Stop! Hamster Time!

(Title sung to the tune of MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This”)

… changes too the organizational structure are beeing made to optimize efficiencies to ensure … *yawn*

… the Devil is blather eclipsed to moat turgid …. *yawn*

… the Division is better equipped to meet target ….. *yawn*

indicators for next fucking *yawn* fiscal year established by  … *yawn* … *yawn* … Headquarters.

“Fuck this,” said my brain, about fifteen minutes ago.

Ah, yes. It’s 2:30. The hamster has been snoozing away, oblivious to the higher-order mental functioning I’ve been doing since this morning. He needs to be away from the office for me to get intellectually-enriched tasks accomplished.

But he’s been stirred by the mid-afternoon doldrums. A precipitous decline of dopamine has reduced the surge of mental capacity flowing in the neural pathways to my pre-frontal cortex to a trickle. The sudden imbalance has tweaked the rodent, who craves norepinephrine; in short supply so long as higher-order thinking predominates. Roused from his slumber, he scurries around my mind seeking thrills to keep him fed, the frenetic energy depriving me of the mental capacity to tie my shoes or speak in coherent sentences.

Now that he’s arrived, the banality of my surroundings shrouds my mental clarity in a dense fog; I grow resentful at the task of spewing the high-minded corporate sludge I’m such a whiz at crafting. The hamster compels me to do something that has me fearing for my life, copulating feverishly, or engrossed in consumptive pleasures to satiate his endless cravings for intense, carnal stimulation.

‘There is important work to be done,’ says my inner CEO, Edmund K. Saunders, Esq. from the wing-back chair in his mahogany-paneled corner office in the pre-frontal cortex.

‘Boo-oooring! Let’s court death! Let’s binge on something! I wanna feel ALIVE!!’ says Yosemite Ham, my idjit inner-hamster, who’s risen from his trailer park bunk in the brain-stem and is holding that no-good, frickin’-frackin’, sassa-frassin’ varmint Edmund K. Saunders, Esq. at gunpoint.

Such are the perils of a desk job for a person with Attention Deficit Disorder. Yosemite Ham sneaks out of his cage unnoticed when I spend too much time in an aesthetically depraved, grotesquely non life-threatening environment like a corporate office.

I need meaningful breaks. I need to be well away from earnest, one-dimensional pests and their putative leaders who reproduce like dim-witted mice in places like this. I want a siesta. Who’s with me?

I want the International Criminal Court to hunt down the evil mastermind behind the creation of the solid 8-hour work day and cubicle dungeons for white-collar professions. I will drop-kick him in the ass before he serves his sentence of five years data-entry and editing other people’s illiterate memos in a six-by-six, grey-carpeted cubicle under fluorescent lights in a room with no windows.

Whoa, whoa. Hold up. Is that Ron sending another snarly e-mail? Nuh-uh, no he di-in’t. Is he dissing my comments on the proposed memorandum? Time to bust an interlocutory cap in a mutha-fucka’s ass.

It sounds like you don’t know what you’re talking about, but your candid comments are well-taken, even if totally irrelevant and completely misinformed.

Those home-boys will get Ron stepping off my grill. Word!

Wait. Are you picking a fight to quell boredom? *e-mail deleted*

Hey, I hear Ginny doing her cockney accent again. I’ll barge in with my over-wrought Scottish-brogue accent. They won’t mind if I cut into their private conversation with humour! ‘Wet are yoo lassie’s dooo-in therrrrre.’

Ginny is always game for some pointless, office-disrupting lollygagging at this time of day. I do my Jaime Rodriguez Marcos riff. He’s my alter-ego and one-time sub-commandante to Che Guevera who’s been languishing in the Chiapas jungle and still believes La Revolucion is in full swing.

We do our usual back-and-forth banter pretending we’re characters from Coronation Street or conversing as if we were in a musical, like Annie or Rent. ‘Tell me now, Ginny / pray, don’t you be shy / sing your dirty secrets / to this cubicle gu-uy!’

