Most of you are probably expecting five short observations on things in the world around me. I hope you are used to disappointment, because you are in for it.
Much like the disappointment that comes with being in an airport while forgetting both my cell phone charger and my headphones. The first lapse in memory will force me to spend a weekend not speaking to those I am trying to reach. The second one will force me to spend a flight speaking to those I am trying to avoid. I didn’t even plan on plugging my headphones in to anything. I was just going to wear them. If my neighbor notices the dangling headphone cord, so be it. It’s what they get for arriving late enough to have a middle seat.
I wrote a column for two and a half years about looking at stuff around me and reporting what I saw. Kind of the little brother urging you to look out his side of the car. But after graduating college, things have slowly begun to change. But not in the airport. I’m still sitting here avoiding people, just like I was a half hour ago.
Observational Humor used to be about college, but I felt a bit sheepish writing about something I was no longer part of. So I started writing about working life, but that’s no fun at all. When you tell someone that you write college humor, they say, “Parties, rock!” When you tell someone that you write office humor, they say, “Excuse me, Irving, may I borrow your stapler? I seem to have used up the last of my staples while putting together my painfully boring life.”
When I started to write this column, I was left at a crossroads. And not the kind that has Britney Spears trying to act (whew). My crossroads involved me making a decision. So I finally made one: I bought a new pair of headphones from the airport’s Overpriced Random Things Depot. Actually, I bought two. I wanted mini headphones, and you could only get those “free” with a twelve-dollar pair of big headphones. The Depot also carries the big headphones without the mini headphones, priced at six dollars.
Equipped with headphones, I started thinking about what to write this week. I could give you a riveting expose on white out or the dress code or the gradual change from water coolers to soda machines or something else that your parents might enjoy reading. Or I could write about whatever I felt like, on a week-to-week basis, and just try to be as entertaining as possible. The decision was much easier than whether or not to blow twelve bucks on headphones.
The problem that decision creates is if interesting things happen around me often enough to write about. Interesting things that I can write about here, anyway. There’s all sorts of interesting stuff that goes on between people I know that you wouldn’t really care about. Like when John asked Patricia out, and she turned him down because she wanted to date Patrick, and then everyone made fun of her because her name was Patricia and so she shouldn’t date someone named Patrick. This is an example of something that would not make a good column.
Living in New York and having a keen sense of perception helps. Which is much healthier than living in New York with a keen sense of smell, since that would prevent you from ever leaving your apartment. I enjoy looking at the things around me, thinning them out into bite size pieces, and serving them to my readers like the tiny bag of pretzels and the 5 ounce cup of Sprite that will keep me full all the way to Los Angeles.
Little things like this should provide me with both hunger pains and countless weeks of column material; the world is full of things that make for funny anecdotes. Like the guy who just sat down next to me and is letting his kid run around touching people.
A lot of people have written to me asking if I could make my columns longer, and I have traditionally told them to go pound. So it is possible that none of them are reading this, since they are all busy pounding. But if they have not yet begun to pound, or perhaps they finished their pounding early, they might be reading this after all. I hope that my new format did not disappoint any of them.
Unless they are the guy with the weird kid who keeps touching me. I hope he gets dissapointed constantly.
Articles (Page 412)
RSSMy friends have started slowly getting married. When I meet a girl, is she thinking about whether or not I’m marriage material? I can’t even settle on what I’m gonna eat for lunch – what makes anyone think I can settle on something a little more lasting than grilled cheese?
Why are women only sure they don’t want to date you two days after you pay for dinner?
I don’t understand work dating etiquette yet. Not picking up girls in your office, okay – that’s like not dating someone in one of your seminars. And Not picking up girls you live with is just like not dating anyone on your hall. But where are all of the fraternity parties to make up for it?
When I meet a new girl, I find myself asking them where they went to school. Which is okay when they’re my age. But when they’re older, it gets a little weird. “Where did you go for undergrad…ten years ago?”
Some guys who just made it to the work place think they’re cool because they can finally afford to buy drinks for every woman they meet. It only takes a few weeks of this to realize it’s cheaper to cut out the middleman and just buy a woman.
In college, we ate lunch. At work, we take lunch. Because the idea of taking time has become much more important than the idea of lunch.
Looking forward to lunch makes the morning go by much quicker. But most of the time, you eat something quick and greasy like pizza or a burger. Which makes the afternoon go by VERY slowly.
Your job is stressful when you have to take some time out of lunch to IM your friends. Your job is not stressful when you have to take some time out of IMing your friends to eat lunch.
