Office1000 Blog June Archive

You Can Shine with a Red Telephones, Even if You Aren't Commissioner Gordon

By Brian K White at 06/28/2007 14:25

Your business can't survive without telephones, but even if you have the traditional black, beige or gray variety, you need to consider the many benefits of having a handful of red telephones around. You'll feel important, elite, and extra special, and your clients will see it coming from miles away.

The main advantage to having a red telephone is that they are popular, and a best seller of ours. That means that your competitors have them, and they aren't crazy. Much the way a red neck tie speaks power on tap, a red telephone tells people that you have power, prominence and importance. They're just like the ones you see in Cold War movies, except that your call is more practically important, because it leads somewhere more viable than to the guy with his finger on "the button".

These "hot line phones" are not too expensive, but they are very popular. They are cool, sexy like a sports car, and speak of importance like little else. You can pretend you are the president awaiting a call from the Vladimir Putin letting you know that nuclear war has started, or you can just link them from your sales line to your shipping office, so that your clients can know that the people with their fingers on the profit (sales), has direct, unbridled contact with the people who handle the merchandise.

That means that your Red Phone will be more than a hotline between Batman and Commissioner Gordon, it's the very lifeline that connects one line of contact with another. If you have a lobby, you can program it to connect directly to customer service, shipping, or whomever else it is that means so much, just by picking it up.

Besides, come on, it's a red telephone. How cool is that?

How You Can Improve Your Life and Profession with Fancy Erasers

Erasers are incredibly important to math students, those with day-timer dates only semi-reserved for people you may or may not like, and anybody else who uses a pencil. If you're using a pencil, and you can admit that you may be somehow fallible, consider that what you need isn't just a pencil eraser, but a dedicated eraser, and a deluxe eraser at that.

For every person and every purpose, there's a different sort of eraser.

• Your pencil eraser is ideal if you love convenience, make very few mistakes, and don't mind the additional smudge offered by the world's very cheapest of erasers.

• A dedicated eraser is also good, since you might make more mistakes, but also favor a cleaner, more refined mark after the fact.

• A deluxe eraser, or an assortment of deluxe erasers is perfect if you know you aren't, you want a clean erase, and you want to make a character impression with those you work with, for, or against.

Think about it. For an investment of a couple bucks (maybe $20 if you really go hog wild,) you can make a statement about who you are, how you operate, and for those who never see the erasers, you can show that your works are cleanly covered and otherwise corrected in ways nearly flawless. Or you can just keep on smudging your papers, not making any statement about yourself, and abiding by your regular work-a-day life. Odds are your office manager will pay for these supplies just the same, so why not make the most of it. Enjoy your new life, and feel free to thank me on the other side.

How to Get a Bigger Cubicle without Getting a Job Promotion

I know, I know, you really want a promotion. We all do, but according to the recent annual review (yours and mine alike) we're just not the right material to move up to management, no matter how warm we've kept our desks during the intervening years. That's okay, though, even though it isn't. You can kid yourself all you like, but at the end of the day, the day still ends, and you can't do anything about it.

You're a good, smart, indispensable and loyal employee, and you know it, so be bitter all you like (I recommend a just-short-of-postal degree of bitterness,) but you can't do anything about it, so take what you can, how you can, and let's make this business work already.

Let's say you've got a cubicle, which is statistically just about certain. The first time I had a cube I had replaced two guys that made more than me (each), and a cube smaller than either of them. That was a miserable deal, but what killed me was that there were five of us in the room, and the two guys who got the window were "outside" sales guys. They were almost never in the office, but were the only ones within 12-feet of the outside world. We didn't have a view of anything, but come on, can't I look outside whilst perpetually on hold too?

Answer is decidedly "no", but isn't there something I can do about it?

When I came up for my review, I didn't even get a raise enough to catch me up to either of the two people whose jobs I'd taken over, but worse, I still didn't get the darn window, which is double-sad at least. Not content to take "no" for an answer, I took my own advantage instead… I made my cubicle bigger.

I looked at the wall configuration, and seeing that nobody but me was ever there early, late or over lunch breaks, I figured it was my duty to adjust those silly cube walls as needed to make the best use of the space available.

I took long walls and changed them out with short walls. I took short walls and replaced them with half walls. I also took bare walls and replaced them with promotional posters, as if to make the space seem so conspicuously ugly that my coworkers couldn't even notice that they're cubes had magically diminished.

I increased my cubicle from 80-square-feet to 108-square-feet, and none of my obviously absent, adjacent cube-mates even noticed it had happened.

If you can't get the raise or respect you deserve, you should at least consider making yours a cubicle worthy of praise, if not at least office-wide curiosity and suspicion. I did it, and though I quickly left after I was rejected yet again for a raise, I felt really, really good about it.

On an unsurprising side-note, the company went through three-rounds of buyout, down-sizing and bankruptcy over fewer than four years. Maybe consider that, if your cubicle is thusly, artificially confined, your company might likewise be gone before you know it.

How to Spite Your Intra-Office Nemesis (Part-1)

So there's that guy (or gal) in your office who totally drives you crazy. Maybe he or she kisses up to the boss in ways the rest of you can't stomach, or maybe it's that lazy jerk who gets all mad because you're kissing up. It doesn't matter to me, so either way, here are a handful of subtle methods you can use to spite your coworkers. This is kind of a long article, and I tried to keep it to a single piece, but once it broke the thousand-word mark, it necessarily was broken into two, but I assure you, revenge is a dish best served via a long, drawn out article explained in vivid detail.

I'll try to put these in order by least offensive to most, but in the end it's all a matter of taste.

