| March 4, 2003 - Assistants at the Bumbling Bureaucracy |
| Dear Friends, in a previous installment I described for you the professional way in which admin. assistants at the BUMBLING BUREAUCRACY (BB) handled incoming telephone calls. Let me now describe for you some of the other interesting aspects of their lives. One of the first things I noticed at the BB was the footwear of the admin. assistants as opposed to the other female employees. Most of the female employees arrived at work wearing dress shoes. Those who didn't, wore sneakers into work and then changed into dress shoes when they got there. The BB admin. assistants, however, wore stiletto heels to work and changed into bedroom slippers once they got there! I was totally surprised by this and came to the conclusion that the admin. assistants were more interested in having the construction workers on the street notice them than they were in impressing their bosses. It's very disconcerting to be walking down the hall of a professional building (outside of a hospital) and see someone shuffling towards you in bedroom slippers. I don't know why they didn't just change into nightgowns for that truly comfy feeling. I mean, one spends almost as much time in an office as one does at home, so why not complete that down-home picture? The other annoying habit many of them had was incessantly cracking their chewing gum! You definitely didn't need a homing device to track any of them down; all you had to do was follow the sound of sharp, brief explosions. Crack, crack, crack, all day long you'd hear it, winding its way through cubicles, up and down stairwells, echoing out of the ladies' room. The only relief I ever had from it was if I had to work on weekends. Then it was mercifully quiet; no crack, crack, crack of gum; no shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of bedroom slippers; no screech, screech, screech of people's names to announce a telephone call. The ultimate horror though was the idea some of them had to form an Uno club that met at lunch in the snackbar. Since I always brought my lunch, I often went to the snackbar just to pick up a soda. It was absolutely impossible to eat in there though. Every time someone got Uno, she'd stand up, slam her card down as though it were a gauntlet, and shriek "TAKE THAT! UNO! I GOT UNO!" This was often accompanied by a little happy dance a la Ren and Stimpey. It was noisier than the New York Stock Exchange! While they played they often erupted into hostile bickering over the game. I've never seen a simple card game take on the intensity of a life and death situation. You would have thought they were high rollers in Vegas who had entire fortunes staked on the outcome. Dear Friends, I'm exhausted just thinking about all of it! However, I'm sure I can introduce you to some further BB horrors at another time. Stay tuned! Next entry Previous entry Go to diary entries Go back home |