Top 10 List of Corporate Party Fouls

Let me start by saying that I myself am guilty of a few of these. I will also confess that yes, I did write this during working hours. However in my defense I must say that this may be the quickest post I've ever written - apparently I've been working on it for years.

Or I am a model of corporate efficiency.

Regardless, I bring you my personal list of top office pet peeves and workplace faux pas:

1. Emails and/or phone calls that begin with “Sorry to be a pain…”  Just stop talking and no apology needed.
2. Emails that ask for a read receipt.  What do you DO with all of those besides judge me for the time lapse between when I read and when I respond?
3. Email signatures that include first name in scripty font above the full name and address block.  Nice try, but we know you didn’t REALLY sign it.
4. Email signatures that contain a Twitter handle.  What, so now you can tweet me your endless list of demands?
5. The phrases low hanging fruit, up (or down) the pike, and hot button issues.  The visual is not helping and now I have nasty images of myself trying to grab at rotten apples while clients come riding at me in covered wagons that flash a big red “XXX” (in manner of Family Feud buzzer) every time I miss.
6. People who walk up when you are clearly in the middle of a conference call and ask “Are you on a call?”  No, but I heard that if you hold the phone up to your ear long enough, Elvis might answer.
7. People who walk up to your desk and ask “Are you busy?”  Nope!  Thank god you came along!
8. When someone forwards you an email chain that appears to have started in 2006 with the helpful note “See below.”
9. Emails the only content of which is “What is your phone number?”  Like I’m going to send it to you now!
10. Emails that are marked High Priority.  While hell hath no fury like the little red exclamation point, get in line.

A Giant Leap for Rumball Kind

Alright. So it’s been a while. However, given that in the history of the rumball “a while” has often been comparable to the gestation period of beluga whales, I suppose I should stop wasting words on needless or at least lame excuses.

[This is not to suggest that I am about to give birth to anything nearly as exciting as Baby Beluga… He was just a special little guy.]

The far more interesting comment is what has at last brought me back to the proverbial pen. The answer is simple: I found my rumball.

Alright. So it’s not my rumball, per se. It’s not even A rumball – it’s multiple rumballs. And malt balls. And rum. These balls belong to Ben and to Jerry and go by the wildly appetizing name of Schweddy Balls.

For any of you who hate fun and empty calories (which some might say are synonyms), please click here to understand what I am talking about for the duration of this post.

The next question is obvious – who ARE Ben and Jerry and how did they get such freaking awesome jobs? I could tell you the answer, but after spending a solid 20 minutes just now on the company website, I can safely say that Ben and Jerry tell it much better in their virtual scrapbook - check out 1983, good year. I can also say that it’s pretty much your standard Mom n’ Pop (or in this case Dude n’ Dude) operation turned large corporate franchisor.

Which leads me to the next obvious question – how does one possibly make a sundae that weighs 27,102 pounds?

[For those of you who have not yet checked out 1983 in the virtual scrapbook, this is the year that will forever be remembered as the year that someone made a 27,102 pound sundae in St. Albans, Vermont. Which coincidentally enough will forever be known as the town where someone made a 27,102 pound sundae.]

Upon further online investigation (which if you do not know by now is the cornerstone of this blog, and also of my existence), we learn that the 27,102 pound sundae was actually the result of a collaborative effort by the entire community of St. Albans + Ben + Jerry + a forklift. We can only assume that Ben & Jerry’s was selected as the ice cream brand du jour on that fateful day in 1983 based on mass by volume. Had those pioneering St. Albanians chosen Edy’s Slow Churned, for example, their creation may have topped out at a mere 13 tons.

The sundae, which has been described by some less-than-imaginative journalists as “mammoth,” was concocted in a swimming pool (duh) and was topped with chocolate fudge, nuts, a truckload of peaches, and a planeload of pineapples.

Which leads me to the next obvious question – who pairs peaches and pineapples with fudge? I would expect as much from Georgians or Hawaiians, but not the Vermontese! One can only hope the ice cream was rum-flavored.

