You know what’s great about office meetings that take place during lunch? Most of the time, the people planning them realize that they’re inconveniencing everyone, and the meetings end up catered. It doesn’t need to be a giant spread. Some sandwiches and sodas or any kind of free office food will do just fine as long as there’s enough for everyone. You know what’s not cool though? That guy behind me in the food line. I don’t remember him being on my team… Wait he’s not supposed to be in this meeting! Does he even work here??

That’s right friends, you’ve been visited by the Free Office Food Vulture Dumbass. He will stop at nothing to get a free lunch, and he’s just crashed your meeting, taken your buffalo chicken club wrap, consumed the last Mr. Pibbs and slinked back to his desk while no one was looking. How did no one else see this? I don’t care if there’s plenty of food, or if Mr. Pibbs is just a fake Dr. Pepper (which there’s plenty of). We’ve been violated!

The worst part is that you can’t even bring it up now, No one even noticed this guy sneak in and out. He’s like some kind of Batman, and you’re a very hungry and disappointed Commissioner Gordon. He just disappeared when you turned around to point him out to another coworker. He’s always doing that! If you start telling people now, they’re just going to think you’re crazy. “Oh that’s just an old wivestale,” they’ll say, “the free food vulture is just a myth!”

No, friends… he’s real. You know last week when there were some cookies left over from the 4 PM meeting and you thought your buddies ate them while you were organizing your papers? It wasn’t your friends… It wasn’t your friends at all. It was the guy with chocolate all over his face that you ran into in the hallway on your way to the bathroom. Right now, that same guy is sitting at his desk laughing it up with a mouthful of your buffalo chicken club! Roll up your sleeves, it’s time to go and show him what happens to vultures when they take from the wrong pride of lions… Ca-CAW!!

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You know what I don’t want to bring home from the office? No, I don’t mind bringing a little work with me to finish up at home. As a diligent and dedicated worker bee, I know that the job sometimes calls for that kind of thing. What I don’t want to bring home from work is pestilence and disease. So why the hell do dumbasses bring it to the office with them? That’s right friends, I’m here to tell you about the sick dumbass.

Look, we all appreciate someone who is willing to tough things out to get the job done on time. I don’t want you to think that if you have the sniffles you should be using your sick days. What I’m trying to say is that if you are hacking up your lungs, sneezing up a storm and otherwise look and feel like death warmed over, and you can do whatever you’re doing remotely from home, fucking do it from the comfort of your own home where the only people you can get sick are people you’ve been getting sick your entire life (family, roommates, etc).

I ride the train an hour every day to and from work. I sit packed like a sardine on the Metro North every morning and evening. I then get off the train and have to walk through Grand Central Station, one of the most populated transportation hubs in the country, if not the world. Then, I have to walk through the streets of New York City to get to my office. That means I am exposed to probably billions of nasty germs throughout my day. Now, if I somehow make it through all that without getting sick, and some idiot at the office gives me the black death… “Wayne Brady might have to choke a bitch.”

We all know that, once you’ve brought tuberculosis into the office, there’s literally nothing I can do to stop it from infecting me. Sure, I can buy an industrial-sized bottle of hand sanitizer and douse myself with it every fifteen minutes. I can even use my Seventh Generation Disinfecting Wipes (That’s right, The Smartguy is eco-conscious) to wipe down every inch of my desk. Inevitably, it won’t matter. Your stupid ass is going to get me sick.

It would be socially unacceptable for me to suddenly start taping Saran wrap around my cubicle, put tissue boxes on my feet, or just start spraying Lysol in the direction of the sick dumbass, so there go those preventative measures too. If I show up to the office wearing one of those breathing masks that people in Japan wear to protect them from SARS, I’m the weirdo. Isn’t that funny? You, however, can bring whatever polio you have with you to the office and sit next to me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Instead, I just have to sit here in my bubble cubicle, with my hand sanitizer, holding my breath under my SARS mask, tissue boxes on my feet while spraying Lysol in and living in fear. Thanks, dumbass! I’ve always wanted feline AIDS!

image courtesy of: http://hierophyte.blogspot.com

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Lately, there’s been a lot of construction going on a The Smartguy’s office. By lately, I mean about the last year or so. While there have been some loud days, most of the time the construction workers do their best to keep the noise down. They understand that they have a job to do, but so do the people in the cubicles all over the building they’re working on. But not today’s dumbass!

