casual to who?

Inspired by the episode of The Office called “Casual Fridays” I took careful note of the casual Friday in my office today. And I have to ask if “casual” is a synonym for “frumpy”? I saw many similarities to my office and The Office. Inappropriate sayings on t-shirts, clothing way too tight, clothing way too loose, clothing un-matching.

Does casual mean you don’t have to try and match your clothing anymore? Sure people let loose on the weekend, but it’s still Friday, let’s save something for Sunday-there’s a reason we don’t live together.

Does it mean it doesn’t have to fit you? (over sized or undersized-I’ve seen both and enjoyed neither). I don’t really want to see the people I work with “letting it all hang out”-there’s a reason we tuck in. I mean sure it lets you express your individuality, but I can’t take an individual seriously when their shirt isn’t meeting their pants-that goes for the pregnant women too. I don’t mind the men in their favorite sports jerseys-that’s the kind of fully covered individuality I can get behind. Or the t-shirt your friend made supporting nachos ny (guilty!)

But maybe I have a different idea of causal Friday. I’m just trying to show how well I can put together an outfit involving jeans. Though I apparently am not allowed to show how well I can put an outfit together involving knee-length work shorts. Chest tattoos that proclaim “SEXY” on women and undershirts with baggy khakis for men are cool, but shorts longer than skirts I’ve seen-could I be so bold? And flip flops are a no as well. I get it, they’re casual wear, but isn’t it casual Friday? I run every day just in the hopes that my calves are arguably more subtly pleasing to behold than a bold “sexy” tattoo. But maybe I should get that on my leg and then I’d be in the clear?

5 Most awkward Phone Convos

Things you shouldn’t do while speaking to a customer service rep on the phone (this list probably will be ongoing):

1 Extrapolate on NJ governor Corzine’s need for hair plugs

2 Scream at your husband and tell him he’d better get down on his knees and pray

3 Flush the toilet

4 Say “I’m just getting into the tub” and then splash around for a bit

5 Allow to your oven fire to “burn it self out”

My Car is Smarter than Me

I can do unbelievably stupid things in the U.S. too. (Though is Jersey in the U.S.)? I missed my first alarm this morning which should have been my first clue of how the day would go. I’ve never turned off an alarm in my sleep in my life, but some how I did today.

So today I got to work just as a downpour hit. A torrential downpour. I gathered my stuff up: checked I had my key, put my dress shoes in a plastic bag and got my umbrella ready. But then suddenly I heard a dripping noise and turned to see water flooding into the passenger seat from the sunroof. So I shoved the key in the ignition and hit the button to close it. I couldn’t see anything move, but the flood stopped so it must have been open just a hairline crack. So I was patting on myself that I had sat in the car an extra second and prevented a major flood.

So then I re-gathered my stuff ready to make a mad dash to the building. I opened the door and hit the lock key on the door and then sprinted to the building. The parking lot was a flood and my pants were completely soaked by the time I got in. I went to my desk to sit down and then did my habitual check to make sure I had everything and realized I was missing my car keys. I couldn’t believe it! I pride myself on how I spastically check for my keys and never locked myself out of my dorm during college and here somehow I’d done it. I was too wet to go outside so I described my keys to the security guard in case I had dropped them and phoned my aunt to bring the spare key. I planned to check at lunch if by chance the door was not locked, but I remember distinctly hitting the lock so I didn’t have hope.

4 hours later a mass email went out to the office that a certain car in the parking lot was still running. Running! Pretty soon I was running too. I told my friend where I was going and I ran out to the car. And there it was, running but not locked. I had left my car  unlocked and running for FOUR hours.  Fortuitously the car was smart enough not to let me lock it with the key running in it. Yet it probably meant to also tell me not to leave the car running for four hours. You may think I should have heard noticed the radio on when I got out. But the other car I’ve been driving leaves the radio on even when the key is pulled out and only goes off when the door opens and when the door opened it was thundering so I didn’t hear it. Of course the whole office knew since there was the mass email. My manager asked me if I’d had my coffee… not enough sir, not enough.

Learn to spell, please

I can’t spell. Hopefully it has not been very evident in my blog
posts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is. It’s something I’ve never
been able to do. I blame it on elementary school when they told me
to “just sound it out, it’s better than not writing anything.” Well, I
still do. And it can come out very wrong. Spell check doesn’t help me.
Sure it can often identify the words I’ve spelled wrong, but usually
I’m so far off that the suggestions it has are not the right word, or
it doesn’t even have a good suggestion for me.

