Sheena is NOT a punk rocker, nor does she appreciate the implication that she may be.

I was on my lunch break, sitting at a table in one of the quieter lobbies where I worked. I had already eaten, and was using the rest of my free time to read some comic books that I had just picked up.

"Can I sit here?"

I looked up. It was my boss's daughter, Sheena, holding a plastic container with food in it. It was lunch break time for her, too, though I was never sure why she was ever there. As far as I knew, she was either a teacher or becoming one, but I would see her around quite frequently.

"Sure," I said. There were plenty of free tables, and I felt like I would prefer to just read my comic books, but I thought she was cute and didn't really mind a chance to sit and talk to her for a while. I had never had a chance to talk to her without her mom, my boss, being there.

She sat down and we started talking. She was happy and friendly, and didn't immediately bore me to tears like most people, though I may have found her purple eyes more interesting than anything she had to say. The conversation was upbeat for the first few minutes, but then I asked the wrong question.

"Do you like The Ramones?" I asked.

"Well," she said, "I am a child of the 80's, so... yes."

"Have you ever heard 'Sheena is a punk rocker'?"

Her smile immediately disappeared. The happy look on her face was immediately replaced by a cold stare. She looked like I had just asked her if she had ever heard a song called "Sheena is a huge filthy whore who stinks."

"No," she said flatly, "No, I haven't."

"Well," I said, "you should check it out. It's a fucking great song! I think of it every time I hear your name."

She seemed to sense from my tone of voice that perhaps "punk rocker" didn't mean "huge filthy whore who stinks", and the conversation once again became upbeat. It was too late, though, because I had decided in the previous few seconds that I didn't want to talk to her anymore. I made small talk for a few minutes before I told her I had to go back to work.

"Oh, OK. I'll see you later. It was nice talking to you," she said.

I found a quiet spot and went back to reading my comic books until it actually was time to go back to work.

I'm pretty sure she made me touch her butt.

I never really socialized much at work. I didn't really even leave my desk except when I had to, and when I did, I would do what I needed to do as quickly and efficiently as possible so I could get back to monitoring the tubes, reading science fiction magazines, and playing with my Nintendo DS. Sometimes I would wear headphones when I left my desk so I could pretend I didn't hear anybody and avoid talking to them. When I was forced to talk to people, I didn't say much, and would immediately go back to my desk when I was done doing what I was supposed to do, regardless of whether or not it seemed like somebody was done talking to me. I just didn't see any need to make friends with the people I worked with, and I didn't want to waste my time talking about the weather, sports, Jesus, TV shows, or any other inane bullshit people seemed interested in. My disinterest in talking to people stemmed less from a specific dislike for the people I worked with than from a general distaste for people.

There were, however, exceptions to this rule.

Some of the people I worked with I found truly disagreeable. Among them was a morbidly obese black woman who dressed very loudly and caked her face with many layers of clown/whore makeup every day. Her appearance was not the only loud thing about her, and I would often be forced to listen to her having long conversations with her friends in their normal indoor voices, which were the screams, yells, and cackles you would expect from people at a loud concert rather than a quiet office building. At least once, I turned my headphones up painfully loud, but was still unable to drown out the sound of her and another woman practicing their gospel singing at full volume.

The woman was somewhat crazy, and I had once heard from a girl my age about an altercation she had had with the woman. The girl was swearing, talking to her friend, when the woman put her face inches from the girl's face and engaged her in a yelling argument over her apparent lack of respect for herself. The girl asserted that she was "a grown-ass woman" who could talk however the hell she wanted to, which only served to make the woman louder and angrier.

I was, unfortunately, too friendly to be actively disliked. Despite my unwillingness to socialize with my coworkers, I would always help people with their retarded-person computer problems if they asked for my help. I would have preferred it if people thought I was an asshole and never tried to talk to me, but I gained a reputation as a quiet but friendly guy who was willing to help people when they were too goddamn inept to do incredibly basic tasks by themselves.

