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We’re having our biweekly scavenger hunt this morning.
The only thing in our list, as it is every other week, is “something which will hold hot coffee without scalding our hands or leaking all over our desks and dripping into our very sensitive nether regions.”
The Styrofoam Holy Grail of our office
You see, we’re out of Styrofoam coffee cups. Sure, they’re the environmental equivalent of RAID to cockroaches, but you don’t worry about the environment so much when you’re 20 minutes late to cubicle hell on a Monday morning after a weekend of fun. To put it simply: we need those cups to hold our magical elixir of youth and vitality to get us through the day… Yes, I mean coffee.
But without cups we can’t drink coffee. This makes us very, very sad.
This is not the first time we’ve faced this tragedy.
Lisa, our office secretary, forgot to order cups and we obviously forgot to remind her to do her job. Lisa, bless her soul, is a functioning idiot. I’m sure there’s some amazingly tragic and heartwarming story involving multiple car accidents or a blimp explosion or being fired out of cannon or something which explains her total lack of thought, but I don’t really care at the moment.
I know she has a daughter that she’s on the phone with 7.5 hours a day. I know she has a husband she’s on the phone with the other .5 hours. I know she regularly uses Microsoft Excel as her word processor of choice. And I know my bare hands can’t hold fresh coffee long enough to properly stir in the cream and sugar. Don’t even ask what I was planning on stirring the coffee with.
And, dammit, my coworker is screaming in delight. He just found an old soup bowl in the back of the cabinet and is now enjoying a bowl of fresh, steaming hot coffee.
This is not to say that Lisa’s problems only revolve around coffee cups. I’ve been watching her closely and I’ve come to the conclusion that any task involving numbers, colors, letters, words or basic motor skills seems to throw her for a loop. You have to really try to be as dense as she is.
About a month ago I asked Lisa to order a desk lamp for me. About a week later two very large Office Depot boxes with my name on them showed up at my cube. I opened them up to find 40 cases of hot pink Post-It Notes. I had to call Lisa to straighten the mess out.
“Lisa, I now can now label everything we have in the company, including the employees, with little hot pink squares of paper,” I explain.
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.
“I don’t-”
“Then why’d you order them?”
So I marched down to Lisa’s desk and asked her to pull the requisition form. This proved to be a special type of challenge because Lisa’s filing system is apparently based on some set of criteria which only people in padded rooms can decipher.
Finally she found the form and presented it to me. She had somehow taken the first two digits of the desklamp sku number and put it in the “Quantity” field, resulting in a heck of lot of items that were two digits less than a desklamp. At least it wasn’t 40 desks.
Cripes! Another coworker just dumped out his pencil holder and is using that for coffee. He’s now enjoying a hot cup up joe that’s only slightly marred by that “bottom of the cup pen-ink and pencil-shaving” flavor. Lucky bastard.
These ordering problems with Lisa are not isolated incidents. Just lask week I asked her to order a few office supplies from Office Depot. On Friday I ended up with a blank box that had no label containing a book entitled The Wisdom of Menopause. The really spooky thing is that Office Depot doesn’t even carry that book.
When I asked Lisa about it she simply explained that she had obviously given me the wrong package. Obviously. Though I had to wonder what the person who ordered this book was wondering when she opened her box and found a heavy-duty Swingline stapler, a box of dry-erase markers, a case of paper towels and a bottle of Wite-Out.
So the search for coffee cups continues. Sure, the employee cafeteria has something we could use, but they charge us a dime for each empty cup, so it’s really a matter of pride to not have to resort to that.
The way I figure it we might as well just order a dozen ceramic coffee cups and not have to worry about constantly restocking our supplies. I’ll fill out the paperwork for the mugs and give it to Lisa today, which leaves only one question…
What on earth are we going to do with the 120,000 Brother SX-4000 Electronic Typewriters we’ll receive instead?
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3 Responses to “Disordering Conduct”
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Mad Brotha Jay says:
I can certainly empathize! I’ve seen the wake of chaos left when the coffee cups are out. The Images of Folks run amok dumping out pencil holders, finding lost bowls, anything that can hold coffee - waaay to funny!! I’ll admit to having used a small tea tin to do the job!
While we don’t have a Lisa at my office, we do have the Coffee Bandit. Steals coffee when no one is looking, won’t make another pot. Leaves empty pots on hot burners…November 15th, 2006 at 8:54 am -
Sarah says:
Ah, Lisa! It would be so much more funny if I didn’t have a zillion Lisa moments of my own. Like the time I was coming back from a conference with my boss and starting shoving all the “confidential” documents from our meetings into an airport trash can in efforts to lighten my load. I didn’t understand why she was staring me me aghast until she grabbed them out and started yelling at me.
It stinks to be blonde.
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CaffiNation Paul says:
Hi Tom Great stuff. We too are afflicted with an afflicted secratery she make dung beetles look bright. I think the solution to your problem might be to order one of these puppies and bring it into work. Let someone try to steal your brand new mug after that.
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/11/07/pull_the_plug_o.htmlBy the by I know the need may have passed. but properly folded wax paper works for a cup, Also if you had an old soda can that could rock too.