Incognito: Methods of Mini-Vacationing at the Workplace

The daily grind can be… well, a grind. They don’t call it the daily R&R or the daily isolation tank for a reason. For the throngs of people going through the hum-drum hustle and bustle of everyday life, finding the brief opportunities to hide out at work can be the difference between thrusting your head through your computer screen or having yourself a nice “woo-sah” and making it through to 5:00. Here are some tips to help capitalize on brief vacation opportunities – and these are paid vacations, mind you.

1. Bathroom Solace

   Bathroom breaks are the one thing your iron-fisted supervisor can’t take away from you. What are we, farm-hands? When you gotta go, you gotta go, and taking those brief breaks on your own porcelain La-z-boy can be enough to help make it through your next spreadsheet.
   You have to be careful when navigating bathroom breaks – where does your boss sit? In a secluded office away from you? Do they have direct view of your cubicle? If they have the opportunity to see you get up 15 times in a single day, it may raise some questions. In the event of an interrogation regarding your bathroom habits, feel free to use any of the following: bad chinese/mexican/any kind of foreign cuisine of your choosing the previous evening, having a weak bladder, diabetes, or the age-old Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Ahh, yes… the pièce de résistance of gross excuses to make frequent trips to the bathroom. Pulling the IBS Card is a 99% guaranteed way of avoiding further questions for the sake of decency and having a free pass to sneaking away from your office to play Temple Run 2 for 5 minutes at a time. Watch out for those monkeys!

2. Podcasts

   Sitting at one’s desk and focusing on nothing but data entry or Excel formulas can get pretty old, pretty fast. Does your boss let you put in headphones at work? For goodness sake, don’t let it go to waste. Giggle to yourself semi-audibly as you listen to Marc Maron drop the F-bomb a hundred times in the course of an hour on WTF with Marc Maron. Check out the Nerdist channel with dozens of available podcasts about comedy, nerd-dom, and more. They say curse words too! Just make sure your headphones are in before you start playing – the quickest way to get taken out of your happy place is having Pete Holmes talk about all of his awkward sexual encounters and you forgot to put in your headphones. If this happens and your boss approaches you, deny deny deny. “Whaaaat? This isn’t my Gmail account! I just hit this button and… wowzers. The Internet sure is dangerous!”

3. Mental Breakdowns

   The previous two are mainly targeted toward those of us with office jobs – not really the service industry. But rest assured, workforce, we’ve all been there too, and if anyone needs a mini-vacation it’s the good people at your local eatery or coffee shop. Being forced to stand in front of guests all day and being yelled at for your assumed incompetency (despite your college degree) can wear on the soul, and sometimes you need to take a moment to relax.
   Having a mental breakdown is a classic technique to get what you want. If you don’t want to go back out and face the terrible customers at table 32, freak out! Are you an actor? Whip up some tears! Don’t make it about the job, either – that’s how your boss questions your ability to handle the work load. Carry around a wallet-sized photo of a dog with you, and let someone find you wailing while holding onto it next to the drink machine. When they ask what’s wrong (even if they don’t) tell them Sparkles is terribly sick. “The doctor says he won’t come back from it… he only has a few days to live!”
   It should be noted that this technique works very well for attractive females. Every restaurant has that one manager who is way to inappropriate with the female waitstaff. Take advantage of his susceptibility to female attention and tell him you need a moment to weep the loss of your dog. If he seems like he won’t relent, talk about how nobody in the restaurant likes you and everyone keeps giving you a hard time! Make it the boss’s fault! People will hate you, but hey – how much is a little alone time really worth?

4. Pull the Fire Alarm

   Oops… did I say that? Don’t do that. Good Giant does not condone the practice of pulling the fire alarm, and is totally opposed to the practice, which is totally illegal, of pulling the fire alarm without just cause, just so everyone has to leave the building and wait for 30 oh-so-appreciated minutes of fresh air while you wait for the fire department to arrive. Good Giant absolutely opposes putting a wad of tin-foil in the microwave in the break room and setting it on level 10 for 15 minutes. We absolutely do not agree with assuring your awkward cubicle neighbor that “cooking over an open flame in the break room is 100% allowed! Didn’t you get the memo?” Don’t do that. Wink-wink. Wait, no wink-wink… Wink. Wink-wink. Wink-wink-wink. Wink-wink. Wink-wink-wink-wink-wink-ow, my eye…

5. Give Your Boss a Scavenger Hunt

   Everyone loves a good scavenger hunt! And if your boss is the kind of supervisor who desperately wants the approval of his/her staff, it might do you some good to surprise them with “something the office put together for you.” This one takes some planning. Get to work early and post your magazine-cut-out letter on their computer screen telling them the office put together an adventure for them. Lead them to the break room. Then to the conference room. Then to the parking lot. Then back to the break room, and repeat. When your supervisor realizes he’s been going in circles, he’ll come by your office and say, “Who’s responsible for this!?” At this point, everyone in the office reveals that they too have scavenger hunt notes on their computers! (Optional: If someone in the office does a great Nicholas Cage impression, have him/her declare, “We have to find the Declaration of Independence!“)

6. Hire a Traveling Carnival

   Okay, okay, here’s one… so get in touch with a traveling carnival, bouncy-castle company, petting zoo, whatever, and tell them to arrive at your office at noon. When you see that they’re ready outside, declare, “Office Party!” If your boss asks questions, tell them corporate sent out a memo yesterday, duh. If your supervisor has any childhood left in their hardened heart at all, they’ll be like, “Well… okay, you crazy employees.” Encourage everyone to convince your boss to get in the dunking booth, and give them a humiliation bath. The time it takes to dry off will almost certainly keep everyone out of the office until closing time.