On several occasions, the loud woman came to my desk asking for computer help. Each time, she wanted me to go back down to her desk to help her. She was very slow-moving because of her girth, so I would be forced to endure extra moments of her talking to me. She would tell me about her teenage son's incredible musical skill, and how he played for a large number of incredibly famous acts, and how all kinds of guys really want her because she's so sexy. I never believed her. When we got to her desk, her problem would invariably be something so fucking stupid that it would shock me that somebody would give her a job sitting at a computer much of the day. I would save her file, or maximize her window, or whatever other stupid shit she needed, and then immediately go back to my desk.

I tried to avoid interacting with her more than I tried to avoid interaction with anybody else. When she did say something to me, it was often uncomfortable shit like, "You get more and more handsome every day", or trying to get me to come to her birthday party. I tried to be polite, but I was always very short and in a hurry to get back to my desk.

One day, I went downstairs to pick up my batch of work that should have been printing out at that moment, as it did every evening. The morbidly obese lady was standing near the printer with two other coworkers.

"They're not coming yet," she said.

"Oh," I replied, ready to go back upstairs.

She grabbed my hand. "Here," she said in her deep, manly voice, "let me show you."

I didn't need to be shown, and I sure as hell didn't need to have my hand held to walk 3 feet to the printer. My hand was limp as she clasped it and began waddling towards the printer.

And then my hand touched her butt.

"See?" she asked, gesturing at the empty printer with her free hand.

"Uh, yeah," I said, pulling my hand free. "I guess I'll check later," I said, and went back to my desk, wondering what the fuck just happened. Did she just pull my fucking hand into her butt? I asked myself.

It has been hypothesized that perhaps pulling my hand into her butt was just an unfortunate consequence of her being so fat that her butt took up so much space. That makes me wonder, how often do morbidly obese people "accidentally" touch their own butts? I will never know whether or not she intentionally made me touch her butt, but either way, she had no goddamn business grabbing my hand in the first place.

On my last day of working at that place, she stopped me as I was walking to my boss's desk, trying to bitch at me about doing too much work and raising the ludicrously low standards, which meant she actually had to do some work.

"You do all them boxes, and now Chris thinks we can all do that much. I can't. You need to..."

"This is my letter of resignation," I said, cutting her off and showing her the paper in my hand. "I don't have to take any shit at all from anybody here ever again."

She was clearly taken aback. "Oh," she said, "well, I was thinking I might have to do the same thing if things don't change around here."

"Yeah," I said, not trying to hide the contempt in my voice, "You do that." I walked away.

I'm so happy that I'll never have to see her again.

I'm not doing any more work.

Today, when I got to work I sat at my desk and played on the internet for a while. A couple hours later, some of my coworkers were congregated downstairs, having a conversation in their normal indoor voices, which are screams loud enough that I can make out their entire inane conversation every single time. I was already in a bad mood and wanted nothing more than to loudly swear at them and tell them how fucking obnoxious they are, so I left before I got myself in trouble. When I came back, I sat down and continued playing on the internet. A few minutes later, one of my bosses, the only one I really see on a regular basis, appeared at the door.

"Paul," he said, "can you come downstairs?"

I went downstairs, where he was sitting at his desk, looking serious.

"Have you started anything today?"

"Nope," I said.

"You need to start working when you get here."

"It doesn't matter when I start," I told him, "I'm still going to do the same amount of work."

"How long are we here? Eight hours," he told me, "We work for eight hours."

"No," I said, "I'm going to do the same amount of work no matter how long I'm here."

"Why?" he asked.

"Because I already do a disproportionate amount of work. I'm not doing any more, and I'm not going to pretend I'm busy when I'm not. There are other people here who barely do anything. You can't hold people to different standards. It's stupid," I said.

"Yes, it is stupid," he said. "You should ask Chris for more money."

He started laughing. It's funny because I'm a permanent temp. More money is actually a pretty fucking hilarious joke.

"Well, more money is the only way I'd even consider doing any more work," I said.

He asked me to help him work on something, but I told him I was eating and would help when I was done. He said he thought I was done eating, presumably because I had just returned from not being there for a while. Why should I waste my lunch break eating, though? That's the sort of thing that can be done on the clock.

I really should just quit.

Can you put the seat up?

My desk chair at work is pretty nice. Pretty much everything about it is adjustable, and I adjust it to my liking every day upon arrival. I am an efficient sloucher, so I generally drop the seat all the way down. When I come in the next day, the seat is usually all the way back up, but it's no big deal, because it's easy to adjust, and I understand the concept of a shared workspace.

