-One gloomy afternoon back in my Wall Street days, as I roamed the fourteenth floor of my company’s mammoth skyscraper, I came across a desolate and sparsely decorated cubicle.  Sitting on the desk between an unused monitor glare guard and an ergonomic mouse pad was the book, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work.”  Half absentmindedly, I picked up the book and found that I was soon heartened by its spirited tales of teamwork and levity in the workplace.  I turned to a nearby receptionist and asked whose cubicle I was standing at.  Eyeing the book in my hand, she replied, “Oh, you can just take that, he was laid off last week.”  And so it goes.  The plight of the twentysomething in corporate America is a paradoxical one.  We don’t want jobs but need them to support our gluttonous lifestyles.  We hate our jobs but are scared to death of losing them.  We find new, exciting jobs only to find out they suck just as badly as the last one.  And so let’s once again examine what I call the era of Job Insecurity.

-In our first jobs out of college, we are so naive.  We don’t realize that being given a pager, cell phone, or BlackBerry by our company is very, very bad.  Sure, the NYU chicks at the bar may think it’s cool when you pull that little toy out of the holster on your belt to send a quick email, but everyone else just thinks you’re a jackass.  Plus, now your boss can find you wherever you go.  You know what other organization has that capability?  Prison.  I do not believe this is a coincidence.

-The “off-site” meeting is another misdirected attempt to boost productivity.  Ostensibly, the purpose of the off-site is to gather the whole team in a mildewed conference room somewhere far from the actual office to prevent distraction and engage in embarrassing team-building exercises.  In reality, everyone spends half the day in the hallway checking their voicemail and about the only team-building that occurs is the unanimous agreement that the sandwiches brought in for lunch are soggy and inedible.

-Your first drug test is a rite of passage in corporate America that all twentysomethings remember.  I’ll never forget mine.  Most people in line for the single bathroom were calm and collected while everyone who partied in college was cowering in the back and chugging huge bottles of Poland Spring.  I think my buddy Harlan has my favorite drug test story.  While filling up the cup, he suddenly realized he had more business to take care of in the bathroom.  So he calmly turned around and took a dump while the rest of the puzzled first-years waited patiently outside.  Now that’s stickin’ it to the Man!

-It is a sad fact that many attractive girls I know tell me they get harassed at work on a daily basis by disgusting guys.  Now I’m not talking blatant breast-touching or the “date me or I’ll fire you” type of harassment, I’m talking about subtle, constant, inappropriate emails and innuendos from ugly, balding, married men.  I’m pretty ashamed of my own gender for this.  Guys, crude and improper behavior belongs in the bar, not the boardroom!

-My office was always business casual, so I feel bad for guys who have to wear formal attire.  Twentysomething guys usually have about five suits max but one they don’t really like and another is pretty ugly.  And when you’ve got a three-suit rotation going, there’s little room for error.

-I love how the term “FYI” is now used as every part of speech in the office.  Noun?  “Just as an FYI, tell James I’ll be at the meeting.”  Verb?  “Can you FYI James and tell him I’ll be at the meeting?”  I swear I once heard a co-worker use it as an adverb:  “I told James FYI-ishly about the meeting.”  It’s like when the Smurfs use the word “smurf” to mean twelve different things.

-If you’ve never played “Religious Chicken and Stove Top” at work, you have to try it.  When the holidays came around, I’d tell my boss I had to go to services, I’d tell my mom I had to go to work, and then just I sat home and ate ice cream all day.

-Let’s face it, the working world is full of annoying people.  Here are some of my least favorite: people who set up out-of-office replies on their email when they go home for the weekend, guys who have female assistants leave their outgoing voicemail message, people who keep a little tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush in their desk so that they can brush and floss every time they touch a morsel of food, people who take the elevator only one floor and, the all-time-worst, unnecessary business-card-exchangers who give you their card at the bar even though you have no fathomable use for their services nor any remote desire to contact them in the foreseeable future.

-One side effect of being a cog in the system at work is that you no longer feel remorse about lying.  In fact, you are encouraged to lie, on the job, about your job.  Only in corporate America, it’s called “recruiting.”  I once stood at a table at a job fair for three hours just straight-up lying to undergrads about how amazing my job was – even though only a few months earlier I had been lied to myself.  No wonder one of my buddies had no qualms about sticking a dozen cotton balls in his mouth once so that he could call his boss and pretend he just had his wisdom teeth out and couldn’t come to work.

-Just once, when you’re walking down the hallway at work and a co-worker is walking toward you and you both almost walk right into each other because you both moved the same way, and then you laugh under your breath and start sort of stutter-stepping to try to get around one another, don’t you just want to uppercut the guy in the face and be done with it already?

-I hate when I call a friend at work and an assistant picks up and says, “Jason Smith’s office!”  Can you giving me a fucking break please?  I know you don’t have an office.  I also know that same assistant answers the phone for a dozen other drones.  In fact, I bet she has a bigger cubicle then you do.  So get off your lazy ass and pick up your own goddamn phone because now your assistant wants to know what I’m calling “in regards to.”  She won’t transfer me unless I tell her what this is “in regards to,” even though there’s no regards!  Finally, I just get fed up and say, “Do you really want to know what this is in regards to?  Do you really want to know?  Well, I’m calling to ask if Jay got head from that chick we met last night, OK?”  And I get transferred right away.

