Long lives aren’t natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

The real killers in the business world aren’t the ones who aim for the top, it’s the ones who aim for two notches below the top.

If cats were double the size they are now, they’d probably be illegal.

There’s a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps

Once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.

We’re rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

Your body isn’t just a body. It’s an ecosystem

As we age we passionlessly assess what we have and what we lack, and then go about making the best of it, like an actor who goes from playing leads to playing character roles; like a party girl who goes from being a zany kook to being a cautionary tale for the younger girls.

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

In our heads we’re all about 33 years old.

By twenty-five you know you’re never going to be a rock star, by thirty you know you’re never going to be a dentist, and by forty there are maybe three things left that you can still be - and even then, that’s only if you run as fast as you possibly can to try to catch the train.

You can’t get mad at weather because weather’s not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.

Quick. Name ten dead redheads

If you don’t change, then what’s the point of anything happening to you?

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they’ve been told they have lots in common.

Being asked what animal you’d like to be is a trick question; you’re already an animal.

It’s difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.

A day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle, a day in which all things that could have gone wrong didn’t. The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.

Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.

When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?

Figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then don’t do it.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can’t. The brain doesn’t process negatives.

I think that in the future, clocks won’t say three o’clock anymore. They’ll just get right to the point and rename three o’clock ‘Pepsi.’

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it’s not quite the same thing.

There’s much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world’s probably a better place for it.

The US was founded on the rights of the individual before all, Canada was founded on the notion that the common good can (and frequently does) come before the rights of the individual.

Canadians can easily ‘pass for American’ as long as we don’t accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that’s sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.

Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it’s seemingly smooth.

Blame is just a lazy person’s way of making sense of chaos.

If God drives a car, He’d drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it’s going to disappear completely.

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn’t arrive.

Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

You can’t fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

Fate is for losers.

If you’re not a tree hugger, then you’re a what, a tree hater?

I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

The modern economy isn’t about the redistribution of wealth, it’s about the redistribution of time.

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.

Sometimes failure isn’t an opportunity in disguise, it’s just you.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people’s families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it’s been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

If you don’t have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can’t expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they’re going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they’re going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.

Failure is authentic, and because it’s authentic, it’s real and genuine, and because of that, it’s a pure state of being.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it’s a failure.

We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

Everybody has basically the same family, it’s just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.

Salad bars are like a restaurant’s lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

What if God exists except it turns out he doesn’t really like people very much?

If human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

the universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don’t take them, the universe says to itself, ‘Oh I see, this person doesn’t like opportunities’ and stops giving them to you.

Punch and Judy shows are like societally endorsed wife beating. There were no women’s shelters in the 1600s.

With Google I’m starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

Florida isn’t so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.

Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It’s like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.

If one member of a couple is too striking looking, then they should hope to have a boy rather than a girl because the girl will just end up looking like a curiosity rather than a beauty.

God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.

I have trouble with meat that had a job before it was meat …liver …kidneys …thymus glands (sweetbreads).

I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock.

It’s very strange that most people don’t care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.

Gap clothing allows you to look like you’re from nowhere and anywhere.
It also allows you to look as though you’re not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value.

I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.

On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they’re listening to what you’re saying, you’re off the screen.

I like doing radio because it’s so intimate. The moment people hear your voice, you’re inside there heads, not only that, you’re in there laying eggs.

Where does personality end and brain damage begin?

Men won’t read any email from a woman that’s over 200 words long.

Purchased experiences don’t count

Technology favors horrible people.

Flying dreams mean that you’re doing the right thing with your life.

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey’s paw in disguise. Most people can’t handle a structureless life.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.

Forget about being world famous, it’s hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.

If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

I’ve got 911 on speed dial.

How are you supposed to derive solace from stories of oneness with nature written by those old-fashioned writers, about hiking and breezes in the trees? If they were alive today, they’d all be in leather bars.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation.

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one’s taking.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

When we constantly ask for miracles, we’re unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.

Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

You can never become rich unless you like rich people.

Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people.

People will always choose more money over more sex.

There’s nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It’s a total turn-off.

New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108

There are three things we cry about in life, things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you’re past it.

Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.