My mom accuses me of having ruined her spelling over the years. She says she’s seen words
spelled wrong so many times by me she can’t remember what the correct way is. Some of her favorites of my commonly misspelled words are “tomorrow” and “rough.” Tomorrow I always spelled tommorow, forgetting which letter was double, and rough was a problem of mispronunciation too… I spelled it “ruft.” My mother discovered that one after she was helping me edit a “ruft draft” of an English paper.

One word I still can’t spell is expirience. Good chance it will still be wrong
in this post since it’s another one the spell check is baffled by.
I admit to “dumbing down” my vocabulary in text messages or gchats
since it takes too long to look up the spelling of the complicated
word I would have said if talking face to face.

My aunt used to tell me to look up words I didn’t know in the
dictionary. Is that a joke? A good way of babysitting– keeping me turning pages for hours since inevitably I started with the wrong letter.

In college, I confess, I used the method of instant messaging my friend
Lee asking him how to spell a word correctly. Of course he would never
know what the word was I had sent him and I’d have to use it in a
sentence first. When I visited him in China he didn’t want me trying
to teach anyone English since he figured I would teach misspellings.
And it’s true, I never liked helping my French cousins with their
English homework, I wouldn’t know the answers either. But that was
mainly grammar… and that’s another story.

One time on an English paper I tried to write that something was “in
tatters” but apparently I wrote “taters” and my English teacher (I’m
pretty sure I got an A on it regardless) wrote “what some kids call
potatoes! you meant tatters…”

Anyway, long story long, I had a spelling incident on the phones at
work. In my customer service phone job I was trying to spell something
in a case file for a customer. And I had to spell the word
“essential.” Apparently I didn’t know any of the correct letters in
that word. The phone call went like this:
me: “ok ecc”
cust: “no ess”
me: “right ecci”
cust: “no essen”
me: “of course essens”
cust: “no”
me: “c?”
cust “NO TIAL…” then in a much put upon voice “why don’t you read
that back to me”
I wanted to defend myself, I really did, send her an A paper of mine,
send her my transcript, but of course I couldn’t do anything like
that. So instead I know she’s probably retelling her friends about the
complete idiot she was talking to on the phone…”I guess they don’t
have any standards for hiring people these days!”

The old shake of the hand

I’ve never been good at figuring out the appropriate way to greet people. Usually I’m a reluctant hugger. After being laughed at by my friends for my inability to give good hugs, I was forced to learn on the orchestra trip to South Africa. This involved me having to repeatedly hug a bunch of my friends and actually squeezing them instead of my usual limp-noodle approach of just letting them embrace me while I tense up and wait for it to be over.

My French cousins have always been reluctant huggers, but  then they found greeting with the double cheek kiss the norm. Arguably full frontal impact is more contact than the cheek kiss, but the face time closeness still seems more intimate to me. One time a group of French exchange students made fun of American students for just nodding and saying “sup” when they passed each other. They couldn’t believe how coldly we greet each other. From my point of view it was surprising to suddenly be kissing people I’d never met before. I will admit that it did grow on me to the point that when I first returned home I felt rather distant from my friends when we didn’t kiss in greeting.

So work has given me whole new set of troubles with greetings. I’ve tried to work on the usual firm hand shake to give a good first impression. But at my work after the initial intro the fist pound is the most common, which is one I like a lot. Really it’s just the right amount of physical contact with people I’m just getting to know. I also find it amusing since I have fairly tiny hands so fist pounding a larger male hand looks comical. Basically the point of my story is the awkwardness I’ve had trying to do hand shakes. You could tell the first time one of the guys at work tried to do the hand shake thing with me where you slap hands, slide down the hand and then snap  off of each others fingers? Have I lost you? You’d recognize it if you saw it. Anyway, the whole thing is supposed to be over fairly quickly when you snap off each other’s hands, but somehow I didn’t snap off of his hand fast enough and ended up holding his hand awkwardly at the end. And even I know that is not what is supposed to happen! I thought that attempt was awkward until the next one… I tried to initiate it, thinking I was cool. But I didn’t know where to go from the start and ended up just shaking his hand like we were first being introduced. But not even a firm hand shake at that since I wasn’t trying for that when I started. The look of confusion on his face was priceless. After that it has been all first pounds. Safer-except for the ring I wear on my finger that may or may not be slicing people’s knuckles. But since my hands are tiny and the men’s fists I’ve been pounding are about 2x the size I’m banking on them not noticing my minuscule ring…The first time someone gets a bloody knuckle will be the last time I greet someone at work.