Which brings me back to the present and Schweddy Balls. Available today in select grocery stores and Ben & Jerry’s scoop shops. And, in case it is not available in your town, you can either move to St. Albans (recommended) or click here to participate in all the virtual schweddy fun.

Thanks to Jenais for bringing this important rumball development to my attention.

Stay tuned for my next post – Baby Beluga: Where Is He Now?

The Intro-Extrovert

According to Myers-Briggs, the psychologists and pioneers whose famed personality “type indicator” helps give us all a valid excuse for any traits and behaviors that we may choose to exhibit, the basic difference between an extrovert and an introvert is not one’s level of social activity and interaction with others. It is rather whether one derives energy from those social interactions or not. Per Myers (or was it Briggs?), a true extrovert draws their energy from active involvement in events and engagement with those around them. Naturally, this does tend to mean that very extroverted people have large circles of friends and are often seen as “outgoing” and “a people person” (the traditional nay pedestrian definition of the word).

By the inverse property then, it would seem that the traditional definition of an introvert is “a loser.” However, we sophisticated students of Myers-Briggs know that this is not accurate. Introversion really just means that one draws energy from oneself, from one’s internal world and ideas. Introverts are deep thinkers. Philosophers. Spiritual leaders.

I have always wondered quite where I fall on the spectrum of “troversion” – Briggs (or Myers?) stresses that it is not a definitive label but rather a sliding scale with everyone exhibiting some traits of each. Without tooting my own horn (although M & B would doubtless excuse such impoliteness by deeming me “Feeling”), I can say that I generally like having others around me. I engage in an acceptable if not above average amount of varied social activities, and I feel comfortable in interactive settings. However, at the same time, I have always suspected that I am at heart a spiritual leader.

[M-B: “She’s so Intuitive.”]

Regardless of my future role in the church, however, it is true that I like spending time in my own head. I am comfortable alone and when reflecting on important matters I often like talking them through with just a few other people or talking them through with myself.

Clearly and like 99.8% of the population, I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and quite honestly it’s never really mattered precisely where. Until I realized recently that I no longer spend any time in my own head. Nor do I reflect on important matters. Any talking with myself is frenetic muttering of To Do lists and is most likely done on the bus.

[M-B: “Nut Job.”]

I’m a busy girl – aren’t we all – but it’s not so much the busyness as the wholly extroverted nature of activities I am engaging in. I work at an advertising agency as a Digital Project Manager. Meaning, in sum, that my job is to listen to what clients want and then badger my coworkers until they do it. Feeler that I am, I like to think that I have a good relationship with most of my coworkers. Nonetheless, I find that I may as well begin (and frequently do begin) any work correspondence with the following:

With a job that requires pretty constant interaction with others, a wise Extro-Introvert would probably choose to spend some of their free time in quiet reflection. Recommended activities might include running, playing an instrument, taking baths or owling. I however choose to lead groups of 15-25 women and the occasional Perceiving male in the exercise regimen called the Bar Method. I teach Bar Method classes before and sometimes after work, such that by the time I arrive at the office I have already been extroverting for several hours.

This is where the muttering on the bus comes in.

I am not complaining over the choices I’ve made. [M-B: “Yes she is.”] I’m simply stating that whether Extro-Introvert or Intro-Extrovert, everyone and especially we aspiring spiritual leaders need to take some time for ourselves.

This was driven home for me on Friday night as I found myself, having passed up the opportunity to go have a ridiculous amount of fun at a cabin in northern Wisconsin for the weekend and having just said “no” to happy hour, sitting alone at an outdoor patio drinking a glass of wine and reading a book. The entire weekend stretched before me and I had no plans. I asked myself what I would most like to be doing at that very moment if money were no object. The honest answer: Sitting alone at an outdoor patio drinking a glass of wine and reading a book in the south of France.

So essentially in an ideal world I would have been engaged in the exact same activity except in a place where I know absolutely no one and do not speak the language. This struck me as somewhat pathetic until I realized that Myers-Briggs had a perfectly valid explanation (M-B: "Excuse"): I have been neglecting my undefined percentage of Intro. In fact I have been extroverting the crap out of myself to the point where all energy is sapped and inner Mandy is stunted and laying on the floor in a prone position.