"Hey, I have a request for you," the midnight lady said when she got in the other night. She sits at the desk next to mine.

"Yeah?" I asked, "What's that?"

"The day girl wants you to put the seat back up when you leave at night."

"Sure," I said.

"She's really short," she told me.

"Yeah, I know," I said.

I sat there for a second, and then asked, "Hey, can you do me a favor?"

"Sure, what?"

"When the day girl gets in tomorrow morning, can you ask her to put the seat all the way down when she's done?"

Password reminder.

My job requires me to access various database systems via the computer on my desk. One of these systems I had to access once a week for a few months, and then not at all for a few months. When I needed to use it again, I found I had forgotten my password. I tried a few different things I thought might be my password, but after a few tries my account was locked, and I was given a message with an 800 number to call to regain my access. Unfortunately, the phone on my desk can't call outside lines. It was no big deal, since I only needed access for one small thing, and I was able to pass it on to somebody who remembered their password.

It's been months since I've needed to use that system for anything, but today we had a meeting about a new task we were going to be doing, and it required access to the system in question. I told my boss what had happened with my password, and he had me reset it from his computer. When I went back to my computer, though, I was still locked out. He said he'd look into it, and hopefully have my password ready by next week.

A few minutes later, my boss came to my desk with my username and a temporary password written on a piece of paper, and said he thought he figured it out. I was able to log in this time, and was greeted with a message saying that I had to change my password. On the screen was all the user information I had entered previously, including my name, department, and my forgotten password reminder. When I had entered my password reminder, I must have been wrongly certain that I would never forget my password, because it wasn't really much of a reminder. I scrolled the screen, pretending I was looking for the box to enter my new password, but actually just trying to prevent my boss from seeing my password reminder.

In the middle of the screen was a box that read "PASSWORD REMINDER".

And underneath that, right where I had left it so long ago, it said "FUCK YOU".

I'm not really a computer guy, but you really are an idiot.

"Let me see the bottom of your mouse," she said, picking up the mouse on my desk and flipping it over.

"Uh, OK."

"No, that's not it," she said, putting it back down. "Somebody keeps stealing mine and replacing it with a broken one. I'm so pissed off about it."

"What's wrong with it?" I asked, sympathetic because people were always stealing shit from my desk, too.

"I move it around, and it doesn't go where I want it to. Like, it sticks."

"Oh, that's easy to fix," I said, flipping the mouse over and popping out the ball inside. "You see these strips of gunk built up on these bars?"

"Yeah."

"Well, you just scrape that crap off with a paperclip or your fingernail," I told her, and scraped the crap off with my fingernail. I put the ball back in and moved the arrow around my screen.

"Oh," she said. She paused for a second, and then said, "Well, I'm just gonna call the tech help desk to see if they'll give me a new one."

Worthless, thieving scumbags.

Every single time I stock my desk at work with office supplies, somebody comes along and takes everything. It usually stays there for a couple days, I use a little of it, and then one day I come in and and it's absolutely all gone.

My desk is in the corner, semi-secluded. Unless it's the day shift person taking my shit and sticking it in their half of the desk, which they lock, or the day shift person at the desk next to mine doing the same thing, somebody has to make a trip to take my stuff. Wherever they're coming from, it's pretty unlikely that they're saving themselves much time at all by stealing all my stuff, because if they're walking across the department, they may as well go to where the supplies are kept.

I can't even put into words how much this pisses me off. Somebody with absolutely no consideration for other people is wasting my time to save a negligible amount of their own. I don't want to have to lock my fucking desk. I shouldn't have to.

The saddest part of this is that I know whoever this person is does this to everybody, wherever they go, all the time. Fucking scumbag!

Today, when I found all my stuff gone again, instead of restocking the desk in the traditional manner, I wrapped my stuff in plastic and hid it in the dust-bunny infested space between the desk and the wall. Now my desk will be a mystery to the thief; when they come to steal my stuff, they'll wonder how I do any work with no supplies, and then they'll have to go elsewhere.

"The guy who eats from the trash."