-Any twentysomething guy reading this right now knows that there is one thing about work that is worse than everything else combined.  Taking a shit in the office.  I know, I know, with the economy in shambles and sexual harassment running rampant, this should be the least of our concerns.  But it’s not.  Shitting at the office is akin to desecrating guys’ most sacred ceremony.  The primary issue is the noise factor.  Solution?  Time your thrusts to coincide with co-workers’ coughs and sink usage.  Then there is the uncertainty principle.  Don’t go into a stall if you see the person who just came out.  You never want to match a face to an ass.  You can also use the bathroom on a different floor.  Even though the architectural layout is bound to be identical, the fact that you won’t be able to recognize anyone’s shoes is somehow comforting.  Of course, if you’re really shit-shy, you can always use the bathroom they use for drug tests.  My friend Harlan says it’s quite roomy.

-I worked in an office with some of the smartest young minds in the business.  Graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Amherst.  And no one could work the fax machine.  In fact, I would venture to say that the most difficult aspects of working on Wall Street are faxing and printing.  Once, I was late for a meeting when the printer broke for the sixth time that week.  The error message said, “Load magenta toner.”  I almost broke down in tears when I realized that I graduated from Wharton yet only understood one out of three words in the message.

-When you call an investment banker, I think you can judge how disgruntled he is by the length of the sigh he makes after he picks up the phone but before he starts talking.

-Many of my friends spend more time in the office looking for a different job than actually doing work.  The clandestine nature of searching for a job while on the job means that when your friends call, you can’t just give them an update because you don’t want your boss to hear that you’re about to jump ship.  I’ve actually become quite adept at discerning what the hell my buddy at work is trying to tell me about his meeting with a headhunter by using a few benign code words and a lot of yes or no questions.  It’s like playing white-collar Taboo.

-The business trip, like the BlackBerry, is another corporate mirage.  Sure, it sounds cool to your mom that you’re going on an all-expenses paid trip to Dallas, but let’s face it, if you’re under twenty-five and going on a business trip, all you pretty much get to see is the airport, a Starbucks, a mildewed conference room eerily similar to the one where you had your last off-site, the hotel, one fancy steakhouse, and then the airport again.  All in less than 24 hours.

-Have you ever been so bored at work that you actually asked for more work to do, then when you got more work instantaneously regretted opening your big, stupid mouth in the first place?

-In the end, I don’t think I was cut out for Wall Street.  My three least favorite things in life are waking up early, shaving, and tucking in my shirt.  Obviously, I chose the wrong profession.  Now that I think about it, being a twentysomething in corporate America all comes down to one thing – being tucked in.  When you’re working, you have to tuck in your shirt.  You’re stuffy, you’re uncomfortable, and your crotch itches.  When you’re out of work, you’re untucked – you’re loose, free, and uninhibited.  I don’t think we were meant to spend our twenties, our most cherished years, all tucked in.  It’s not natural.  So turn off that BlackBerry, skip the off-site, blow off your drug test, throw out that toothpaste, drop-kick the fax machine, and untuck that goddamn shirt.  You’ll be glad you did.  That is, until your rent is due.

-As always, here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone over whether a shirt is black or dark blue?  Some people are not very religious or political, but when you attack them on cloth color, their beliefs are unwavering.  And I love when the argument gets so vociferous that you need to bring in a third-party fabric and compare.

-Porn star Jenna Jameson is on the cover of Penthouse magazine this month.  When I read the headline, “Jenna Jameson As You’ve Never Seen Her,” I couldn’t help but think, is that really possible?

-Have you ever had a friend email a bunch of the guys out of the blue and suggest that everyone take a trip somewhere and it’s not until later that he reveals that the only reason he wants to go is because he has enough frequent flier miles to go for free?  The other day my friend Triplet #1 was like, “Yeah, we should all definitely take a vacation.  We just, uh, we have to fly Delta.”  Dick.

-You know what would really improve my quality of life?  If the tongue on my sneaker didn’t always wedge itself to one side.  I know it sounds petty, but I feel like I spend half my day futilely centering my sneaker tongue.  Maybe I do need a vacation.

-There’s a liquor store and a 24-hour Dunkin’ Donuts on my block in New York.  And that means my street is a favorite nesting ground for crazy people and other assorted vagrants.  What always interests me about crazy people is that they all seem to be wearing headphones all the time.  What do you think the crazy people are listening to?  My guess is it’s that stupid “Milkshake” song playing over and over and over and over…

-I hate when someone makes a vague complaint about being sick and someone else says, “Yeah, it’s going around.”  What’s going around?  “It”?  Could you be a bit more specific?

-I also hate when television commercials ask rhetorical questions – “Where do you want to go today?”  “What’s in your wallet?”  “Where’s the beef?”  Honestly, I think the American consumer has long since been desensitized to catchphrases and jingles that don’t involve the Coors Light twins.  Please don’t ask us any more questions because we’re too lazy to answer them anyway.