Two days later, having engaged in some nice solitary blog writing and aggressive owling, I think the balance has been restored. Lookout spiritual world, I am poised and ready to assume command.

My job is to annoy you.

Visit here to take a free online equivalent of the Myers-Briggs type indicator or visit here to help those two "pioneers" make even more money off this thing.

After all that, I am an Extrovert. Also an overwhelming Judger.

A Blog About a Blog

I realize that WheresMyRumball is supposed to be a pseudo travel blog, however if you will indulge me one more post I would like to continue to write about writing. I swear there is a word for that – a word that describes the instance of a verb applying its action to itself, i.e. writing about writing – but I cannot for the life of me or Merriam-Webster figure out what it is.

Reflexive?

Sort of.

The opposite of an oxymoron?

Kind of a stretch, and multiple words.

Titillating?

What? Sorry, I just like that word. It sounds so dirty but it’s not! But then it sort of is, just because you thought about it.

Anyway, whatever the word is, there are only a few activities for which this concept can be applied. A few examples that come not-instantly to mind:

Talking about conversation

Thinking about thought

Writing a blog about the process of blog writing

That last one may just sound silly (try to ignore the sinking feeling in your stomach about what the next several paragraphs of your life may entail, namely great patience) but I am going to pursue it nonetheless. Blog writing is after all what got us here, we may as well explore it in greater depth in order to better understand the blog and thereby formulate an escape plan (that is for you, I am stuck here).

Take tonight. Once again, I arrived home intent on blog writing. I thought I had a topic picked out (it was sooo much more interesting than this, too) but then in crafting sentence number two I stalled out trying to remember a word. A long forgotten, rarely used, possibly non-existent word.

(Don’t you already feel like this entry would be so much better if I could just remember that damn word?)

So I did what I always do when I don’t know something – I turned to the Google. And in case you didn’t believe it was possible, I proceeded to stump the Google. My well-defined query of “what’s the word for when you do something about that same thing” returned zero relevant results. The number one result, in fact, was an article titled “What Men Want in a Relationship” about how women think men want the exact opposite of what they really do want. Clearly my muddled search terms indicated to the Google that I am post-breakup, likely drunk, and possibly thinking about cutting myself hence they directed me to the “Sex & Love” section of powertochange.com.

(The number three result is titled “6 Reasons Why You Might Be Feeling Bad Right Now.” And this is why I have pre-designated a trusted friend who, should I ever meet a sudden end, will immediately delete my browser history.)

When I accepted that I would probably need to refine my search terms slightly in order for the Google to actually help me, I went a different route and typed in “reverse dictionary.” The Google helpfully and immediately pointed me toward the OneLook Reverse Dictionary, which allows users to describe a concept and receive back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. This time, my entry of “a thing that describes itself” returned hundreds of results, a few of the more interesting of which were connotation, self-identity, hermaphrodite, fundamentalist Christianity, and reformed Egyptian.

Perhaps the most accurate on the list was pest.

I was intrigued, however, by another word on the list: paradox. That’s an interesting word. I knew it wasn’t the word I was looking for – quite the opposite in fact. So I pulled up dictionary.com and entered it with the intention of scanning for antonyms. Dictionary.com does not offer any antonyms for paradox.

(Seriously, if you guys could just think of this bloody word and text me, we could be done…)

In scrolling through the dictionary entry for paradox, I lingered for a moment in the section for famous quotations featuring the word. In doing so, I came to a few more realizations. First, I was struck by how much smarter than me old dead famous people are. Thomas Mann, for example, had the following quote: “Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.” Thomas Mann clearly did not have a problem thinking of the word he wanted when he wanted it. I wish he were still with us.

But the quote that I would like to end with is from James Clavell. James, who FYI was an Australian born, British (later naturalized American) novelist, screenwriter, director and World War II veteran and prisoner of war, was quoted as saying “The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox.”

To James, I would say this:

Be glad you never met the Google.

A Midsummer Night’s Blog

In anticipation of the inevitable question – what could have possibly prompted this unprecedented mid-year blog entry? – I am actually going to dedicate the entire first three paragraphs of this post to explaining why on this night of all nights I have decided to write.