Where I work, there is a coffee stand near the vending machines. They sell a variety of caffeinated beverages, as well as stuff like bagels, cookies, soups, and sandwiches. I might think it was kind of awesome if I didn't work a late shift. When I'm at work, they're not open. I still have access to some of the food, though, and I get an incredible discount. At the end of their day, around the time I'm arriving at work, they throw much of the food in the trash. It's clean, it's wrapped, and I have no problem eating free food out of the garbage.

I have a dilemma, though: I don't want to be "the guy who eats from the trash." I used to pull bagels and such out more frequently, but I pretty much stopped when I got caught taking a cookie. Luckily, the dudes who saw me were a couple of construction guys, there for one night, and not anybody I work with. I hadn't taken anything out of the trash in a while, but since I still don't have access to my money, thanks to the bastards who robbed me, I went looking for a free sandwich today. There weren't any sandwiches, but there were some bagels, wrapped up in clear plastic wrap. I took one, and it was the freshest bagel I've eaten in a long time, much better than the ones my girlfriend buys in a bag at the grocery store.

I should have access to my money within a couple of days, but now that I've eaten that bagel, I have an appetite for more free food. I feel like it's something I'm going to start doing more frequently, because hey, free food. There's just something extra tasty about something for nothing. I'm just worried that now it's only a matter of time until I'm "the guy who eats from the trash."

The humorless, stupid coworker.

I was working as a clerk, keeping track of a bunch of items that always went to the same group of people. We would hand out the goods in the morning and throughout the day, and then take them all back in the afternoon. I had one coworker who was my age, and the rest were old ladies. I think the youngest one was in her fifties.

I got along with the old ladies pretty well. They all seemed to like me, except for one: Alice. Alice hated me. She thought I was a slacker and had a poor attitude, and would always get on my case about how I needed to take incredibly trivial things incredibly seriously. I thought she was humorless, work obsessed, and just plain old bat shit crazy. There was no parking where we worked, so on a few occasions I rode in with her and another old lady in the morning. Each time, she would talk incessantly about what she was going to do that day at work, which would invariably be the same exact things she had been doing every day for the many years that she had worked there. She'd also conspicuously hide her purse every time I got into the car.

Alice would always try to get me in trouble for silly little things. Any time I didn't do things exactly by the book, she would go to my boss's office and tell on me. In nearly every instance, my boss, who loved me, would either not care, or think I was just awesomely efficient with my methods. There was only one time when she succeeded in getting me in any trouble at all, but it was so minor that I was entertained by the event.

Bored out of my skull one day, I wrote "Bill McDonald has Slavinizer #639b" on a sticky note and stuck it on the side of my computer monitor. It followed the format of other notes we'd make when somebody was in a hurry and/or the computers weren't working correctly. We'd write something like this down so we could enter it into the computer as soon as we could. I don't know what motivated me to write this note, but Bill McDonald did not exist, nor did an item called a Slavinizer. I assumed the note would either go unnoticed or get a couple laughs. If anybody made any effort to look for Bill or his Slavinizer, they would quickly see that neither was in the computer or in the books, and was obviously made up.

The day after I wrote the note, the phone at my desk rang.

"Second floor dispensing, this is Paul," I said.

"Bill McDonald has Slavinizer #639b," a voice said. It was my boss. "Does that ring any bells?"

"Yeah," I said, "I wrote that yesterday."

"Stop. I want you to stop," she said, her tone firmer than usual.

"Uh, OK," I said, wondering what the problem was.

"Alice said she spent three hours looking for Bill and the Slavinizer yesterday," she told me.

"Uh, oh, alright," I said.

Immediately after I got off the phone, my boss came to my desk.

"Are you OK?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, confused.

"I'm sorry for yelling at you, but I had to," she said quietly, "Alice was really mad."

"Yeah, you told me."

"Don't do that anymore, OK?"

"Yeah, sure."

My boss walked away, and I told the rest of my coworkers that Alice is stupid. I made sure everybody knew that I wasn't going to apologize to her because she had to go to the boss instead of talking to me directly. The old ladies gossipped constantly, so I know it got back to her.

Public restroom pervert.

