The New Jerusalem

My goal, in any relationship, is to win.

At work, sometimes, coffee won't do.

At work, sometimes, I just need a little extra boost on a monday morning to get me into the proper state of mind, to get rid of the weekend sluggishness and liquor-hazed mind. That's why I put in a suggestion to my manager that the company start stocking conservative amounts of cocaine.

Now I'm not talking about anything excessive. This is drug use, not abuse. I'm talking about individually dosed packages of 1 or 2 lines to get me into the place i need to be creativeally and motivationally to be the best damned employee I can.

But then my friend Adam says, no guy, what we need are office gnomes. What we need are a race of tinly little creatures who live up above the accoustical ceiling tiles, and come down at night to finish our work for us and maybe, if they have some extra time, cobble some shoes. That's how we should achieve productivity, a race of tiny little men doing jigs and having big shiny belt buckles. That way we could improve corporate profitability without bringing the ill specter of illegal columbian narcotics into the office, I mean, when you're dealing with a magical race of gnomes, the worst problem you're going to face is, every six months or so, a baby's going to get stollen and held for randsom until someone can guess the gnome's name.

Now Adam's point made sense, a lot of sense. There were some technical flaws, you know, budgetary concerns, gnomes not existing, and all that, but hey, at the rate stem cell research is going, let's not bound our horizons. But I was really reticent to just pass on by the whole 'illegal amphtimines' angle, so I says to him, I says, "Here's some brilliance, we do both." Think of how much we could get done on a monday morning if we had the singularity of purpose only bolivian marching powder can give, and the assistance of an army of tiny little magical forest creatures in pointy hats.

But then adam turned to me with the steely gaze of a man who has seen too much in this life, and said "no guy, what you speak of is a recipe for disaster. Yes, it may lead to increased corporate profitability at first, but it will only be a matter of time before the gnomes get into the office cocaine supply, and the last thing you want or need is a bunch of coked up gnomes going less than zero all over the office, getting paranoid and fucking jamie gertz in the supply closet."

And every morning, ladies and gentlemen, as I get my cup of coffee and think "sometimes coffee just won't do", I simultaneously think to myself "Until the day when we learn to control the drug habits of our fictitious workplace helper-folk, coffee will simply have to do."

I have a nasty habit of writing emails. Long, involved emails to people I only kind of know telling them, generally, how much I like or appreciate them. Or, about 1/5 of the time, how annoyed by them I am. But not normal annoyed, my parsed out, mitigated annoyed that takes into full sight their situation and can never completely give itself over. Point is, i never send the vast majority of them.

Then I never remember if I actually sent them, and have to spend the rest of my relationship with that person trying to figure out just exactly how honest i've been with them.