If every construction worker was that respectful, would I be writing this story? Those of you who answered no, congratulations. Those of you whose first thought was “Why, sure! Everyone loves construction workers!”, you might want to check back next week, because there might be a story about you on this very blog. Anyway, so I come in to the office on Monday morning, and the construction has moved to the area around the corner from where I sit. It was bound to happen eventually, right?

At about 11:00 AM, the actual construction work started (nice hours), and I started hearing a constant noise that was being produced by a power drill or power sander of some kind. Perhaps it was a cutting tool, even. I don’t know. This noise would go on for about a minute or two at a time, stop for a few seconds, and then continue on for another several minutes… OK, I thought, that’s annoying, but the fact that it was a constant noise made it easy to push into the background, and I continued working.

Suddenly, I heard some whistling. Ok that’s really annoying, but at least he was humming an actual tune, and not just random noises like the guy in my building they call “The Whistler” (There will definitely be more about him some day). So that would have been OK, only the whistling seemed to get louder. Then, every once in a while, Construction Man would belt out a verse from the song he was singing. Without getting too specific, I can tell you it was a Matchbox 20 song (let’s find construction guy a more current station to listen to).

I soon realized he was only singing one specific line from the song, and it wasn’t even the chorus! Who picks a random line from a song and sings it out loud the entire day? He must have had that song running through his mind all day. I mean we’ve all been there. A song just gets stuck in there, you can’t get rid of it. The difference is I don’t sing it out loud over and over. I learned my lesson when I was 16 and someone I worked with at KB Toys told me, in no uncertain terms, that I should refrain from singing that particular song ever again, or he would introduce me to the bottom of his shoe.

Ok so the drilling, the whistling and the random singing of one line from a song all day long was a little annoying. I’m not a monster though, the guy was working by himself with no one else to talk to. Sometimes we get lonely and lash out for attention. The Smartguy understands, Construction Man. The Smartguy understands…

What I don’t understand, however, is why Construction Man then got on his cell phone to discuss company business at the top of his lungs. Mixed in with his laughing and his dumb jokes that I’m sure make his coworkers hate him (probably why he works alone), I found out that he’s got only three hours of overtime left, and how he needed more. Then he negotiated some kind of deal to get more overtime that may or may not have been shady (you know how construction people are). If you’re going to discuss what random debauchery to commit regarding your overtime pay, should you not go outside, or anywhere else that isn’t full of people? The Smartguy is no snitch, but you never know who is around the office, or if someone from your company is listening around the corner. Now you’re getting indicted by the federal government because you decided to be loud and annoying.

I’m not saying all construction workers are loud and annoying. Usually the only annoying thing the construction guys do around my office is track dirt on the floors or take a couple parking spots (the worst!), but you know one dumbass Construction Man apple always spoils the bunch, as they say. What a dick. Why don’t you take your tools and build yourself a soundproof (and probably dumbass-proof) box to do your work in, before everyone hates you?

image courtesy of: http://muppet.wikia.com

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Call me weird, but I am not a fan of public bathrooms when it comes to number two. I’ll go number one all day, and where ever it is socially acceptable to do so (social acceptability is not a deal breaker in the right situation), but the same does not apply to number two. I once described it in college as my policy to never drop bombs over foreign soil. If I can avoid having a seat in the bathroom at work, I damn well do it. The whole thing (including seeing others who might use the same stall) makes me a little uncomfortable.

There are some days, however, when that doesn’t matter. I won’t get graphic, but sometimes even The Smartguy puts his feelings aside and goes into a stall. Fortunately, I know the rules for using the public/office bathroom. Apparently not too many other people do, because this is how I met today’s dumbass.