I was working in a big building that had, at any given time, hundreds of people per floor. Half of the people were employees, while the other half were members of the general public there for various reasons. It was the sort of place where just about anybody could walk in and aimlessly wander the halls without really being noticed. This story is about a weirdo who may have had a legitimate reason for being there, or may have just been there to get his kicks.

It was still earlier in the morning, and I left my work area to go take a dump. I took the stairs to the next floor down, because I figured I was less likely to have people I knew smelling my waste should they need to use the facilities. The restroom was empty, so I took my place in one of the stalls and hung my coat on the stall door.

A few seconds after I sat down, somebody else came into the restroom. He took the stall next to mine, and I noticed his red sneakers. I heard him spit a couple times, and then I began to hear a vigorous rubbing sound coming from his stall. It sounded like he was rubbing his hands together very quickly and rhythmically, occasionally stopping and spitting.
There's no fucking way he's doing what I think he is, I thought.

This continued for about a minute, and then he confirmed my suspicions when I heard him speed up his rubbing before abruptly stopping, grunting loudly.

"Uh, unnh, yeah, unnnhh, yeah!"

I hoped he would leave so I could finish pooping, but I heard him spit and start doing it again a few seconds later. I quickly wiped my ass, rinsed my hands, and got out of there. I went down another flight of stairs to the bottom floor. I did my business in the restroom down there and then left to go back to my job.

When I got to the stairwell, I looked back for some reason. Entering the restroom I had just been in was a young guy, probably in his mid or late twenties. He wore a baseball cap, flannel shirt, and a pair of jeans.

And a pair of red sneakers.

My two days as a professional activist.

According to Wikipedia, The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is one of the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equal rights organizations in the United States. I worked for them for two days, knocking on peoples' doors and begging for money. I'm convinced that they are a scam, masquerading as an activist group to cash in on peoples' desire to change the world for the better.

I found their ad in the paper claiming I could make money as an activist fighting for justice. I called and set up an interview.

At the interview, they sat me at a table with 3 other applicants and handed us questionnaires to fill out. They weren't typical job applications, and included questions such as "What do you think the biggest problem with our country is?" One of the applicants, an older woman, took a brief look at the questionnaire before quietly leaving, leaving me and two young girls. After we had some time to write answers, one of the guys who worked there sat down to discuss them with us. He was roughly my age, and a total douche bag. He was smiling and friendly with the girls, saying "Right on" to absolutely everything they said, no matter how ridiculous, and then he would roll his eyes and look at me like I was crazy whenever I said anything. I thought he was about to send me on my way, but then he told us that we had passed the first part of the interview and it was on to the second.

For the second part of the interview, this short girl took me in the hallway to talk to me. She was a lot friendlier than the guy, and seemed to like me. She hired me within 5 minutes. The job would start in a couple days.

On my first day, I was introduced to the people I was going to be working with. It was all nice girls, the only other guy was the asshole who had interviewed me, and I wouldn't be working with him. They were going to spend the first few hours teaching me what to say to people when I knock on their doors, and then we were going to go knocking on peoples' doors, begging for cash.

One of the things that initially struck me about my co-workers was that they didn't seem to fit the activist mold. It could have been that having just moved from a rural area, my entire experience with activists had been either grubby punk rockers or the old Marxist professors I had in college. These were preppy college girls who seemed more motivated by their desire to pad their resumes than their desire to change the world for the benefit of others.

The short girl taught me the spiel I was supposed to give. She had me say it over and over again, all the while moving closer and closer until her face was literally inches from mine. It made me really self-conscious and worried about whether my breath smelled fresh or funky, and so I kept speaking with less and less volume, which would prompt her to tell me I needed to be louder.

"Hi, my name is Paulo, and I'm with HRC, The Human Rights Campaign! We're America's largest gay and lesbian civil rights group! We're out here today to fight discrimination..."

I was supposed to knock on the door, give the spiel, and ask for money. If they declined to give money, but sounded vaguely in favor of the cause, I had another, shorter speech ready to try to get cash out of them. When the short girl was confident I had my lines memorized, she brought me back into the main room for a pre-begging pep rally.

We gathered in a circle, myself and the 4 girls I was working with, while one of them whipped us into a frenzy.

"We're gonna go out there, and we're gonna do a good job! 'Cause we're good! And we're doing a good thing! And we're awesome!"

