(No, the other labor…)

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Work.

In America, most adults still have to work, because despite decades of weird liberal dreams, food’s still not free.

But work is weird, too. It’s filled with odd realities, like the strong possibility of getting sued for telling a woman she looks nice today. (A situation made more difficult by the possibility that, these days, she may not actually be a woman.)

So, this week, let’s just consider some of those hard-to-accept workplace realities, beginning with…

People I Can Do Without
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People I Can Do Without: guys in Sales who think beginning an email with ‘Hey! Quick question…’ will cause the recipient to just drop everything and cater to Sales’ latest irrational unicorn fantasy

At a company where I once worked, it was discovered that somebody was stealing the Human Resources-supplied bottles of Scope from the bathrooms. HR decided the thief might be a functional alcoholic who was drinking the stuff, so they replaced the Scope with bottles of vanilla extract. They finally caught the bandit when co-workers kept complaining about a guy who always smelled like banana pudding.

People I Can Do Without: employees who schedule a meeting on Monday to discuss what they want to talk about in a meeting on Wednesday

I used to work with a guy named Clif, spelled with one ‘f.’ Nice guy, Clif. Some of us were saving up money to buy him another ‘f,’ but beore we could, he let the company or a diferent job.

People I Can Do Without: co-workers who send you an email and then walk over to your desk to tell you they just sent you an email

In case you don’t work with any database administrators, they are, as a rule. an extra-special breed of Olympians. They can’t be expected to simply be on-hand, just because you mere mortals planned, scheduled, and announced changes to a database. No, DBAs have to be rousted, like Tolkien’s mountain giants, or stoned koalas.

People I Can Do Without: executives who pick up the phone to tell someone, “Joan, get Buddy on the phone for me.”

Software developers live in a world where a single misplaced comma can bring 300,000 lines of code to its knees. Yet they’re constantly firing off emails with malaprops like “your late.”

Corporate Quiz: when a company is trying to schedule a meeting, what’s the most commonly-asked question?

• Is that 2pm your time, or mine?
• Does “optional” mean I can pretend I never saw this?
• Didn’t we already discuss this in Monday’s meeting?

People I Can Do Without: sales reps who stand in the middle of the hallway, talking on their cellphone and swinging an imaginary golf club

Over my employment lifetime, I’ve experienced some terrific workplace nicknames. Here are some of my favorite nicknames for co-workers, bosses, and suits:

• Moose: a guy
• Sally: also a guy
• Captain Tiny Pants: a guy, sort of – I’ll spare you the details
• Purple Jane: Let’s put it this way — in Roget’s Thesaurus, under “Tolerance, Anagrams” the first listing is Purple Jane. Her face was constantly the color of a very old tomato. Purple Jane was never more than two bad news emails away from a crippling stroke.
• Rictus the Clown: For this guy, everything is funny. I mean, any- and everything. As an example, here’s an early morning conversation with Rictus the Clown:
  Rictus: Good morning. Heh heh heh.
  Me: Morning.
  Rictus: Heh heh heh.
• Lady Saliva: as Jerry Seinfeld might put it, Lady Saliva was a “close talker” but with a fun extra feature – an onboard spittle cannon. If the UN could recruit Lady Saliva to walk around the Sahara reading War and Peace out loud, Africa would be a rain forest.
• Captain Nightmare: This character had it all – semi-competent, semi-conscious, semi-literate, semi-deaf, semi-retired, and absolutely reeked of discount tobacco. Fortunately, he wasn’t around long, as he was obviously a plum candidate for promotion to management.
• Ferret-Face: a strong favorite for Putz of the Year. Once, in the middle of a company awards ceremony, he tried to insult one of my friends…while giving her an award. After paying her a begrudging compliment, Ferret-Face commented that the compliment “sounds like self-aggrandizement to me.” She replied, “Well, it can’t be self-aggrandizement if you said it.” Life is good.
• Phlegm Kadiddlehopper: That’s all I need to say.
• The Ninja Unicorn: One of the brightest people I ever knew. Not only was she a product expert, but she was never afraid to yell “snake!” when anybody attempted to propose poorly-thought-out ideas, which in corporate America only happens on days that end in “day.” In fact, as a testament to the onslaught of nonsense product suggestions, she once knitted unicorn caps for our entire development team. We used to wear the caps to meetings until Sales stopped inviting us to meetings.
• Turbeaux, the bipolar dwarf: my nickname for a short, edgy, Purple Jane type I worked for at a marketing firm, who handled bad news about as gracefully as Hitler handled news about stalled troops. Turbeaux was the only person who ever fired me. In the “exit interview,” Turbeaux actually brought transcripts of my published humor columns (and some facebook postings) that referred to a fictional character named Turbeaux. I asked the little putz, “Are you seriously taking credit, out loud, for being that goat-sized imaginary character?”

People I Can Do Without: people who use “ask” as a noun, VP references as a threat, or “I was too busy” as an excuse.

Karma Update: two months after Turbeaux fired me from the marketing company, the marketing company fired Turbeaux.

People I Can Do Without: corporate morale boosters who come up with fun “bonding” ideas like Friday is Dress Like Your Favorite Intestinal Parasite Day! (dress code still enforced)

By the way, if you ever need to borrow it, I still have my unicorn cap.