I did Robin Williams’ Mexican penguin accent from Happy Feet as I pretended to be in a meeting to convince the higher-ups they were making another stupid organizational decision. Then of course, there was me being Michael Cain saying whatever, because, Michael Cain. Duh.

Wow. That was twenty-five minutes I’ll never get back. I hope nobody in the nearby cubicles was trying to get some work done, because we were loud. Maybe even a little obnoxious. Oh well, they were definitely entertained. I mean, come on, Michael Cain.

However, in the following fiscal year, without an injection of ..

I have to go to the bathroom again. The bathroom at the end of a really, really long hallway where I  pass the HR folks who usually have cookies and goodies in their common area. They’re so nice they don’t mind people popping in to grab some grub without stopping for conversation. That’s why it’s there right?

Excellent! Someone in my unit brought chips and ju-jubes while I was taking a pee and wandering the hallways. I love chips, so I’ll stand and jib-jab with the assembling crowd as I binge on junk. One cannot put a price on such opportunities for team-building.

I’m not much of a candy guy but I like the red and green ju-jubes. I’m not so crazy about the black and orange ones. Yellow ju-jubes? Pfft. They’re like a comb-over – not fooling anybody. They’re sugar-flavoured nubs of pee. Everybody seemed to agree, and we returned to our cubicles feeling more cohesive than ever.

… additional funding, our ability to continue to meet expected targets will be severely …

Donna just came in the door. Another Manager called she and her all-female group the “tampax club” when they were in a training session yesterday. He’s only a few years older than me but seems to have been plucked from a Leave it to Beaver episode and cast in our office. Gee Beav, Donna sure let him have it, boy oh boy.

So anyway, I lampooned runway models and did the munchkin song ‘We represent the Lollipop Guild’ from the Wizard of Oz. Donna is a tiny woman and it brings her off the ledge when I say she reminds me of an angry munchkin when she’s apoplectic. I recounted the story of when I was a boy-model for the department store my mother worked for when I was three. I did an assortment of underwear modeling poses to demonstrate my technique, which was legendary. It was incredible fun, which is why I’m Donna – my boss’s – favourite employee.

… diminished owing to attrition, increased workload, and anticipated retirements.

Hmmm …  I wonder how many people checked out my Flash Fiction story from last week. Aw, only ten today. It has a surprise ending involving squirrels. Squirrels! Ha ha ha! How zany and clever I am.

We propose a resourcing plan be implemented in mid-year…

Let’s see what’s on facebook. Surprise, surprise, US Republicans are being union-busting, bigoted, poor-people hating, evolution-denying, unconstitutional foreign policy-undermining, assholes again. Amazing! – pictures of people’s dinner last night. Boo hoo, someone’s flight to some amazing, exotic place far, far away from my cubicle-prison is delayed. Poor them. Ooh, another mouth-watering photo of a recipe I’ll never have time to make. I can’t … resist … another lame … article … with the cliched title “You won’t believe what happened!”

I don’t know why I bother. What a fucking waste of time.

… to ensure full operational readiness at the inauguration of FY2016.

I am parched. I need some water …

I am glad I ran into Jody as I fetched my third litre and a half bottle of water for the day. She is into hot yoga, which I don’t do because I am a big sweaty pig who leaves a moat around my yoga mat and requires a drawbridge to cross it at the end of class. That, and mid-way through I feel like I’ve been caught in a rogue wave of perspiration swallowing my body, making it impossible to hold a pose; or breathe, which is the whole point. I made self-deprecating jokes about how shitty I am at the pretzel-like poses of the Ashtanga yoga that is my practice, but attest to how it curbs my seething inner rage and neurosis. It was fifteen minutes of laughter. Serendipity at its finest.

We cannot move forward with certain initiatives without assurances additional funds will be available to staff the positions required to meet our strategic objectives.  

My goodness, it’s 4:30! Where does the time go?

I made it to the end of the day, in spite of Yosemite and his moronic ideas. Report finished. Well done, Edmund. Well. Done.