Starting off easy, if you've got a co-worker you dislike, take his or her handset telephone cord, disconnect it and place it in the top drawer of the desk. No harm, no foul, but it will be fun when the phone rings, they try to answer it, and they're stuck with a disconnected handset upside the head with no ability to hear or be heard. Oh, it's just fun.

If your co-worker uses a 10-key to punch up numbers, take a fine-tip screw driver to disassemble and rebuild it. Take the traditional number placements of the calculator, and re-order them in keeping with a telephone, which is top-to-bottom, instead of bottom-to-top. Visually, it will still look fine, but all of the math that comes out of it will be crazy messed up. It isn't too bad of a prank, but don't worry, we're just getting warmed up.

If you've got a beef with the janitor, as I did when she hit on me, dressed up fancy, then turned me down once I succumbed to hitting on her, take the contents of your hole punch and place them strategically around the office. There's nothing harder to get out of the carpet than hole-punches, so lean towards your bosses door, since he or she will be the first to complain, and the most probably to fire that janitor.

Bring in a two-dollar vial of clear nail polish, and use it to varnish the pencil and other erasers. It's virtually invisible, but the damn things won't erase nothing for nothing once you've sealed them in polished lacquer.

If your office has air-fresheners, whether of the clip on, tape on, or spray variety, use them up entirely against your nemesis co-worker. If you have to buy it and bring it from home, go for it, it's still a cheap degree of vengeance. Easy is to fill the bottom of a garbage can, since it will reek for weeks, but go for cloth or hidden areas. Stick a paste-on sort to the bottom of a desk (wide open, of course), or dump a few ounces of patchouli oil in the swivel chair. The stench will quickly become unbearable, and there ain't much a darn thing that can be done about it.

Save up dead ink cartridges and put them in your coworker's desk. It's easy, you just take his or her good, new ones, and replace them with your own old, dead ones. It's the most minor distraction, but every bit helps when it comes to harassing your least favorite coworker.

Steal office supplies and put them in your office-mate's desk. Especially if it's something critical and important. If the tactic doesn't work, mention to the office busybody that you thought that person might have them. It will be a surprise to everybody, and you weren't part of it, but it's trouble when we're out of push-pins and one person has every single one of them buried in the desk.

Go in a tad early, and take the making of the morning coffee upon yourself. Do it, and do it with glee, but make the coffee ever and forever weaker. I had an ornery ass of a coworker who made four times what I did, and that jerk would drink a hundred half-cups of coffee per day. He wouldn't brew the stuff himself, but oh man, that Bill Watt would drink it like a madman. I took it upon myself to make the coffee weaker and weaker until he wouldn't drink it. He had to walk halfway across the complex to get coffee strong enough for his taste, and my single pot became enough for us, even though three-pots never was before.

If your hated coworker uses Equal, Sweet & Low or Splenda, it's easy to spite them. Just start slitting the packets and emptying them out. It doesn't work with sugar, but it does with these. If you also use an artificial sweetener, just keep a stash in your desk and you'll be fine, but they'll find none of what they want, and that small irritation will overwhelm them in a day.

If you don't drink coffee, go ahead and add pencil shavings, ash and spices to the coffee grounds. Even mixed up a tad, nobody will notice it, but even a dash of All-Spice will forever change the flavor of the coffee in ways they can't imagine. If you do drink coffee, and you still want this prank in your arsenal, keep taking cups of coffee yourself, pour them out in the bathroom by degrees, and insist you don't notice anything wrong with the taste of it.

The Eight Best Uses for Three-Ring Binders

Two and four-ring binders are exceptionally uncommon, though I have seen a five-ring binder once, and that made no sense at all. I knew when I saw it that an engineer had grown a tad over-zealous, but it inspired me to nonsense, and I now feel all but compelled to share what equally nonsensical wisdom I've since discovered. Three-ring binders are helpful, clever and can make your work-a-day life more efficient, profitable and in rare cases, even somehow remotely bearable. Here are some of the many advantages of three ring binders.

• 1. Starting with the least crazy use, you can use them to print out all the most relevant things for your profession, and keeping them in tidy, organized, categorized ways, so you and the person who succeeds you in your unsuccessful profession know easily and precisely what to do.
• 2. From there you get a bit crazier. Start off by taking all your important work-related documents, and do not organize them alphabetically or chronologically, but by who filed them, who wrote them, or by length of title based on each letter having a numerical value, added up and made into a mathematical equation. It makes painfully little sense, but it can justify the heck out of your binder budget.
• 3. Since you may be working on your graphic novel, or let's be honest, your comic book, an open-ring binder is easily the best way to organize, edit and adjust your works in progress. Still, don't plan on it being a big success. Either way, this will make it that much easier to get it done in order.
• 4. While writing your manifesto out of order, you can use a three-ringer to bind your works in ways that allow you to edit and re-edit it day-by-day as needed, in accordance with prophecy.
• 5. If you're a runaway-rampant scrapbook-keeper like me, a clamp-in/clamp-out binder can be the best book to keep odd-sized and off-sized things like soiled garments, bar napkins and de-crumpled inter-office memos.
• 6. If you like pain and punishment, buy yourself some 3" binders. They don't work worth a darn, and they only bind pages while tearing the tabs and punched holes out. Not only are they big and mostly empty, they're unruly and horrifically abusive to the pages they contain. I recommend them highly.
• 7. Consider a few hundred half-inch binders, since they're adorable, though 80% of their bulk is consumed by the spine and covers. It's not that they aren't any good, it's just that they're only good for something very specific, and nobody I've ever met has any idea what that benefit may be.
• 8. If your employer doesn't provide a healthcare package that affords routine physicals, you can use the clamping action of the top ring of the binder to hammer down on your testicular region in probative ways that may not rule out cancer, but can surely rule out ball comfort.

Three-Ring binders area available in an assortment of sizes and colors, and can be shipped straight away