Once you see someone lose it, you can never look at them the same way again.

If a man steals at 15, he can be saved. If a man steals at 25 he will still be stealing at 75.

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

Star Trek characters never go shopping.

Today sure is a beautiful day. Yessiree, nothing could possibly go wrong on a beautiful day like today.

Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness.

The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where the two people can finish each other’s sentences. Forget drama and the clash of opposites. Choose banter any day of the week.

You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?

Michigan: “The Silicon Valley of 1937”

I know it’s not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?

It’s weird when people start sentences with ‘frankly’ — as if their other sentences don’t count.

If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn’t have to bury it down deep within us.

Thinking you’re immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.

If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?

I don’t want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

Want to take your business to the next level? Use new strategies to improve your income, and locate parks and truck stops where purchased orgasms are a snap. Make your elevator banter funny but not witty. Get free publicity even though you’re promoting nothing. Network with scary people you don’t respect and whose haircuts obviously cost way more than your own. Establish credibility for tasks you hate performing. Clarify values but remember, a million times nothing is still nothing. Read business magazine articles written by children and adults who’ve never owned businesses. Get more referrals by grooming better and by shooting out more pheromones; basically, don’t wash your perineum, that little strip of skin between the genitals and anus. This goes for both sexes. Sex is everywhere in even the drabbest office environment. But then, so is death. Find the middle ground. Overcome objections by pretending you have a non-existing education. Even when life is good, it isn’t really good. Get commitments, and then let people down. Increase sales and get nothing for it. Sell more with your Internet marketing and your website, but don’t show too many teeth in your press photo. Make spelling mistakes in your résumé and then wonder why nobody calls you. Play FreeCell and contribute nothing to the world but have fun doing it. Yes! You can improve your marketing strategy and your sales, but people will find you kind of boring while you’re doing it, and if it works out, people will still think you’re not that nice person who showed promise in high school. Also remember that high school is a North American obsession. Europeans think this obsession is juvenile, and the moment you use a high school metaphor, their minds will wander. They’re just jealous. There is a much better way to market your products and services, but it’s maybe too fresh, and maybe you’re not ready for that new freshness. If you want to grow your business with less wasted effort, then you’re living in dreamland. Whether you’re just starting out or you made a million from your business last year, it’s all kind of scary and futile, isn’t it? There are simply too many people on earth. Oil is going to run out in your lifetime. What’s your follow-up strategy to increase sales and profits? Honestly, if you haven’t joined a local Kiwanis-type organization, then do it right now. Most of the business decisions in your city are made by older guys who eat mediocre chicken dinners in hotel ballrooms and then go off and have naked whipped cream go-kart rides. It doesn’t matter how savvy your proposal is, if the guys in the fezzes have chosen Murray to take over the lease to that office space you were eyeing, then you’re totally fucked and Murray will get the lease. One person’s testimonial: “Requests for my services went up by 300% as a result of working with Ken, because he’s way better-looking than the earnest blank before him, Ron. We fired Ron under the pretext of catching him swipe Post-it notes and bond paper from the store room, but really it was because he was boring, didn’t like golf, and Tracy at the front desk thought he was, quote, ‘Kind of pervy. ’”If you’re trying to stay more focused on what you do, then simply do what most genuinely successful people do, which is take Ritalin. Most people think Ritalin is a kiddy drug, but what it actually does is allow you to stay focused and stop your mind from wandering. Hi, I’m Denise from HR. This morning I crumpled up a piece of paper and then I held it in the palm of my right hand and I looked at it and I thought, “Denise, this is your life. This is as good as it gets. ”Hi, I’m Jeremy. I’m that high-energy new guy they stole from Remtech across the Parkway. I’m young, smart, good-looking and I’m using ever-escalating amounts of crystal meth to make me seem more alive than you. I’ll either end up winning everything or be found holding up a cardboard sign and talking to myself at the Exit 23 offramp. Hi, I’m Rick