You don’t have enough money to go out for lunch unless you work in finance. Which is perfect, since they all eat lunch at their desks.
My company cafeteria is VERY segmented. The editors sit in one place, the writers in another, and the interns in another. Each magazine sits seperately, and no one from editorial ever sits with anybody from production. We might have diplomas, we might have saved our tassles, and we might even have the yearbook – but no one ever really leaves high school.
The thing I hate the most is when someone near me checks their voicemail on speakerphone. The thing I love the most is when I hear it say, “you have no new messages.”
Everyone has one guy in the office who knows how to use every feature of his voicemail. You’re struggling to change the name that pops up on your co-worker’s call ID, and he just used it to check his e-mail, forward calls from his wife to his cell phone, and baste a twelve-pound Turkey.
I don’t understand how to use my phone at all. I’m sure that there are a million cool features that I could use if I just read the ten-page manual. But then I’d have to read ten pages about phones.
On my phone at work, you have to dial in your extension and your pass code every time you want to hear your messages. It’s a good thing there’s so much security. Otherwise anyone could break in to my voicemail and find out that no one ever calls me.
I try to sound professional on my work voicemail, but I still sound like myself. I know some people who try to deepen their voices to sound older. This was okay when you were twelve and calling a girl for the first time. But it’s not okay to leave an outgoing message and pretend you’re Barry White. “I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Awww, yeah.”
The free stuff factor we learned in college never gets old. Most offices have an office supply cabinet where they keep all the extra pens, masking tape, folders, etc. And even though the entire contents of the cabinet cost twenty bucks, you still hoard as many supplies as you can, just because they’re free. But guess what – free crap? Still crap.
Some companies make stuff with their names on it. That makes sense if these things are being given out as promotional items. Not if they’re being used around the office. You spend 40-50 hours a week in this place already, you probably have an e-mail address with the company name, and you might even have business cards. But in case you forget where you work, you can check your tape dispenser.
Everyone I know goes through at least a box of pens in a year. I used to think it was because people are constantly losing their pens. Actually, the pens are right in front of us. But after a week, they’re so chewed up that you can’t tell they’re pens anymore.
Office supply stores are fun because they make you think of uses for products you never thought you needed. Like the desk organizer that organizes your other desk organizers.
Businesses have to make a choice. Either they lose money paying someone to do inventory, or they lose money paying for replacement supplies. So most of them don’t bother to do inventory, because if they’re going to lose money, at least they can help raise company morale with free pens.
8:00 AM looks dramatically different from this angle. It’s not spinning anymore.
The biggest thing that changes when you start work is your concept of midnight. I used to see midnight and go to the bars. Now I see midnight and go to sleep. I don’t know if that’s really funny, but it sure does suck.
Senior year, you feel very old. Which is nice preparation for being the only one in your company without kids.
The only way to be happy with your first paycheck is to assume they’re going to take out 35% of your entire salary in takes. That way, when they only take 32% or 33%, you’ll be thrilled.
Interns just create work for other interns. My job is basically as a researcher and reporter, so I have to call people and ask them questions. And when they don’t know the answer, they have their interns call someone else, who asks their intern, and so on, and so on. And then somehow, it all ends up back at the White House.
I wasn’t going to write about my job specifically because I like to stick to universal stuff. But then I realized that AOL/Time Warner owns my company. Which means half of us already work together, and the other half are customers.
The good thing about working for an AOL/Time Warner company is that they can’t really get mad at you for using IM seven hours a day. “Dude, relax. I was just making sure the product works.”
During our orientation, they told us all about the AOL/Time Warner subsidiaries, and how vast the company really is. And they showed us this video with all these boy bands, Brittany Spears, and a bunch of kids using AOL before flashing “America Online touches thirty-five billion people each month.” And you thought the Catholic Church was bad.
There’s always weird stuff going on in the Time Life Building. Thursday, there was a boy band in the morning and a stand-up comic in the afternoon. Like they couldn’t see this one coming…
I love the Time cafeteria. It’s got a great selection, the lines move incredibly quickly, and everything costs about $5. And the best part is, I’m not already paying them $30,000 a year.
A lot of people ask me what I’m going to do after graduation. I think I’ll go to dinner with my parents, then drink a whole lot and pass out.
You pretty much have to write something in masking tape on your mortarboard-the space is too good to waste. I’m deciding between “thank you, Spark Notes,” “for a good time, ask,” and “brought to you by yahoo.com.”
