Thought it would be helpful, since we are largely a nine-to-five site, to come up with a special Office Edition of Blinq, filled with the sort of practical, real world information you've come to expect on this page.
So, no, I am going to avoid making much of Yahoo!'s Seven Things To Make Your Cubicle Cool, mostly because if it's posted on a mass-appeal site like Yahoo!, you are no longer going to be cool when you display your Ambient Weather Beacon or your Babble Voice Privacy Machine.
You are going to be like everyone else in your particular cube farm.
What I am going to hook you up with is something more distinctive -- annoyingcoworker.com. I found it on Pajamas Media.
Yes, friends, it's the key to sending a Web-based - and by that I mean anonymous - email to that colleague who smells like Limburger cheese, that co-worker who insists on parading around YOUR DESK at lunchtime while on the cell phone, explaining some obscure medical condition in disgusting detail, the boss who emails you, then drops by to tell you he just emailed you.
Imagine sending an email, signed anonymous, that reads:
Would you just SHUT UP about your stupid wedding plans? Your fiance isn't even divorced yet, moron!
Or
Please stop typing on your keyboard as if it is an actual typewriter used in the 1940’s.
Or better yet,
You are the most annoying and irritating Bastard that I have ever encountered in the workplace. Where shall I begin? How about save your fingernail clipping sessions for your wife! When you constantly have to clear your throat, maybe you should excuse yourself and get a drink of water. Hey, it's free-at the water cooler!!!! And if hunger should strike, maybe you should excuse yourself too and eat your loud, crunchy snacks in the break room!!! What the hell is this; a damn movie theater?!! Stop slamming and banging your office furniture drawers/doors!!!! It sends a shrill up my spine into my skull!!!!! "What the hell are you looking at EVERY TIME you walk past my cube?!" Most of all, stop popping your head over my cubicle trying to listen to my private and/or work-related conversations!!!
The site has a forum filled with rants bearing such captions as The Chatty Co-Worker, Hyena From Hell, Chew With Your Mouth Closed, Micromanaging Boss, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Breath and Try Showing Up For Work.
That last one - it's me, right?
More?
We have more. "My Cubicle," a video mash heavily influenced by James Blunt's "You're Beautiful."
I searched in vain for a link to the greatest office scam I remember -- Rodney Rothman's 2000 piece in The New Yorker, in which the former Letterman head writer showed up to work at a dotcom, which had never, actually, hired him. He perfected the act of looking busy, and mouthing inscrutible work-speak. Great scam, not-so-great reporting. He'd failed to tell readers the firm employed his mom and he'd made up a few details. The magazine apologized. Rothman's piece made it into The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002. How about a follow-up, though? He fakes retirement.
Ok, you've been reading this for a few minutes. Time for some exercise. Some office sculling? A quick YouTube video.
Finally, some inoffensive decorating etiquette from Cube Farm News. Dig the Southern hospitality.
Couldn''t end on that note. Just found whom you want to call when that jerk empties the coffee pot then walks away: Terry Tate, office linebacker.
