Raw chickens. Slimy water. Money.

Work was kind of a bear today. I'm not going to write much about it, because it's long and involved and I ain't exactly in the mood. Basically what it comes down to is that I may or may not be getting tapped to do some gruntwork for a dude I can't stand. Hopefully that's not the case, but we'll see. I really love my job and have a great interest in preserving its current ideal status quo, but such things are not always feasible.

So, instead of kvetching about this dude and how irritating it is to watch him time and again circumvent and sabotage our established process and make us look like idiots because he's preventing us from doing our jobs by being one-to-whom-the-rules-do-not-apply, I thought I'd write some crap about our small department and how much fun it is to work in it because of the sheer ridiculousness of one of its members' sense of humor.

My boss has this thing about trying to find our price for stuff. I think he lays in bed at night and dreams this up. It cracks me up and often provides much-needed relief from the tedium that can be involved in proofreading technical or medical jargon. Some of the things he has asked:

• How much money would it take for you to ride an office chair down four flights of stairs?

We have Aerons. I don't think HR would approve of our destroying them in an attempt to ride them down flights of stairs. Stipulations of this flight-of-stairs shenanigans: no protective gear, and if you fall, you have to go back and start from the place where you fell. I told him I wouldn't do it for any amount of money. One of the copywriters said he'd do it for fifty bucks. That wouldn't even cover his medical bills.

• How much money would it take to get you to eat this entire raw chicken?

We were proofing some newsletter with a picture of a raw chicken in it. (It was something about eating healthy, if I remember right.) The chicken was shiny. It glistened. The chick who sits next to me said she'd do it for twenty grand, if she had twenty-four hours in which to do it. I again said no amount of money would convince me; first, I'm a vegetarian, and second, I don't think risking my life or at least surely a gnarsty bout of salmonella would be worth dollars. This led to a protracted discussion about my doing it for a billion dollars, which I could then donate to anti-factory farming efforts. I didn't have an answer. Would I do that? Could I eat the flesh of something with a central nervous system? It's like asking if you could prevent the Holocaust by going back in time to kill Hitler. You know what you could be stopping, but could you really kill another human being? Could you find that in you? I digress...

• How much money would it take for you to plaster your car with republican propaganda and not explain it to anyone?

My car currently has the following bumper stickers: a three-foot-long, 1" thick wavy rainbow on the back windshield, a "Got Rights?" sticker, one that says "Ban Stupid People, Not Dogs" and has a pit bull on it, and one that says "D.A.R.E. to keep your kids off television!" I told him I'd do it for no less than a million, which I'd donate to grassroots organizations that promote the things I believe strongly in. Shit, who votes republican because they saw it on a bumper sticker?

• How much money would it take for you to jam a baseball-sized wad of powdered calcium in your mouth and keep it there until it dissolved and you swallowed it all?

I just looked at him like he had three heads for asking that one. The chick who sits next to me said she'd do it for thirty bucks.

• How much money would it take for you to go into the lunchroom and just start eating people's lunches out of the fridge without explaining what you were doing?
  

Oh dude now, come on. Could you ever show your face in your workplace again if you did this? I mean really. It's one thing to be sneaky and steal someone's lunch out of there (I've never done it, but others have). It's another thing entirely to blatantly snag someone's Lean Pocket and heat it up and snarf it right there in the lunchroom. I asked if I could explain the next day and like split the profits with the person whose lunch I'd stolen, and he said negative, you could never explain it. So yet again I had to turn him down for any amount of dollars. Sometimes it stinks having morals. Look at all the money I could be making.

• I got twenty bucks right here that's yours if you drink this cruddy, slimy green water that my bamboo plant has been living in for the past two years.

There was like, maybe an eighth of a cup of this water. It was truly disgusting. It was slimy. It was cruddy. It was green. It was only twenty bucks. I turned him down. For fifty, I might have considered it.

All right, that's enough of that. One parting note. At lunch today, I met a friend at the downtown mall's food court (ugh)--I didn't eat anything there, just because...eh, because yech, but I took some pictures. The thing about taking pictures in a place as crowded as the downtown mall food court at noon is that everyone thinks you're taking pictures of them. You can't point your camera anywhere without pointing it at people. And so today I was trying to take a picture of some purple light reflecting on a white column, but there were these dudes in the foreground. I didn't even see them until I came home tonight and put the memory card in the cardreader and looked at the pictures. Look at these dudes. I just crack up every time I see them. (I edited out the purple light bit so y'all can see the dudes better.)
Thank you, and goodnight.