to tie up the phone line by having phone sex with that really hot girl from the bar who was just in from out of town for that one night? It’s not like anyone ever calls to see if we’re still open for business…
Involving co-workers in your personal problems
So I shouldn’t ask them to launder money for me, and I shouldn’t talk to the ladies at work about good ways for my wife to hide the bruises I’ve given her? As far as I’m concerned, that’s not “involving co-workers in personal problems,” it’s “building friendships based on shared experiences.”
Getting too comfortable
Are you telling me that all those mornings I used to open the shop wearing sweatpants and smelling faintly of stale vomit, I was being unprofessional? Well, what about the countless conversations with my boss where we boldly defamed the female gender? What about the greasy hair and the days on end without showering? What’s wrong with that? People are always telling me not to shower so much because it’s bad for me, and now you’re telling me that showering is a good thing? Ugh.
Hitting on your boss
Not gonna be a problem, all my bosses have been men. Hitting on customers in front of their significant others…now there’s a disease I don’t think I’ll ever be cured of.
Hitting on your employee
This is one rule that I will never break, because I’ll never be anybody’s boss. I’ll simply be a worker drone my entire life, then someday my life will be cut short by a freak accident. All my friends will laugh at my funeral and say shit like, “Man, something that fucked up could only have happened to Evan.” That’s just life, I guess.
