Yes, I Do Know That I am Lucky to Have a Job At All

Today someone generously left some books they no longer wanted on the little table in the office kitchen. One of them caught my eye, a slim red paperback volume, because the title of it made me heave that big interior "what am I doing in this job?" sigh: Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Reviews. Talk about your page turner!

But after a little self-absorbed glumness on that account, I remembered a couple of the other little office oddities of late, and since this is a daily blog, people, this is what you're getting today. First, on that same table, someone left an US Weekly (I think) with pictures of the two Twilight stars on it. And someone else, I guess, thought it would be funny to write in some captions on the cover, what the stars were saying, or thinking. But they weren't funny at all, the captions, not even a little bit. It wasn't even clear that they were meant to be funny, which raises the question: is there any other point to this kind of minor vandalism? Other than satire or whatever? I wish I could remember now what they said. Something like "How does my hair look?"

Next, while the code review book at least makes sense in the context of my workplace, and the US weekly, while less so, is at least a popular publication in some sense, a few weeks ago someone left another piece of reading material in the kitchen, and it was... a catalog, the size of a monthly periodical, of the Christian Louboutin Barbie collection. The who and the what? Still no satirical or other captions added to the cover of the Barbie catalog, though to be fair to the artist, I should probably leaf through and see if anything thought-provoking has been added to the interior.

The oppressive beeping air freshener has returned to the bathroom. Beep! My very presence necessitates freshening. Beep! I am just washing my hands!!

Last, and absolutely least, for a week and a half or so, this spot on the way back from the kitchen, near a couple of lonely cubicles in the hallway, smelled just exactly like the pickly jalapenos you get on nachos at a sports arena. Although, to be fair, I haven't had nachos at a sports arena in a very long time, and my frame of reference is working at a sports arena to raise money for "band tour" in high school. Having had that experience, though, I have smelled many a pickly jalapeno (to say nothing of the joy of cleaning out a metal pot with nacho cheese sauce charred all over the bottom), so I knew what I was smelling. But there was no visible source of jalapeno odor. A little mystery to work on. Or I could just learn the best kept secrets of peer code reviews!