Graduation robes are so weird. Why do we only look educated after we dress up like giant colored snow angels?
Graduation is a huge step in a young adult’s life. Hooking up with a college student goes from encouraged to sketchy in just three hours.
They tell us not to throw our hats because it’s dangerous. They’re talking to people who spent the last four years drinking ourselves to sleep on the weekends, taking no-doz to study on the weekdays, subsisting solely pizza and Chinese food, and braving communal bathrooms regardless of whether or not we remembered to bring our shower shoes. If that didn’t kill us, I don’t think we have to worry about an out of control hat.
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I can’t pull an all-nighter to study. When I’m that tired, I don’t have trouble picking a,b,c, or d. But I have trouble remembering what order they come in.
When you try to comfort someone studying, don’t ever do it by saying, “don’t worry, it’ll all be over in a few days.” They’ll ignore “it’ll all be over” and just hear “in a few days” before they breakdown crying.
The library is a great place to study. By the time I leave, I haven’t looked at my reading, but I am the world’s foremost expert on 17 different people’s pen fidgets, snacking habits, and bathroom intervals.
If I can’t remember the name of the girl I met in a bar five minutes ago, what chance do I have of remembering anything so much less important?
My mom told me that if I spent half as much time studying as I did on watching baseball, I’d be a straight A student. “You get a B in history, but you can tell me Keith Miller’s batting average from 1987.” I said, “.373, though he didn’t have enough at bats to qualify for the batting title so Tony Gwynn won with a .370—but that’s completely besides the point.”
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When you’re a senior, finals are different. They feel so, I don’t know, final.
The timing for Cinquo de Mayo couldn’t be worse. Here it is, a holiday where people celebrate with nachos and Corona but everyone is stuck in the library. Not me – I think studying instead of nachos and Corona is like vacuuming during the Super Bowl.
For the classes I have with finals, I fill up an entire notebook. For the classes I have with papers, the notebook has a bunch of half-drawn pictures, notes from the one class we had before I realized there was no final, and the date crossed out and changed each time I didn’t end up taking notes.
It’s not that seniors have fewer finals than everyone else, it’s just that we don’t care. By now, most seniors have jobs or have been accepted to grad school. And if they haven’t, they’re still smart enough to know that ten points on a calc final isn’t going to make or break them.
If you finish finals early, keep your mouth shut. You may think it’s cool, but there is nothing that other people hate more than the guy who finishes all of his work first. Walk up to anyone and say, “I don’t have any finals and I kicked your baby brother in his stupid fat head.” “What? You don’t have any finals?”
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I have one class where even the TA has been cutting lately. Or so I’ve been told.
If you’re not worried about getting in to grad school, all you need is a B to get any job. So if you’ve been through three years of school with A’s and you find yourself not going to grad school, the only math you’ll need to do is figure out exactly how many classes you can miss and still pass.
Being 6’4” with red hair makes it tough to cut class. Having professors who are 64 with gray hair makes it easy.
You might be slumping when you’ve taken the time to make three-dozen different away messages. You know you’re slumping when you have that many different ones that describe which bar you’ll be at.
You never completely stop caring about your workload when you’re a senior. But if you skip class, it’s hard to actually expend the effort to call someone to see what you missed. That’s why you make friends with people who go out a lot. “Hey, aren’t you in my bio class? Did we get any assignments? Any exams? No? Cool – see you next weekend.”
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Why does every school have at least one really crappy dorm? And every dorm has at least one really crappy room? Hey college – stop building crappy rooms, okay? Thanks – we appreciate it.
Why do people get so excited by their friends’ housing lottery numbers? “My friend got number 2,998 out of 3000! Isn’t that wild?” “No way, dude, my friend was number 23!” “Woah – my friend was number, like, 17!” Hey – no one really cares what your friend’s lottery number was. Besides, I had a friend who was number 4. Isn’t that wild?
There’s constantly signs advertising on my campus for people to help fill the last few spaces in suites. I think it would be smarter to post signs looking for a roommate who is going abroad the whole year. Or at least someone with a girlfriend across town.
How horribly backward is special interest housing? At some schools, any minority group can apply for their own suite, floor, or house. So you can only live with people of your own race or religion? I thought America had a problem with this rule the first time when it was called “separate but equal.”
If I got number 1 in the housing lottery, I’d sell it to number 50 for $100, then sell that to number 100, sell that to 200, and so on and so on. Sure, I’d end up with the worst room on campus, but it’d be wallpapered in solid gold.