and I hate everything in the world because I lost everything I owned in the tech bubble in the late 1990s. I really thought I’d be on a beach right now. Instead, I piss in the men’s room urinal and have to listen to Jim in the stall beside me flip through the sports pages. It’s all he does. I don’t know how he gets away with it. He’s there for two hours a day. Please turn off all cellphones and personal computer systems. Engineers aren’t funny or cute or nerdy. They’re damaged. I might be damaged, but they’re way more damaged than in any other division of the company. I resent the fact that nerds are somehow cool. They’re just losers. Would you like another transaction? People say that everyone can be a success, but you look at the numbers and no, the world is way more about failure and compromised standards than it is about winning. The older the culture is, the less cutesy it is about saying, “Well, you’re a winner because you tried your best. ”Can you imagine a Chinese person saying that? They’d just think you’re a loser and buy all of your goods at fire sale prices during your bankruptcy yard sale. Communists are smart in some ways. They actively discourage hoping or dreaming. At least that way, when you finally get a shitty little AM radio after being on the waiting list since 1988, you’ll feel both cheered and kindly towards the regime in power. Okay, I’m kidding. Greed kind of helps, but it looks ugly, and at parties people avoid greedheads, so there goes your social life. Life is a contest between you and everyone else. Don’t you get an empty feeling in your soul when you have a blank to-do list? Hasn’t it been a long time since you had a flying dream? Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless poor people. TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public. There are too many old people coming down the chute in the next few decades. Heaven help you if you can’t hold your job act together. Put a smile on it, or it’s cat food for dinner tonight. A decade of cat food is 3, 652 cans. Incorrect password, please try again. Invitation to All Staff Members: Thursday bowling, pizza and drinks, sponsored by the company. Black lights and music galore. Dancing and bowling shoes provided. Bowling Skills Not Required!!! People who use the phrase, “In these changing times, when the only thing that’s certain is change itself” are idiots. Think about it and read the following sentence: “In these static days, when the only guarantee is stasis itself …”You see what I mean. Sometime when you’re all alone in a room, ask yourself if what you do for a living can be done by someone in India. If there’s even a flicker of doubt, then you have to admit that you’re doomed. Which is more humiliating: losing your job to a robot, or losing your job to someone who lives in a country whose standards of living you consider inferior? Go sell roadside corn in India. Your call is important to us. As you know, Jessica is away for two more days—could you please be sure all of your dirty dishes are put into the dishwasher (not the sink) before the end of the day so that when Katie or Kirsten come down to turn it on, it is ready to go. Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a résumé. Using the keypad, spell the last name of the person you wish to speak with. Women can discern shitty clothes at thirty paces. Even seasoned recruiters base their first impression on the basis of fuckability. The second thing they look at is whether you’re competent, and the third thing they see is whether you’re creative in disguising your lack of competence and/or fuckability. A big Thank You to everyone who participated in Jeans Day this year. We did really well and were able to raise $230.00 for the kids. My friend Josie used to apply for jobs she had no interest in getting, and she liked to mess with people’s minds. She’d talk about cramps and abusive boyfriends and her daydream about one day breastfeeding her baby and she always got offered the job. Most people are at their most robotic when interviewing, which is obviously ironic because you’re trying to put forth the most concentrated essence of yourself that you can. Most résumés are as boring as yours, and nobody ever reads the second page. There are people out there who will hate you for the way you use your knife and fork. Put the word “implement” in your résumé and you won’t get phoned back. College will guarantee you a higher lifelong income, and friends made in college last longer than those made in real life. Men turn bitter around forty. The easiest way to get a job is to fill in for women on maternity leave. They almost never come back. Watch out for post-grad students. They wreck more marriages than drugs and alcohol combined. Needy people never last more than two years at any job. I used to get straight As my whole life, and then in college I started getting Ds and it was like morphine. It was great. If someone’s bothering you at work, ask him or her to make a donation to a charity. Keep a can and donation envelopes in your desk. They’ll never bug you again. It works. The way you deal with money is learned behavior you get from