I felt awkward as hell trying to act even half as excited as everyone else. I let out a couple of wimpy cheers that were drowned out by the excited screaming of some girls about to go out panhandling.

Before we left, they sent me into the office to ask that asshole for a clipboard. He sighed loudly, indicating his annoyance with me, and then grabbed one off of a shelf. He sneered when he handed it to me and told me in a condescending tone not to lose it. I guess I must have looked like a completely inept monkey. Or maybe he was just a stupid fucking dickhead.

Out we went, armed with maps of our route and clipboards to write down the addresses of the houses we went to. Everybody went into the neighborhood we were canvassing on their own, except for myself and a girl who was going to help me with my first day on the job. She showed me the ropes, delivering the spiel and collecting money. She made it seem so easy.

At one house, she convinced the guy inside to give her $100. The guy obviously thought it was going to be a tax write-off, because he asked for a receipt.

"Yeah, no problem," she told him, and then gave him some HRC promotional materials instead. When I asked her later what we're supposed to do when we get asked for a receipt, she told me that nobody had ever asked her for one before, and that I didn't need to worry about it. This was my first sign that something wasn't right about this.

Throughout the course of the night, I did most of the knocking and talking, and she would only say something if I ran into trouble and didn't know what to say. Together, we raised $160. We also got yelled at by an angry homophobe who was convinced that gay guys are out every night actively trying to rape people, and that the solution would be to enact legislation so that these acts would be considered hate crimes.

When I went home that night, I looked over some of their promotional material. I noticed DONATIONS ARE NOT TAX DEDUCTIBLE written in small print on the back of one of their newsletters. Not tax deductible? So that means it's not a non-profit group, right? Still, I needed to make some money, so I put the thought aside and hoped I could get paid. They still hadn't told me how I was going to get paid, but the ad had claimed $300-$500 weekly, so I wasn't particularly worried.

The next night, I was sent out on my own. I did significantly worse, this time only earning $60. I also had some asshole fratboys invite me inside to give my spiel while they drank 40s and played video games. I knew damn well they weren't going to give me a cent, but they made me go through the whole thing before saying "Nope."

When we went back to the office that night, the girl who was the boss told me she wasn't going to ask me to come back. That was fine by me, because I had already decided I didn't want to do that shit anymore. She told me I could come back in a week and get my check. I still had no idea how much it was going to be for.

When I came back in a week, they told me I was wrong and would have to come back in another week.

When I finally got my paycheck, they explained to me that I got paid half of what I brought in, so my check was $30. All together, I had spent 12 hours working there.

The section of the newspaper under which their ad was listed said that none of those jobs were commission-based, but that turned out to be false. Just like the claim that I could make any kind of decent money doing that crap.

Where exactly does the money donated to HRC go? Supposedly it goes towards lobbying congress and shit like that. Half of it definitely goes to whoever you handed it to. A chunk of it goes to weekly parties at places like Mongolian Barbecue. The Wikipedia entry says this:

Sometimes referred to as "Headed by Rich Caucasians" or the "Human Rights Champagne Fund", the HRC has often been the target of critics who claim that the HRC and HRCF do not produce any significant policy advocacy, and only serve the interests of a select minority of wealthy, white gay men. In the same vein, it is heavily criticized for its national, top-down structure instead of a local, grassroots focus.

The HRC is considered by some to be too cozy with the Democratic Party establishment. For example, during the 2004 elections, the bulk of the organization's time and funding was focused on the unsuccessful effort to elect John Kerry ("George W. Bush, You're Fired!" became the group's heavily merchandized signature line). As a result resources were not spent to defeat state ballot initiatives that sought to ban same-sex marriage — all 11 of which passed overwhelmingly on November 2, 2004. Given that Kerry was a supporter of such state ballot initiatives, many questioned why he had received a "free ride" from HRC, and why more effort wasn't made to defeat the marriage initiatives.

I see people driving around with their logo on their cars, and I just want to yell, "Hey, you've been scammed!" Whenever I'm downtown, I notice their fliers everywhere. ACTIVIST WORK! MAKE MONEY FIGHTING FOR HUMAN RIGHTS!

If I have a writing instrument on me, I write SCAM on them.

The Human Rights campaign is bullshit.