In a nutshell, I have decided that if I truly want to do justice to my undergraduate degree in English & Creative Writing and also ultimately pursue a career as a writer someday, then I must start to produce more than one piece of writing per annum. Plus we canceled our HBO and Grey’s Anatomy (which yes I still watch, two words: Jesse Williams) is a rerun.

Now, to any readers out there who may also happen to be my employer or my financial advisors (Bob & April Rinder), no I am not quitting the day job just yet. I have a long way to go before I can move beyond the “aspiring” stage and into full-fledged (read: paid) writerdom. Authorship? Regardless, I am resolved to try.

The hardest part about writing for me has always been titles. I feel, as do many would-be aspiring writers, a great deal of pressure to come up with truly brilliant titles. A brilliant title is not only an enticement for people to read your work, but sometimes, if a title is brilliant enough, it will actually convince them the writing is good. On top of that, a brilliant title will make your work memorable to your readership. It may even prompt readers to promote your writing to their friends and associates. With a little bit of luck, a brilliant title could ultimately result in an exchange like the following:

Reader: I read a good piece of writing the other day.
Friend/Associate: Oh really? What was it called?
Reader: Silhouettes.
Friend/Associate: Ooh great title. What’s it about?
Reader: …um… shadows.
Friend/Associate: Who wrote it?
Reader: No clue.

Because of this tremendous importance of titles, and because I am a procrastinator in the purist sense of the word (see: annual blog postings on December 31st), I invariably leave them for last. In college, my approach for academic paper titles was generally to come up with some play on words or overused cliché (and no, in this case you will see that is actually not an oxymoron) and then add a lengthy and dramatic subtitle that still failed to give any indication of what the paper was actually about. Some examples include:

Shattered Expectations:
The Inconsequence of Ending in Dickens’ Novel

The Inexhaustible Well:
Deepening the Experience of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas

Happily Ever After:
Re-imagining Jane Austen’s Emma into Film

Embracing the Savage:
The Triumph of Human Physicality in Orwell’s 1984

I mean I could go on. (For those of you who will appreciate, I did not even dig into the IHUM archives yet…) Anyway, it is clear from the above that the thesaurus was my good friend and constant companion in those days (read: early mornings of the day the paper was due).

For my fiction writing classes, however, I took it to the next level. Because as important as titles are for academic papers, the professor has to read them or at least pretend to in order to assign a grade. For fiction, however, a bad title can kill a story before the reader makes it to page one.

For creative work, therefore, I relied on the brilliance of the words themselves. I came up with what I considered to be a truly awesome word, and then would go to great lengths and artistic sacrifice to somehow weave that word into a critical part of the story (which was at this point written in its entirety and probably due in 20 minutes somewhere on the other side of campus). I picked titles like Etchings, Castaways, Lighthouse, and Silhouettes (you may have heard of it). I once went so far as to choose a girl’s name that I thought was particularly poetic and then proceeded to rename my main character Chloe (thank god for find/replace).

Ironically enough after what I have just shared, I came up with the title of this blog before I had a clue what I was going to write about. It just seemed fitting as I walked home on a warm July evening, intent on blog-writing. It is also a terrible play on literary greatness that is too often clichéd, making it the obvious choice for yours truly.

And yet if you will indulge me for another few paragraphs, I shall attempt to insert meaning where before there was only shoddy wordplay.

A wise friend recently told me that one of the keys to making a goal (read: dream) become a reality is to talk to people about it. The simple but ingenious reason being that once people know you have a goal you are working toward, unless they are forgetful or assholes, they will probably ask you about it the next time they see you. And if you continuously have nothing to share and no progress to report, you’re going to start to feel like a bit of an asshole yourself. You will also lose all credibility as a dream-haver.

So to you my loyal readership, I am entrusting my dream. Or at least this blog. It is now your duty (unless you are forgetful or an asshole) to continue the conversation. Not only do you remain obligated to read whatever I manage to post, you must also heckle me to produce more and better writing. Possibly even other kinds of writing that don’t rely solely on sarcasm and self-depreciation.

And also titles. I really must work on those titles.