your father. If he was superstitious about money, you will be, too. If he saved money, then you’ll also save money. Was he a bastard? Were you ever really sure what your allowance was? Decades later does your father have any clue about the jobs you had during high school? Reading the newspaper too closely during coffee breaks will make upper management question your loyalty. Who knows why. Do you deserve a raise? Maybe you don’t. Be that as it may, asking for a raise is uncomfortable and intimidating. Does your job have perks? Free toner cartridges don’t constitute perks. Nor does a good parking stall, or a liberal dress policy. Does a compressed workweek fill you with a tingly sensation? Or perhaps flextime or telecommuting days? You deserve success— and now you can have it—and go to hell, too. You deserve the success you desire. You also deserve happiness, irritable bowel syndrome, personal fulfillment, a bad haircut and an abundance of crap from Pottery Barn. Catchy ring tones, search engines and supermarket customer loyalty programs are emerging as the engine of the new global economy. Who’d have thought? People started getting incredibly fat almost exactly the same week that Coke changed its formula. Coincidence? All project managers are asked to update their project information using the corresponding colour code for each project phase and add quality control drawing review periods accordingly. How many putty-coloured appliances do you own, including peripherals? Customer satisfaction survey results: yeehaw! I used to stay with a job only until I’d learned just about as much as I could from it. After that, it was all downhill. I’d show up at noon. I’d take naps under my desk. I was quite brazen in my attempts to get fired. I look back now and wonder, well, why didn’t I simply quit? Just to let you all know, the filtered water reservoir at the fourth floor kitchen sink has been serviced and you can once again enjoy a tall, cool, refreshing drink of clear, clean, fast-pouring H 2-oh! Brenda. Too much free time is certainly a monkey’s paw in disguise, isn’t it? Most of us can’t handle a structureless life. A clever way to make money on the job is to gamble . . . bet your boss that you will meet or exceed a target! Oh God, how depressing. Is this what life has come to? Thank you for continuing to hold. Here at American Airlines we believe in alchemy. Do not change visibility settings in either the “Overall,” “Partial” or “Sector” views. Only change settings in the “Working views.” Retiring in the Caribbean is a form of death. Do you ever listen to success tapes? Have you ever sat in the ballroom of the city’s third-largest hotel with four hundred people wearing bad shoes? Get out of debt. Build wealth. Gain confidence. Enhance self-esteem. Develop leadership skills. Chew gum. Fester while you curse nature for not having made you charismatic. Yachts are boring. Do you have hidden mental abilities? You have three new messages. Statistically, your hidden mental abilities are far more likely to be dormant pathologies just waiting to explode: schizophrenia, delusional thinking, memory loss or various subcategories of autism. Your subconscious mind isn’t some kind of adventure-packed “Land of the Lost” that you can visit in safety and comfort and then leave any time you want to. It’s expensive and difficult, and your discoveries, if any, might simply be dull. People who have a seductive handshake have really worked on it. They might be good in bed, too. You’re being judged at all times. Don’t take sides. Remain emotionally uninvolved. Have a stroke. Most anger is justifiable. Secretly destroy the lives of bullies. Jeff, the hour you spent with me last Tuesday morning on the phone changed me entirely, from a cowering servant of fear and anxiety into a free and happy human being, but it only lasted a few hours, and now I want—need—more of what you have. Jeff, be my friend. Let me buy your whole series of tapes. If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many. Fear is nature’s way of making sure too many people don’t get everything they want, hence stripping the planet of raw materials too quickly. People who go to seminars and come away from them thinking they no longer have fears are a real nuisance until you find out how their old fears have reconfigured themselves. Sometimes that never happens, and they get to float to the grave thinking they’re groovy. Seminar people are a pain in the ass. In a pinch, it’s always easiest just to blame your parents. Your parents’ mistakes are your Get-Out-of-Jail Free card. Rejoice! I care about you! I really do! No. All you care about is sucking up desperate energy during crises. Are you addicted to failure? Who writes this shit? Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing. It’s not a tough call. Losers attract losers. Please recycle your old phone book by stacking it opposite the freight elevator. This action is currently prohibited. Beautiful people only like to have sex with beautiful people. Pretending you’re passionate about something you’re not really passionate about is just plain depressing, and people can smell it a mile away. Having a nice, loving family might, in the end, just not be enough. You have to face that. There may be a part of you that feels you don’t deserve to have money. Loser. Some people get to have lots of money, and you don’t hold it against them, but some people get even a bit of money, and man, do you hate their guts. If it hasn’t happened by now, it’s probably not going to happen. If the previous sentence made you angry, then it’s easy to understand why countries undergo political revolutions. Doing nothing is fun. Has anyone seen a spare calculator floating around? Mine has gone missing from my desk. Try the new #10 Trade Size Poly-Klear single-window envelopes with privacy tint. I promise I’ll answer your emails. I promise to overdeliver on all my promises. Sometimes failure isn’t an opportunity in disguise; it’s just you. If you don’t feel like you’re in the know, you most likely aren’t. Are you disgruntled or merely gruntled? This stackable chair’s smooth rolling casters allow for easy mobility. From the conference room to the workstations, from lobbies to training areas, this chair is ready for the fast lane. Maybe you can help me. Like you, I’m a professional here. I love networking with fellow professionals. Maybe there’s a way we can help each other. Let’s go for coffee sometime. Do you have an actual skill? Let me get this straight: you’re using the company server to download a pirated German-language screening version of Mrs. Doubtfire, starring Robin Williams? Have a happy birthday, Kelly! The next year is going to be terrific! Lordy, Lordy, Kelly’s Forty! Signed, your cellmate, Darryl. Hi, Kelly, it’s all downhill from here, kiddo. Fran. It’s quite easy to tell which text has been typed by someone living in the Indian subcontinent because they all too frequently forget to put spaces after periods or commas. Whenever people say, “So, what are you waiting for?” what they’re really saying is, “Hand over your cash while you’re still in a semi-hypnotized state.” Boost your career to a new height. This mailbox is full; please try again later. Sell more products. Be a corporate fartcatcher. Hey, Mr. IT Smartass. Your cleaning staff despises you. You know that in your heart, but you smile and say good night anyway. Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code? Personality-wise, does your office have “one of everything”? Use any of the following three words in the coffee room and just watch the mess that results: dissolute; peregrination; zaibatsu. Tits. All I think about is tits, forty hours a week, and that’s above and beyond the amount of time I spend thinking about them on my own time. Hello. Adware and Spyware have been added to your computer. Allow us to do a scan so that we can protect you. Simply click here. Blame is great! It’s fun to make life hard for newcomers. Skipping meetings makes you look cool. Five minutes of missed work per day adds up to one day per year, so find joy in shaving the minutes off like crazy every day—it’s like a time-release slow-acting holiday drug. It’s awfully darned sexy to see someone get piss drunk at lunchtime. Assume one active affair per every 5 staffers. Don must have some kind of sickness, as he can’t stay away from your overgrown larva-infested snatch, you cow. Free NASCAR and NHL box seats? I’m your bitch. Even the Japanese have finally abandoned as pointless the notion of corporate loyalty. Go, Team Members, Go! What’s the difference between a venerated senior staff member and a lifer? Chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with—however, they probably feel the same way about you. What a shitty world. Unbeatable firewalls! Install your own PBX! Everyone is roughly 33. 5 years old in their heads. People with bad fingernails probably drink too much. Relentlessly perky women often have deeply rooted fertility issues. Ageism and rankism are great because they make for such good gossip when abused. It can be really fun to go down with the ship. Four-line phone with speakerphone, only $89.99. There was this one guy I worked with, Ian, who got a DUI for his third time, and he lost his driver’s license. It was weird because he had this sort-of “gee-whiz” aura that always surrounded him, like a holy man, and people started assuming all these crazy mystical things about him. I Wuv Hugs. Thanks for leaving melted cheddar all over the microwave’s bottom, dickwad. No iPods or Walkmans or any other similar devices permitted. I’d like to speak with a real human being, please. Ever since the new no-smoking bylaws passed, it’s like I don’t know Craig any more. He spends all his breaks smoking outside the ground-floor lobby with his new smoking buddies, like we’re not good enough or risqué enough for him. I secretly don’t mind Kyle’s lame backrubs. AutoReply: Out of Office. I’m away until the 27th. If you have urgent business, please contact my assistant, Sandy, at ext. 238. There’s nothing cute or funny or lovable about being cheap. It’s ugly, and people really hate seeing cheapness in operation. If you think being frugal makes you look sensible, just stop right now and hope your friends come back to you.