7. Build a House of Mirrors in the Building

   At closing time, after you’ve clocked out and packed up all your things, head to the bathroom and lock the door. Climb the toilet to reach the ceiling, move a panel aside, and climb up there and hide. Wait for about 5 hours until it’s dark and you’re sure the cleaning staff has left. When you’re ready, drop down and pull the giant floor-to-ceiling mirrors out of the various locations you’ve been hiding them all over the office for the past few months. Commence to setting them up right from the elevator door to lead your boss and coworkers into a maze of confusion and dismay. Extra credit if you can have the elevator doors shut behind them and then deactivate the call buttons. Extra-extra credit if you thought ahead enough to plant booby traps around the various corridors you’ve created. Make sure your boss winds up in a circle-mirror chamber with you at the very end and say, “Very good, very good… but which one of us is the real Darryl Erlenmeyer?” Have your smoke bombs ready.

8. Start a Blog

   Not to get too meta, but if you’d prefer not resort to extreme measures as listed above, start a blog about an interest of yours and spend copious amounts of time writing articles for it at work. When your boss comes by and asks about your progress on your latest project, go with, “Yeah, making some progress… but this one’s a toughy!” Better start practicing your shrugs and incredulous expressions in the mirror.

“COMPUTERS SURE ARE HARD!!!”

Orange Is the New Black Is the New TV

A woman watching “Orange is the New Black”
(Caption By: someone who doesn’t watch “Orange is the New Black”)

If you’re not already watching, prepare to sentence yourself to thirteen hours of house arrest to marathon-watch Netflix’s fourth original full-season release, Orange Is the New Black.

Based on the jailhouse memoir by Piper Kerman—a Yuppie blonde, Smith graduate who served 15 months in a minimum-security Danbury, Conn. facility—the show is a smartly outrageous dramedy from “Weeds” creator, Jenji Kohan.

Rivaling cable in content and surpassing it in distribution, the graphic prison comedy follows Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling)—incarcerated in connection with her ex-girlfriend’s international drug-running, and details the day-to-day lives of her fellow inmates—as well as the fiancé (Jason Biggs) and life she’s left on the outside. Yet, Piper is intentionally white-washed, her perspective paling in comparison with the rest of the impressively diverse ensemble, not often—if ever—seen on television.

Piper’s plight as the beige fish-out-of-water in a hellacious penitentiary pond is a luring device for viewers to explore and empathize with the other inmates, fulfilling its ambitious tagline: “Every sentence is a story.” Bravura performances abound: Natasha Lyonne has effectively rehabilitated her career as the ex-druggie, Nicky; Kate Mulgrew captains the kitchen as Red, the Russian chef; and Laura Prepon is flawlessly deadpan as Piper’s aforementioned girlfriend, Alex Vause. And that’s just the Caucasian talent. (“It’s not racist, it’s tribal.”) Michelle Hurst is riveting as the no-nonsense Miss Claudette; Uzo Aduba elevates Crazy Eyes/Suzanne beyond caricature; and Laverne Cox is a welcomed presence as the male-to-female transsexual, Sophia.

Orange avoids prolonged Oz comparisons by eliminating the temptation and expectation of gratuitous violence (though it’s still susceptible to shock value). Instead, it relies on the heartbreaking backstories and experiences of these murderers, thieves, and drug addicts, who are neither weak nor subhuman. They’ve found themselves behind bars due to a series of unfortunate circumstances. As Lauren Lapkus’ Officer Fischer intimates to Piper, they’re not that different, the prisoner and the officer: they’ve both made bad choices, but only one of them was caught.

I’ve made plenty of bad choices, so prison feels like an eventuality, with an 80-20 split between insurance fraud and murder. As a white girl without cornrows or a neck tattoo—but a deep desire for both—I imagine I’d be a Piper, in terms of acclimation: wifed (and possibly knifed) early. With a “get ripped, not raped” mindset, I’d have taxpayers subsidize my six-pack, in lieu of wasting $30 a month on unused gym Groupons. I’d try to find God, but He won’t make it easy, since everyone wears Waldo stripes behind bars. Though, once I find Him, I’ll pray for Taryn Manning’s Emmy win for her portrayal of Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett, Piper’s Christ-loving nemesis. I recited a similar awards prayer for Manning after her heroic turn as “Friend” in Britney Spears’ Crossroads in 2002; I lost my faith shortly thereafter. In addition to bible study and working my way through the classics, Piper Kerman’s memoir will undoubtedly be at the top of my prison reading list, as both a study aide and spoiler source. So, to whomever’s waiting for me on the outside, feel free to break our TV promise and watch the last season of Breaking Bad—I know how OITNB’s second season ends.