Top Ten Signs You Need a New Job

10. While working, you overhear your cube neighbor improvising cheery little ditties about suicide.

9. Your plants appear have eaten your pencil sharpener. They are still hungry.

8. Your manager asks anxiously that you please not plan to be sick anywhere near the holidays.

7. Phlirting with the phlebotomist at the blood drive is the high point of your month.

6. Four hours' solid work in the mainframe database application leaves you with an unusual sense of accomplishment.

5. You no longer have the heart to put together humorous, animated PowerPoint presentations about your surroundings.

4. Of the five trial-size packets of personal lubricant you left in the basket in the ladies' room on Thursday, only one remains, which means that everyone else apparently had a much more interesting weekend than you did. You have seen these women. You are dismayed and alarmed.

3. You find yourself overwhelmed with self-righteous rage if anyone suggests you might take shorter than a 30-minute break.

2. Even the most die-hard skeptics in your office are forced to admit that Scott Adams walks secretly among you.

And the straw to snap the spine of the most stalwart dromedary:

1. It's the end of the day. You're standing at the sink in the office kitchenette, washing out your coffee cup. When you've finished, you turn around and discover someone standing barely eighteen inches behind you. You do your best to convert your involuntary yip of alarm into a "hi!"

It wakes him up.

The Office Bathroom

Leaving work to ride my bike home in the afternoons, I duck into the bathroom with my backpack for a quick change from work clothes into a T-shirt and shorts.

On the counter in the office ladies' room is a small decorative basket someone has thoughtfully provided, stocked with little bottles of perfume and lotion. "For everyone's use," reads a small sign taped to the side of the basket.

At the Gay Pride Parade several months ago, smiling parade-goers riding on floats were tossing out beads, mints, and other little favors to the crowd, including ziploc baggies containing several individual samples of personal lubricants: a few different flavors, in warming and cooling varieties. I've been carrying the baggie of lubricants in my backpack ever since, partly because I thought it was kind of funny, but mostly because I'm really bad about throwing stuff out.

Today while I was changing, the baggie fell out of my backpack onto the floor. I picked it up. I started to put it back in my backpack. My eye fell on the pretty little basket.

Well, I really didn't need them.

Get Packing

What do you bring on a trip? And how long does it take you to pack?

I pride myself on traveling pretty light, for a girl anyway. One week in Syracuse with my parents means I'm bringing one small-to-medium wheeled suitcase and my backpack. My backpack has purse-y things and my iBook in it; the suitcase will have a few pairs of jeans, a couple of skirts, a few tops, the requisite unmentionables, and a toothbrush and eyeball supplies and cosmetics, my camera, my dad's birthday gift, and such.

Come to think of it, my backpack still holds a little sample baggie of flavored lubricants that was tossed to me at the Gay Pride parade a few months ago. I suppose I might not want to bring that. Then again, they ARE all still in the Ziploc baggie that they were distributed in, so it'd make it through security. Perhaps it might brighten their day a little! Only I wouldn't, because that's sort of the girl equivalent of being known to carry a bottle of Viagra, and I don't want anybody thinking I need that, because I don't, thankyouverymuch.

Once my stepfather gave my sister Margie a mortar shell he'd acquired through work at some point. It was, of course, hollow; but she had to leave it behind. You can't exactly carry a 5-foot-tall, olive drab, oblong metal bomb-shaped thing on the plane. Or at least that's what she assumed. I'm sorry to report she didn't actually try. I, being of a somewhat more practical bent, am giving my dad a book.

For tonight, it's laundry and white wine. Tomorrow I fly!