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When I meet a guy in college, I always want to ask, “what kind of guitar do you play?”
You know MP3s have taken hold when everyone has burnt copies of all the CDs from their music class.
I think live music is usually better than listening to a CD. But I will never understand why people like recorded live music better than something produced in a studio. “Hey, he’s saying something to the audience that we can’t really hear. Oh, I love when he does that! Maybe later, he’ll miss a few notes, and the mic will pick up some feedback!”
I love those compilation CDs they sell on TV. When it’s one I want to buy, I get the song list off their website, download all the tracks, burn the CD myself, and spend the $19.95 on pizza.
I am a music idiot. I like popular music with a good beat and good lyrics, and I don’t care how studio produced it is, how few chords it uses, or how little talent it took to write the music. That’s the only way I can play it on my guitar anyway.
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In high school, you had a principal and an assistant principal to kiss up to. In college, you have 473 deans. Better get some chapstick, buddy.
How great would it be to work as an office assistant in a college and just happen to be named Dean?
There’s a dean for everything at my school. Dean of Students. Dean of Student Affairs. Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. Assistant Dean of Student Affairs and Special Programming. Ever think that the title “Dean” is kind of like “Associate Producer”?
Do you think the Dean of Food Services gets really pissed if you call him Jimmy?
We have something called “Dean’s Discipline” at my school. That’s when you do something wrong and you are at the complete mercy of a dean when it comes to punishment, which some people think is unfair. But how are our kids going to learn to use fascism later in life if they don’t teach it to us now?
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I used to think that Easter Island was a whole island filled with chocolate and bunnies, but it turns out that it’s just a bunch of mean looking stone faces. Which makes sense, since that’s how a lot of my friends describe hanging out with their relatives.
A friend of mine asked me if I had a happy Passover, without realizing it was still going on. Passover is eight days. Hannukah is eight days. Sukkot is eight days. See, we buy everything wholesale.
Good Friday is supposed to be a fast day. Except I found out you get one main meal, and then another small meal to keep you going. That’s not fasting – that’s Jenny Craig.
Passover is a simple holiday to explain. It’s Thanksgiving without bread or football.
I prefer Passover to Thanksgiving. At Thanksgiving, some of your relatives will drone on and on for hours about what they have to be thankful for, and why they’re all so blessed to have made it another year. That happens at Passover too, but at least there’s a script.
I think it’s funny when people give up things they don’t really enjoy doing for lent, in an effort to trick god. I like to think of a god as someone who can’t be fooled into thinking that I’m struggling to end my addiction to homework.
I know an overweight, chain-smoking alcoholic who couldn’t come up with anything good to give up for lent. I think she settled on “three years of her life.”
In some families, it’s Passover tradition to serve both egg soup and chicken soup. Though for the life of me, I can’t remember which comes first.
Painted eggs, wicker baskets, chocolate and marshmallows molded in the shape of bunnies and baby chicks? The only rebirth Easter commemorates is that of Martha Stewart’s career.
The ten plagues were blood, frogs, vermin, pestilence, cattle death, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the slaying of the first born. If it weren’t for that last one, I’d think I was praying to El Nino.
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I define “hooking up,” as anything sexual, not including sex itself. That is much more than hooking up. That is being completely interlocked.
Everyone has their little quirks when it comes to hooking up. So after you’ve been hooking up with one person for a while and you hook up with someone else, you need to be very careful that you remember not to do that extra swirly thing with your tongue.
I know a girl who laughed when she made out with someone. I’m talking right in the middle of it – just burst out laughing. And she did this with everyone she ever kissed. Or that’s what I tell myself to keep the self-esteem up.
I won’t ever say someone’s name when I’m hooking up with them. Not because I’m afraid of getting it wrong, but because I think it’s weird when someone says mine. Even if I’m doing something like fooling around, when someone says, “Steve,” it’s just instinctive for me to answer with, “what?”
There are some guys who just try stuff and see if they get slapped. But most of us will lightly brush up against things first to gauge the reaction. That way if the girl is like “what are you doing?,” we can just pretend it was a complete accident that the back of our hand landed squarely between her thighs.
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The first time I ever went to the gym, I asked my friend where the bathroom was. He hushed me really quickly, and said I should be quieter or everyone will know that I didn’t go to the gym so often. Yeah, that bathroom comment was the only thing that gave it away.
