How To Succeed in The Modern Office

Did you suddenly find out that you have a job placement in the same office building as your man (also known as boobooschweetimunch)? Really? Are you concerned about whether the proximity will put a strain on your relationship? No? That doesn’t bother you because neither of you is irritating so you don’t see why more of each other’s company should be a problem? What you are worried about is all the other heffers in the office he works at? I can help. Presenting: How to survive working in the same office with your man. This is good advice.

I promise that it will work. If you follow these few steps your relationship will not only survive, it will become strong, it will be come mighty and all who behold it shall be in awe.

1.

Watch your diet. Eat a lot of vegetables and fruits and drink a lot of water and practice yoga. You need a strong constitution and rock-solid focus. Also, drink vodka. You also need the balls to do a lot of stupid shit and the only way one can get those kinds of balls is in vodka.

Unless you are a man. Some men are born with them inside their stomachs.

2.

Don’t go to work in casual clothes. Hell no. This is not that kind of operation. Combat gear is what you need. Stern, severe corporate suits, madam! Attenshun! Do you have perfect 20-20 eyesight? I hope not. Because we are going to need you to wear glasses like those of Miss Courtney in Mind Your Language. Nah, don’t worry about this look compromising your natural innate gorgeousness. It won’t.

It’s actually a very sexy look. Let me make sure my google safesearch is on before I find an illustration.

The plan is that Dude will spend the whole day smitten, dreaming about getting you some place where you two can remove the hair bun and um… I don’t know. Those things.

But all those heffers in the office will be deathly scared of you.

3.

Some of the more weakminded among them might think you are a cyborg or an alien or an secret member of that assassin group in the movie Wanted. Let them think that by occasionally acting like it. Keep a can of motor oil on your desk. Learn to call people “puny earthlings” and say things like, “Back on my planet—I mean back in my village…”

This is called a Sustained Campaign of Psychological Bitchslapping. It is one where you don’t actually do any violence, but you keep your victims oppressed with the constant threat of violence.

4.

But it is not enough. As any tyrant will tell you, mere threats are not enough.

So, the final act in this course module is this. Find the secretary with the finest legs, shank her in the parking lot and let that serve as a lesson. No, don’t wait for her to make a move on your man. Do it on the first day.

That is my advice.

You are all welcome.

The Kitchen of Death Part II

How much did he pay?” Kevin said, face brightening up in the way faces brighten up on some people when they think they have hit on a brilliant idea that will save the day. “We can work out what he ordered from how much he paid.”

You know the look. The eyes all wide and the mouth staying open even after the words have been said because the dude is waiting for everyone to pat him on the back and congratulate his genius before he can shut his trap.

When no round of applause is forthcoming, he repeats himself. Louder. With the words “as in” and “you get”.

“As in the money he paid can be used to calculate how much his bill was so we can know what he ordered. You get?”

Silence sat on the kitchen air like a fat hairy cat as it finally dawned on everyone that the idea they had been waiting for all this time they had been a stupid one.

Everyone except Kevin. “As in you take his bill, you get…”

“Dude, he paid with a 10k note. Shush,” snapped Belinda.

Suddenly there as a creak and a whooshing sound. Belinda rolled her eyes to say “Oh shit.” Because she realized what had happened.

Brenda, having panicked, had gone and pushed the red button.

It’s a little-known fact that every restaurant (even bodaboda) has a red button in the back. Much like the ones banks have that tellers discreetly press when you try to rob them. The ones in restaurants are however, not used to summon the police. They are used most commonly to get the spittle-monster out of the back, but they can also be used to summon…

Gungaman!

And this is what happened that day.

Gungaman stood in the doorway.

Gungaman is pretty much as sinister and frightening as your imagination is telling you he is. He breathes smoke, stands seven feet tall, has skin as black as the soles of shoes and his eyes are terrible eyes. One of them is completely red, all the way round. Like a blood-filled marble with a black dot in the centre.

The other eye is perfectly black. With a red dot in the centre.

Gungaman has five claws for hands. And a tail.

Gungaman also wears an apron. Stained with the blood of his victims.

Gungaman spoke.

“Hello, how’s everybody doing? I hope you’re all having a splendid day. Hello Belinda. My, your hair looks incredible! What did you do with it? Hey Kevin. Now, did someone press the button? Are my services required?”

I don’t think this really qualifies as an emergency…” began Belinda, but the thing with  Gungaman is you can’t fool him.

Gungaman sees the secrets of your soul.

“Hmmm. A Code 34, I see,” he muttered, his red eye drilling into Brenda’s quivering countenance. “That customer acting like a little brat over his … what? You gave him rice and a chap? Brenda naawe.”

Brenda broke down and wept for two seconds then, deciding that wasn’t dramatic enough, fainted.

Gungaman wasn’t offended. He was resigned to the fact that having a large red eye would occasionally prompt people to fall unconscious.

“Well, all that’s left is to do the deed,” he said. “Kevin, will  you pass me the axe?” Restaurants have a cabinet in the back where they store Gungaman’s tools.

The customer who was seething at his table quickly shat himself when he saw what was stomping towards him carrying an axe.  Belinda didn’t want to look, but Kevin was the sort of asshole who enjoyed such spectacles.

After the murder, and after Gungaman had been paid his fee, and Brenda rescusitated and made to clean up, a day passed.

And then you went to that takeaway to ask for chips-liver. The liver didn’t taste like cow liver, did it?

The Kitchen of Death Part I

A mound of rice sat on the plate, looking quite embarrassed. As if it knew that everyone was staring at it. It suddenly blushed.

