In Case Shit Happens

2002-07-24 - 9:02 a.m.

My therapist (me) thinks it would be a good idea to talk about what's been bringing me down lately. In a word, lamination.

Some jerkoff at the main office has decided that, in light of 9/11*, we need to be better prepared in the event of a catastrophe. To remedy this, we have printed out two pieces of paper, for everyone in the firm, outlining procedures in case shit happens.

Now, I'm opposed to this whole blatant waste of paper in the first place. If the poop hits the fan, not a single person here is going to check their handy dandy "Emergency Guidelines" to see what they should do. Ninety percent of the people who got this, promptly disposed of it without glancing at it.

The futility goes on though. First, the two sheets are two sided, but instruct you to post them in a visible location. Apparently you're supposed to post them, and hope to high heaven that whatever disaster happens, it's not on the back of the page. Second, the wisdom dispensed by these pages are basically this: Call 911. That's sound advice, yes, but imagine taking two sheets of paper (front and back of each) to say this.

Now the lamination part. Another fruit of our main office's brainstorm (where the people in power sit around a big conference room table and stick their thumbs up the ass of the person to their left, then walk around in a circle rather like parading elephants, which is actually the most endearing thing these rich fucks ever do) is that this valuable two-page tome must be preserved and protected against the wear of time and elements. Having not thought of these two facts: laminate costs more money, and most of these will be thrown away, the word was passed down that these 500 or so pages must be laminated!

So, I, the bottom rung, got delegated the delicate task of laminating these fucking overgrown safety fortune cookies. It took me a week of mind-numbing tedium, but I prevailed.

Much to my dismay, after passing out this latest installment of the main office's worthless mental ejaculate, the dumb fuck secretary (an annoyingly stupid dick with a big attitude problem and a chip on his shoulder about God knows what) who typed these things up in the first place discovered a blatant mistake on one of the pages. They called it a mulligan and I lost more hours of my life to this.

If it takes exactly 60 seconds for a page to laminate, but our hero has discovered you can do two pages at a time, and there are a total of 750 pages to be laminated, but our hero can't stand laminating for more than an hour at a time, how many people will get punched in the face before all of the pages are done?

*The irony of the 9/11 part is that no where on the "Emergency Guideline" sheets does it say anything about what to do in the event of a hijacked airplane coming at the building.