Schizohedron Bullet Points! for 9/6/06

• BUGGED WHILE AT WORK: Now I know my peripheral vision is working well. While typing away at the thinkbox, I noticed a stirring out of the corner of my right eye. A full-on look confirmed the dreadful, initial assessment: A roach was walking across my desk. I bisected it with the edge of a pint Chinese-food container — the first item at hand I could afford to discard — and, dying bug twitching its last between the plastic rim and the September 3rd box on my desk calendar, I called HR to inform them of the infestation. Their speculation: Recent construction on the floors above and below us stirred up vermin. I'd prefer the mice we had in the office during the first few weeks of occupancy. Four legs good; six legs bad.
  

• THEY'RE CUBES, NOT CELLS: Anyone see the Family Guy movie? I believe it was rerun Sunday night. The depiction of pathetic future-Stewie as a dead-end employee of some Best Buy/Staples amalgam called to mind how much I despise Dilbert. The interaction between older Stewie and his female coworker had the same rhetoric of job-as-prison and boss-as-evil-overlord as the crew in Dilbert does. What always goes unsaid in Dilbert, as a friend of mine once pointed out, is that all of these workers could quit, flee this job that is damaging their spirits, and find fulfillment in another position. Are they really all so incompetent that the anonymous company in the strip is the only organization clueless enough to employ them? More important, is this an example a real-life worker should follow? As office rebellion goes, Dilbert is about as subversive as the Elks. My first boss at my current company had walls festooned with Dilbert comics and gear. Had my current department not poached me, I would have quit within a year. Should you walk into an interview with that sort of cube art, just consider it practice, leave a fake phone number, and run.
  

• EIGHTEEN IS TOO OLD: The season premiere of The Simpsons is coming up this weekend, surprisingly avoiding its usual fate of relegation to November by Major League Baseball. If only I cared. The past three seasons of the show have been lackluster. Both Family Guy and the dearly departed Arrested Development routinely trounced the episodes of The Simpsons that preceded them. This season opener is playing the guest-star card, snaring the voice talents of Michael Imperioli and Joe Pantoliano for an ep in which Homer joins the Mafia. Good to see they're getting on the Sopranos bandwagon so promptly. I'm sure we'll see an ep in which Lisa becomes a pro at no-limit Texas hold'em real soon. At this rate, I don't know what original killer material they would consider holding out for the upcoming Simpsons movie. Time for FOX to tell this 18-year-old to move out of the house. I'll instead spend the evening preparing to watch the Duel of the Mannings in the Giants–Colts game, quite possibly with barbecue at my parents' house once they decamp to the shore. And on that point . . .
  

• EAST-COAST CASINO BINGE: The current plan is to go with, at minimum, Steve and Felix to Foxwoods this coming Saturday, then on Tuesday, to visit my parents in Wildwood Crest, stopping at some unsuspecting Atlantic City venue on one leg of the journey, So I'll have the chance to play poker twice in five days, in casinos no less. Were I not on a better-sleep kick, I would have taken the host of the Maywood venue up on his offer to host the game tomorrow. As of this evening, he reported to me that he is light on players, so maybe I'll end up going down there and hitting a poker trifecta over the next several days. On the other hand, I can't win a couple of extra hours of sleep in any of these games, and if the sleeper sofa down the shore is anything like the one I dropped my bones onto last time, I'll spend the night flipping around like a salmon in a bear's mouth and arise with a mighty hump.