-When did the “The OC” become an hour-long infomercial for bands I’ve never heard of?

-Have you ever noticed that having exact change is a pretty stressful experience?  As soon as you realize you actually have coins for once, you tell the cashier to hold on a second while you drive your hand into your pocket which seems to have shrunken in the past two minutes to the point where you can barely manipulate your fingers around the coins while you start to sweat knowing that everyone in the line behind you is paying with a credit card like a normal person and now you’re not sure if it was a dime or a nickel that you just felt and finally at the last minute you emerge victorious from your pocket with thirty-seven cents and vow to never pay with change again.

-Of course, just the opposite occurs when you pay for something and the change is only one cent.  All of a sudden, the thought of receiving and carrying around one penny for the rest of the day is so abhorrent that you mumble “don’t worry about it,” grab your purchase, and get the hell out of the store before the clerk even thinks about handing you that godforsaken piece of copper.

-What do you think the Jerky Boys are doing at this very instant?  Why do I think it’s not making prank calls?

-Quote of the Month.  When I worked on Wall Street, I felt that most people didn’t understand what I did.  Now that I’m a comedian, I think people are even more confused.  A few weeks ago, I went to see one of my idols, Jerry Seinfeld, live in concert with my friend Lindsey and her parents.  The show was great.  Lindsey’s mom especially liked Jerry’s joke about people doing whatever they can to avoid getting up when they let you by in the movie theater.  After the show she said to me, “Karo, can you use that bit in your act?”  Um…that’s not really how it works…

-Why do people in New York City have welcome mats outside their apartments?  Do you know how far indoors I walked and over how many carpeted surfaces I traipsed to get to your door?  I think my shoes are clean.

-Why even bother putting the tongs in the bucket of ice?  Let’s be honest, they’re for show, no one is using the tongs.  You make one stab at an ice cube with tongs, the cube goes flying across the room, and next thing you know you’re fist-deep in the bucket like you’re searching for exact change.

-Don’t you think this surfer chick that got her arm bitten off by a shark is a little too happy about the whole thing?  I mean, I stub my toe and I’m bed-ridden for the rest of the day.

-Well, it’s official, I’ve been converted.  A few weeks ago, I got TiVo.  Actually, thanks to the geniuses at Time Warner Cable in New York City, I have what’s called DVR – it’s twice as powerful as TiVo and it’s right in my cable box.  I’m telling you, DVR is my new religion.  The only bad part is that it’s made me a little testy.  Since there’s no separate DVR equipment, people come over and don’t even realize I have it.  Heaven forbid anyone starts watching commercials and I go crazy – “How dare you watch commercials in my temple!  You must fast-forward and pay homage to the DVR gods!”  Just about the only way I can calm down is by watching instant replays of the girl-on-girl action in “The L Word” on Showtime.

-And when it comes to TV, the biggest conspiracy around is JetBlue.  They’re always hyping the DIRECTV service that’s in every seatback.  It’s such a rip-off.  You get like the History Channel, the Game Show Network, and eight back-to-back episodes of “Will & Grace.”  I once spent an entire five-hour flight watching the ticker at the bottom of the ESPNEWS screen because it was the best thing on.  I want my frequent flier miles back.

-Being shown how to do something on your cell phone that you couldn’t figure out is always such a glorious experience.  You know, there’s that one little annoying feature that you can’t for the life of you understand and then some random dude at a party who doesn’t even have that phone will walk by and casually say, “Yeah, just hold down the button on the side,” and walk away without even realizing he just made your night, week, and possibly even your decade.

-Most twentysomethings think that parents are amazing.  As long as they’re not your parents.  When my roommate Brian’s parents come to visit, he’s a nervous wreck and invariably an argument ensues over dinner about whether Brian’s shirt is blue or black.  Meanwhile, I’m totally relaxed, just enjoying the free meal, and wondering why Brian is so uptight.  Until my parents come.  Then I’m a mess and can’t wait for them to leave while stupid Brian is making them feel at home by showing them how to DVR “The West Wing.”

-A lot of my buddies are really big gamblers.  They’re always playing poker or some card game for inordinate sums of money.  I’m not a big gambler or very good card player.  But thankfully I have really good friends.  They never make me feel left out.  They’re always encouraging me to play and offering to teach me how.  They’re even betting amongst themselves who can get me to play first.  What nice guys.

-When I go out to eat, I usually offer everyone at the table a taste of my meal.  Is it wrong that I’m only doing it because it’s a social convention and secretly I hope that no one takes me up on the offer?

-And, finally, I think that five voicemails or missed calls is the threshold for getting worried that something bad has happened.  If you look at your cell phone and you have four missed calls, you think it’s strange but don’t panic.  But if I turn on my phone and hear that I have five or more voicemails, all of a sudden every horrible scenario that could possibly occur runs through my head in a matter of seconds and I start freaking out until I realize that two are hang-ups, two are wrong numbers, and one is my friend Lindsey’s mom calling to suggest I write a sitcom about four friends who have a masturbation contest.  Fuck me.

HOME