I want to live a relaxed and comfy life, so I’ve been thinking about becoming a member of an Olympic team.

Sure, I may have to train hard for a couple of years and I’ll probably have to compete in the most stressful sporting event in the world, but once that is over I’ll be able to sit back and spend the rest of my days eating Cheese Doodles while quaffing beer in front of early 80’s sitcoms.

See, once I’ve competed in the Olympics I’ll be set for life because every four years or so I’ll be treated like a minor celebrity and trotted out in front of the cameras for all sorts of photo-shoots with other aging athletes for a brief two weeks before I can go back to collecting royalty checks from product endorsements. Endorsements are the real gold medals of the Olympics now. And the types of endorsements you can get are only limited by your imagination. For example:

• Grocery products - “When I was training for the Olympics, I couldn’t drink a beer that would fill me up right before the 500 meter speed skating event. So I drank Coor’s Light and skated like a champion!”
• Household products - “Buy a Hoover vacuum! It sucks like the Egyptian downhill ski team!”
• Books and autobiographies - all with the title “My Quest for the Gold” or “Golden Boy” or “Dreams of Gold”… probably not “Golden Shower.”
• Movie Rights - “The Competition: TERMINATED” - starring Tobey McGuire, Julia Roberts and Arnold Schwartzenegger as me.
• Wheaties boxes - For the collectors of Wheaties boxes, because no one actually eats Wheaties anymore. If you buy a box of Wheaties at a grocery store you’ll really only find left over packing material in the box. At least it tastes that way…

But I understand that as a former Olympian I’ll still have a certain amount of work to do.

I mean, I’ll still have to make five minute appearances at conventions, smile a lot and charge people $10 for my autograph even though I haven’t done anything notable in 20 years. Celebrity status like this is something that is only reserved for former Olympic athletes and previous cast members of almost any crappy Star Trek incarnation.

As a washed up celebrity I’ll often appear on game shows and in commercials and even hang around on the fringes of major events for years to come. The only reason anyone will pay attention to me is because I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands so I can give lot of pointless interviews as though I’m an expert on everything:

“Sure, Bob, as a former Olympic athlete I know a lot about the space shuttle…”

Eventually I plan to land a cushy commentator job on some sports network where I’ll add “color” commentary such as “You know, most people don’t realize just how much a bowling ball to the face really hurts,” or “Wow, that bobsledding team was going really fast!”

There’s one catch, however.

If I really wish to pursue my Olympic dreams of celebrity then I’ll have to actually win something. You see, if I get a medal I’ll be cheered and loved for decades to come, living a life of vast wealth and amazing experiences. If I come in fourth place by seven thousandths of a second I’ll end up teaching high school gym classes for the next thirty years living off Ramen noodles and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

This could be a problem.

See I have a physique which doesn’t resemble the athletes themselves quite so much as it resembles the various pieces of padding and equipment that are used in the sports. And I’m not a thirteen year-old girl, which seems to be a requirement if I want to win a gold medal in anything.

So I’m too old, the wrong gender, I look lousy in a leotard (ask my wife) and I have the athletic competency of a Weeble.

But I’m a positive thinker, and I’m not going to allow a these little problems to crush my Olympic dreams. Instead of becoming an athlete, I’ll become a coach!

As an Olympic coach I’ll need three essential characteristics:

1. An unflagging ability to support and uplift athletes with my knowledge and experience.
2. A desire to dedicate my life to helping young people reach their dreams.
3. A mustache.

The first two will come naturally, so I’d better begin working on the facial hair. I need a bit of hair under my nose so that when I smile I look warm and supportive, and when I frown I look like Ghingas Kahn. This will come in handy as I scream my lungs out at some 11-year-old kid who couldn’t swim the 1500m breast-stroke in under 15 seconds - never mind the fact that there are nuclear submarines that can’t move that fast.

Even in the facial hair department I may have some personal challenges. Most Olympic coaches have mustaches which look as though one of those wooly caterpillars has fallen asleep and died right on there on the upper lip. Unfotunately, my own facial hair growth is less than stellar. My previous attempts to a mustache have resulted in most people asking if the fuzz on my face was part of some sort of bizarre science experiment involving shag carpet remnants and a staple gun.

Even with all these challenges, I’m not going to be discouraged from my Olympic dreams. Instead, I’m going to keep training patiently and hope for the day when the Olympic committee finally recognizes the one event in which I excel:

Channel surfing.

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My wife and I are still trying to wrap our heads around this whole idea of having a baby, though we have wildly different thoughts on the subject. I’m worried about whether or not we’ll be able to handle the financial and moral responsibilities of bringing a child into the world. My wife is mostly worried about passing something the size of a watermelon through her hoo-ha.

And so far the worry has been all our own. We haven’t told anyone else about our impending baby because, quite frankly, I don’t think either of us fully believes that my wife is actually pregnant.

Sure, she’s moody all the time and has had an inexplicable food cravings and she’s taken to complaining about how bloated and fat she feels, but really, that’s no different than how she’s acted for the for the five years that I’ve known her. And I still married her.

Right now our baby is not really a “he” or a “she” as much as an “it” in our minds. It’s really only about .014753 the size of a full grown human being at the moment anyway. We’ve been reading a lot of these baby websites and a lot of these sites compare our baby’s current size to various pieces of fruit. The message eventually changes as the pregnancy moves forward, so one week the baby site will proclaim “Your baby is now the size of a sesame seed!” and a week or two later we’ll read “Your baby is now the size of a raisin!”

If these baby sites had their way we’d all measure our own size compared to various items from the produce aisle. I’d stand 8.4 carrots tall and when I stepped on the scale it would read like a slot machine and report my weight as in at 250 pumpkins, two oranges and three cherries.

So every day I check these sites and every day I’m reminded that our baby is only the size of a grape. I don’t mind telling you that it’s hard to feel very attached to a grape…and it isn’t even a fully developed grape. It’s not like my wife has a little grape-sized person in her. No, right now she has a little pink squishy thing that, really, looks kinda like a…well….a squished grape.

Our baby is only beginning to grow organs, so it’s not like we have a whole lot in common with our very, very, very little offspring. I mean, I’m a not a very complex guy but I still like to relax with a TV remote in one hand and a beer in the other. Right now our baby doesn’t have hands to hold the remote or even a liver to process the beer.

This is all still so unreal to us that my wife and I are also still trying to find the best way to even talk about the whole idea of being pregnant. The phrase “we’re pregnant” makes it sound as though we’re some sort of bisexual Siamese twin sharing one body and committing unspeakable acts of fornication on ourselves. She’s the one who’s pregnant and I’m the guy who did it (or so she claims).

We’ve struggled with ways of referring to the pregnancy situation and so far we’ve used phrases like “knocked up,” “expecting,” “got a bun in the oven,” “infiltrated,” “violated,” and even “been slimed.” I think we’ll have to filter out a few of those when it finally comes time to announce the news to our families.

So that’s where we are in this whole baby-making process. The baby has been made, but it’s still a pretty gooey, tiny thing that doesn’t really have much personality and even less mass. I’m sure this whole fatherhood thing is going to change my life, but right now I’m just not feeling it.

I have, however, sworn off eating grapes. At least until our baby grows up… to be the size of a lime.

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Just wanted to give everyone a head’s up that the Anonymous Cog is back and his Call Center Purgatory is continuing with more harrowing, heart-breaking, hypnotizing and sometimes downright hilarious tales from the office frontlines and backrooms.

His is one of the first and most honest blogs about working, surviving an office job, living in America and discovering the truths of corporate management. Read it today!

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