It had reason to feel a bit silly because it had been caught in the wrong company. On the plate next to the mound of rice were two halves of a chap.

No, there was nothing else on the plate. Just rice and chap.

The customer had sent it back to the kitchen, after throwing one of the most spectacular bitch fits the restaurant which sees spectacular bitch fits on a fairly frequent basis had seen in months. “What the hell has my mother got to do with any of this?” Belinda had wondered as she carried the plate back to Boss in the kitchen.

Rice and chap.

“It makes no sense. How can anyone order rice and chap?” Bosco’s lower lip hung loose like a wet leaf in the rain when he asked himself rhetorical questions.

“He says he didn’t.”

“Then how did this…”

“It seems kind of obvious when you think about it,” Belinda answered. The circumstances surrounding this event were perfectly conducive for the creation of this unlikely pairing, so conducive in fact, as to eliminate all the unlikeliness of the pairing altogether and make it an almost inevitable conclusion.

“Brenda took the order.”

To put it politely, Brenda was not very intelligent. It had been observed that when she had too much to think about, when, say, four customers made orders at once and she had to memorise them, her head would sway slightly on her neck, rocking back and forth as if it had suddenly become much heavier and was about to fall off.

Normally, if enough precautions were taken, (someone else did the math, for example) Brenda was able to fulfil the duties of waiting tables at MaveRin Take-Away Delites adequately enough, but the law of averages is still a law; eventually she would cock up and put a chap on a plate next to a mound of rice and trot it smilingly off to the most cantankerous customer MaveRin  had seen since the MP and his girlfriend showed up in March.

The MP and his girlfriend. Who would have thought anything would ever beat that?

“This is not a problem,” Kevin said, shouldering his way to the table. “Correct his order and take it to him. Chop –chop. Or should I say, ‘Chap-chap’? Har har har.” Kevin’s stupid pun diluted the stance of authority he had started in when he walked up.

“That is the problem. We don’t know what his order is. He won’t tell us.”

What?

“He’s one of those,” Belinda explained.

There is a constituency of clients who are offended by the “Order With Cash” policy of some take-aways. They feel that they are being prompted to prove their worthiness before being served and it offends them. Usually they murmer grumpily and hand over the money, but every once in a while, say when Brenda’s glassy stare impresses upon them just how helpless they are when their logical arguments can clearly gain no advantage, they begin to take it personally.

When, after demanding that he pay for food he hadn’t yet eaten, she brought him a dry plate of food he could not conceivably eat, the customer called down fire from the sky, cursed the plate and its bringer and swore that he must get what he had paid for.

He also said something about the mothers of all involved.

“He won’t budge. He insists.”

“Just how hard have you interrogated Brenda?” asked Kevin, and he turned his head to see the poor girl standing in the corner, with the expression of a complete mouse on her face, her eyes red from all the crying.

Belinda dropped her eyelids to the scoffing position. “You want us to try hypnotism, perhaps, to get the right order out of her subconscious?”

Brenda sobbed a bit from the corner. Her thumb floated towards her mouth.

Kevin thought twice about it.

She was biting the nail of her thumb in such a way as to suggest she would have been sucking it if there weren’t so many people around to frown on the act and she was in enough trouble already, she didn’t need to add further frowns to it.

Then the idea struck. This is how business thrives and operates. Through innovation, through inspiration.

The Movie Avatar: Three Points of Interest

1. The movie Avatar was pointless, racist, and poorly-written, but it looked fabulous. A spectacular sight to see. I was dazzled by the scenery, mesmerized by the animation. I only wish I could have turned off the volume in the cinema and listened to my Lupe Fiasco mixtape on my headphones instead as I watched.
2. The movie Avatar also included a sex scene. I don’t want to overthink this thing, but it was perverse on so many levels. One is that a human being has sex with an alien—a female of another species. Secondly, it’s not even the actual human being the alien was having sex with, it is an artificial body he operates by remote control. Then, and most perverse (yes, I said PERVERSE!) It was cartoons having sex. I had to wonder, as should you: so the people who designed and manufactured the artificial Avatar bodies were there working away. Then came to the point when they had to decide whether to fit genitals onto the thing. What made them decide, “You know, let’s just put functioning gonads on. He might need them.”
3. The movie Avatar was showing at Cineplex Cinema where I discovered what a rotten Kitkat tastes like.

Places I Would Rather Be.

1.

Playing that ka-riff from Money For Nothing on stage with Dire Straits. With the guitar slung low beneath my waist, and an expression of bland disinterest on my face as if the fact that I am rocking everyone’s scalp off is of no consequence to me. I might even execute a little ambiguous semi-sexual hip thrust just to further bedazzle fans.

I like to know how dey prey da jitta

2.

Having a meeting with a plate of chicken. “Hello, Chicken. Glad you could make it to this function. Let me introduce everybody. On  your left are chips and next to chips is coke. They are going to be accompanying you on your mission. You will have plenty of time to get to know them better. We have scheduled a mingling session for later. Heh heh. Now that we are all here, let’s get right into it. The venue for this afternoon’s festivities is my mouth. And Speaking of getting right into it…”

3.

Running barefoot across the lawns of a mansion in the dead of night with my trousers and shirt in my arms while behind me the night air carries the screaming voice of Beyonce. Yelling at her husband, “Yeah, well if you were any kind of real man, I wouldn’t need a toy boy! Whatchoo say to that, Shawn!”

Call me, baby.