Every time I go to the gym, I want to take off my glasses because I don’t like to wear them while I work out. But I don’t do it because not being able to see well defeats the real purpose of going to the gym.
It’s hard to motivate yourself to go to the gym. I may love the feeling I get when I finish a work out, but I love the feeling I get when I finish a paper, and it doesn’t make me write one every day.
When you work out for the first time in a while, you have a lot to do when you get back. You have to shower, you have to change, and you have to tell everyone you run into that you just back from the gym.
I love the people who think they’re healthy just because they go to the gym. Dude, you eat Ramen for lunch, pizza for dinner, and you’ve never even been awake to eat breakfast. You binge drink three times a week, spend your free time IMing your roommate or playing Beirut, and you have to smoke a cigarette in order to go to sleep – at 4 AM on a Tuesday. But those three sets of bicep curls – man, they’re keeping you healthy.
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I love the guy who yells “party!” at the top of his lungs. Beer, dim lighting, a couple going at it in the corner – I could have sworn I was in class. Thanks for clearing that up.
People think that if they drink a lot at a party, they’ll be cool, which is not always true. If you drink a lot and can hold it all, that’s pretty cool. If you drink just enough to leave you passed out in your own puke, well, not as cool.
Parties are fun, but they’re nothing compared to the next day, when five guys sit around and try to reconstruct all the stupid things their friends did the night before.
The best way to advertise a party is to tell 50 people that it’s a small thing and they shouldn’t tell too many people. Only 250 people will even hear about it. But every last one of them will show up.
Your school’s level of parties is directly proportional to how good your teams are, and there’s no good reason why. When ten guys are really good at basketball, everyone else just drinks, dances, and hooks up a lot more. Even during football season.
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In some classes, I sit towards the left, in some the right, and in some, the middle. But in each class, I have one and only one seat. In one class, I tried to switch things up a little and move up a row. Man, that was a weird day.
When you go out drinking during the week, people get in a war over how early their first class is. “I have a class at ten tomorrow!” “Oh yeah? I have a lab at nine!” “Oh yeah? I have class eight-thirty, and we have a final!” Not me – my earliest class of the week is at 2:00 PM and I’m proud. I’ll try to wake you up for your final before I get to bed.
What is the point of auditing a class? You sit through the lecture and take notes, but you don’t have to pay for it. Which would make sense if professors charged at the door.
I was once in a huge lecture class, and the whole semester, people I never saw before were coming up to me and asking me if I was in Econ with them. Sure, I was in their class, but it’s hard to remember people that you meet while you’re sleeping.
I’ve seen a lot of professors try to scare kids away on the first day of class by talking about all the work they’ll be assigning. I wonder how those classes turned out.
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I know some people whose parents pay for their entire tuition, cars, and meal plan, but won’t buy them a computer. I’m not saying parents need to buy their kids everything. I’m just saying that if you’re buying your kid a round of golf, you might want to make sure they have a set of clubs.
When your computer breaks, and it will, most college tech support people can not help you. But man, are they’re good at Counter Strike.
A friend of mine thinks that on-line gambling is dangerous because credit cards let you go into debt too quickly. Instead, he checks his e-mail once a day and lets people bet the over/under on how many messages he got.
The great thing about computers is that they make mailing real letters worth so much more. Writing someone an actual letter is like asking a college girl out to dinner. Sure, it’s easy and an every day thing that your parents did all the time. But because so few other people think of it, you’re a hero.
Do you remember having a 2400 speed modem? Do you remember your first 100 megabyte hard drive? Do you remember the time you spent fondly reminiscing with your friends about how small and slow your computers used to be? God, I hope not.
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Senior year, everyone always asks you where you are looking for work. First semester, I said, “in sports-writing.” Over break, said, “in writing.” Now, I say, “in America.”
People tell me I should go to grad school instead of working right away so I can be well-rounded. As if my four years of college didn’t round me enough. I took two years of core curriculum before I could even start my major, and once I started it, I still had to take four classes outside of my discipline. If I become anymore well-rounded, I can find a cushy job as a meatball.
Career fairs are supposed to help you decide what you want to do. Except the only companies that came to my school’s career fair are firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. “Have you ever thought about an exciting career in finance? No? Well, what about one in finance?”
Companies who fire veteran employees in order to hire cheaper recent college graduates are unscrupulous. They also don’t return my calls.
Some people advise you against taking the first job that comes your way just to pay off your billions of dollars in student loans. They say that you should scrimp and save in a piddling position in your industry so that you can eventually end up where you really want. Like jail.
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