The rules are simple. When you need to use a stall, you sit down in a way that gives you the lowest chance possible to end up sitting next to someone else (urinal rules are the same). If I walk in and there’s no one in any stall, I pick one of the ones on either end of stall row. The bathroom at my office has four stalls, so I would never pick one in the middle. I pick the one at the end, because if someone else comes in, they can take the opposite stall. This leaves a two stall barrier between us. If a third person comes in, this only exposes one of us to having to sit next to someone else (fate decides who it’s gonna be, but at least it’s not both of us). Does that make sense? Again, the goal is to not sit in the stall next to someone else. I don’t want to smell or hear you do your business right next to me, nor do I want you to smell or hear my business. That’s no good for anybody.

What I want to know is this. Why the hell, if I am sitting in the stall to the far left in an otherwise empty bathroom, does the next guy to come in walk right to the stall next to mine and sit down? Did he not read the rule book? Did he not see the two other open stalls? Does he know nothing about buffer stalls?

I just don’t understand the thought process there. Are you some kind of weird pervert? Are you frightened of the bathroom and just looking for a friend to get you through your dump? Maybe you’re in the CIA and need to pass me a secret message. Nope, that wasn’t a coded message I just heard, although it kind of smells like a secret government project.

Maybe you have your favorite stall. I sympathize with that because I think we all do. Mine, as mentioned above, is the one on the far left near the wall. In fact, you must be just about as uncomfortable using the work bathroom to do your duty (pun intended) as I am, because otherwise you’d go to any of the other available. Guess what though, OCD! If I walk into the bathroom and someone’s using my favorite stall, I don’t climb in on top of them. I leave that stall, and the one next to it, for dead, adapt and move on. I do this because I respect the rules. I do this for the good of everyone who uses that bathroom.

I feel like sitting in the stall next to me makes you some kind of bathroom terrorist. Did Al-Qaeda put you up to this? Is your plan to not allow Americans to comfortably use the bathroom until they are too weak to defend themselves against your advances? Ok so maybe I’ve been watching too much “Homeland” lately, but you get the point.

I say to you and your white sneakers (yes, it’s always the same guy)… You’re a dumbass and I banish you from the office bathroom… just as soon as I find out who you are.

image courtesy of: http://nyrehtak.blogspot.com/

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So I’m sitting at my desk, and I hear the guy in the cube to the left of me click on his speaker phone and start dialing. A couple of  beep bop boops later, the phone call connects and begins to ring… Little did I know this was going to lead to the discovery of a new kind of dumbass.

All of a sudden, the phone in the cubicle to the right of me begins to ring. That’s funny, what odd timing. I pretend in my head that the calls are going to each other, because it’s a funny scenario. Like when you see two people standing next to each other on the street talking on their cell phones and it’s funny to think they’re talking to each other. It would be absurd to think two people standing next to each other are on the phone with one another when they could just turn to each other and talk like normal people.

A ridiculous scenario, right? As I’m laughing to myself, the guy in the cube to my right answers his phone. “Hello Ted, Bill speaking,” He says (names changed to promote hilarity). That’s funny, I think to myself. The guy on my left’s name is Ted…

The it hits me. The guy in the cube to my left has decided to call the guy in the cube to my right to discuss whatever dumabassery they have in common. Now, perhaps I should be more clear. My cube is maybe seven feet across. It’s not the size of a football field or anything. If I stand up and stretch out my arms, I can almost touch both walls. The cubes to my left and right are the same size as mine. What I’m trying to say is that the two guys are, at most, twenty feet from each other (if they sit on the far sides of their cubes relative to me).

Are you seriously telling me that you can’t get up and walk twenty feet to talk to your co-worker face to face? Is the news that pressing that you can’t waste the four seconds it will take you to walk over there? No. The truth is that “Ted” is simply too lazy. Why would he want to burn seven of the precious calories he got from his afternoon chocolate chip muffin by getting up and walking twenty feet when he can just pick up the phone? I think that would save him a good six calories, which he could immediately deposit into his ever expanding behind.

Now, I’m sitting here listening to Ted’s voice to my left, Bill’s voice to my right, and the echo from both of their speaker phones all around me. I hear two Bills and two Teds, all off synch from each other. It sounds like a minor league stadium loudspeaker.

“Now batting (now batting)… number 22(number 22)… Lazy Dumbass (lazy dumbass)… number 22 (number 22).”

Get up and walk, dumbass!

image courtesy of: http://bitsythis.com

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