Clearly I'm missing something here.

I just spent two hours in a meeting about a printer. It involved two guys in suits who are responsible for the expensive hunk of uselessness that occasionally spits out the wrong number of copies out of order, neither collated, stapled or three-hole-punched. The Sales Dude said our problems are Microsoft and we should whine to Bill Gates. I pointed out that Microsoft doesn’t make Acrobat, and our problem is printing PDFs. He said, okay, then, I guess it’s the printer.

When Sales Dudes left we ate and talked about how ridiculous our office is: someone paid $200 a YARD so the fabric in our cubicles could have a embroidered spines on them, which, no matter how much I squint or how much acid a person could drop, does not resemble a spine. Further, why? Why would you want fabric embroidered with a spine? If you’re going to spend $12,000 on each cubicle (no exaggeration), shouldn't they be made of solid gold and come with their own well-oiled grape-feeding pool boy?

Earlier today, my cube-farm-neighbor, I'll call him Jackass, was frustrated with a box he was trying to open. He grabbed the nearest club-shaped object, which happened to be a fake bone-model of a human leg, and hit the box repeatedly with it, rather like a monkey with a stick trying to get inside of plastic tube containing a ripe banana. Only it was a 32 year-old man wielding a femur.

Back at my desk, I started going through the draft of a booklet I’m working on. I had given it to a Brand Manager with questions. For example, I said, “We have two conflicting sources of info for Product X. Please tell me which source is correct—source A or source B.” His response? “Yes.”