Some prescient folks have been blogging about their jobs anonymously. Although we here focus on the surreal, sometimes the ordinary details of real jobs are fascinating. Check out the blog ring of mostly UK blogs at
Anonymous Work Blogs Blogring
Later on we'll post links to some of the best of these.
¶ 11:30 AM 1 comments 
The comptroller of the law firm at which I was working was a rather flamboyant lady. She had been living in a townhouse fairly far down the New Jersey coast, and she decided to take an apartment in Manhattan, to reduce her commute. To help defray the cost of her new Manhattan place, she decided to rent out her townhouse.
Her secretary was told that she had to go to the townhouse -- she was provided with company-paid car service there and back -- to inventory every single item in the house, so that the incoming tenant could not steal anything.The inventory took the better part of ten days, and while the secretary was off counting the spoons, a temp was brought in to do her work.
The townhouse's new tenant, by the way, was told before she moved in that everything in it had been catalogued; and the secretary was required by her boss to make unannounced semi-annual trips to the house, to do spot checks of the silver, the china and the appliances, and determine if anything was missing. It never was, but we always wondered what would happen if to the tenant if she accidentally broke a cup or lost a fork down the garbage disposal . . .
¶ 6:37 AM 0 comments
Let us tell your story for you. Venting about your job on the web can be a dangerous business if you do it under your own name.
Of course, even if they should have known better, the stories of those who blogged and paid the ultimate price at work make great reading. Check out
My boss, Irwin, hired an assistant for me who, he said performed well on the editing tests. Irwin also told me that this candidate was the one most likely to enter the building bearing arms and firing.
Jay turned out to know little about working in an office. When I asked Jay to make copies and told him to darken the pages a little, he came to me four hours later with over 100 pages he had copied: all were completely black.
Jay was the president, founder, and sole member of his own religion. He had magnetic signs on the sign of his car advertising his religion.
He wrote me long, single-spaced memos of ideas he had on how to improve the company. They were, as he continually reminded me, written on his home computer during his leisure time. He offered suggestions about how to improve our textbooks:- "[A] mini-profile on the U.S. president who during his childhood had the worst case of acne of any president in American history would be very helpful and grab the interest of many high school students of today who might otherwise regard American history as a dull subject."
- "Another inspirational Lifestyle profile might highlight the United States president who improved his eating habits the most over the course of his lifetime after eating lots of junk food and high-fat food during his childhood and teenage years or earlier years."
- "We should include more pictures of smiling adults in our books." He seemed to have particular issue with Sandra Day O'Connor. In his memo, he wrote that her picture made her look, arrogant, vain, selfish, impatient, abrasive, misanthropic, pessimistic, snide, ill-mannered, unfriendly, and unkind. (These memos sometimes offered too much information and too many opportunities for armchair psychology. )
At other time he provided ideas on office management:
- We should fix the toilet by the wall in the men's bathroom that was spewing water. (I told him whom to contact and suggested he not wait until his next memo to report such a problem.)
- We should change the company name: it was too hard for him to remember.
For months, I told my boss that Jay wasn't working out. Irwin didn't believe me. I told Jay to start giving all of his work to Irwin to review. Finally, my boss ended Jay's contract a month early but gave him two weeks notice. Every day for the next two weeks, I worried that Jay would enter the building bearing arms and firing. Luckily, I survived.
¶ 4:19 PM 2 comments
Many of the best work stories fall into one of the following nine groups.
