Chopped Salad Afternoon

2006-10-31T18:44:00.000-05:00

I ate a salad for lunch today in a bid to be as healthy as possible (at least for today, because yesterday I ate lunch at a mexican restuarant where I ordered this fried burrito thing and had frozen drink and tomorrow I have a reception after work where I guarantee I will drink no less than three glasses of wine and 4,000 calories worth of tiny fried and battered appetizers).

Oh, yeah.... so I ventured out to this salad chopping place to order my salad. I have walked by before at lunch and the place is always jammed with starving-looking office girls clad in the best business casual has to offer and their suited protein-conscious money-manager boyfriends. I stood on line, read the salad-ordering directions, and when it was my turn, I ordered my base of lettuce plus four ingredients plus one special ingredient (avocado) for an extra 75 cents. Apparently this is no ordinary salad, no! The lettuce came flying out of some bin from the back. Scoopers grabbed my salad items and dumped them ceremoniously on the lettuce and then proceeding to mush the ingredients together, and then -- gasp -- mutilated the salad and toppings into shapeless pieces, doused them in some low-fat dressing, and packed them into a plastic bowl.

The whole salad weighed more than most of my college textbooks.

Back at my office, I ate my salad and mourned the loss of ingredients usually left whole. My avocado was a gel coating the lettuce, but I was accostumed to large chunks of avocado interwoven among the greens. My broccoli became nothing more than tasteless colorings in the salad and the satisfying feeling of eating a baby tree was missing.

Even more maddening was the notion that I had to waste so much food; the salad was so large I was forced to throw at least 1/3 of it out as I could eat no more.

But then I went downstairs to buy some cookies, and all was well with the world again.

Office Assistance for the Fish

2006-10-31T11:44:00.000-05:00

Last week I entrusted a standard office task to one of my office assistants. The task included nothing more than merely photocopying a stack of documents, already organized and tabbed by yours truly, and then scanning in said documents and burning them to a disk after I approved the photocopies for binding. "Child's play," I thought. Apparently not.

One day later the office assistant handed me three CDs. I looked at the office assistant with a puzzled expression creasing my face. "Here is the CD you wanted!" she exclaimed and handed the CDs to me with gusto. I took it, and then promtply re-read my instruction email. Yes, there it was -- "please wait until I have approved the photocopies of the originals before you make the CDs." I then reviewed the CDs and, as expected, they were wrong. I brought them back to the office assistant and told her documents were missing and certain other documents were not handled correctly. "They need to be redone," I muttered. "Right on it!" she replied.

Changing tracks, I then asked her about the photocopies for the binders. "Oh, those! We sent those out to a photocopying company because we don't handle those things here." Translation? I sent those documents out because I would rather take some long lunch breaks than work the photocopy machine as per my job description, so I told you that we don't handle that work here, even though you, as the superior, know perfectly well that we absolutely handle that work here and that is precisely why we have an entire room devoted to photocopying documents for binders.

Well, some times goes by, and we finally get our photocopied documents and the revised CDs back. Rather than instruct the office assistant to send them directly to the client, I wisely decide to spend a few minutes reviewing the final documents and CDs myself. Brilliant idea on my behalf, because within 15 minutes I realize that entire documents are missing from their pre-assigned tabs and that one CD will have to be entirely redone.

Rather than deal with the office assistant, I spent the next hour taking the binders apart, putting them together correctly and inserting the appropriate missing documents and using my amazing technological prowess to burn some CDs.

It was an exciting morning.

My Manhattan Fishbowl

Chopped Salad Afternoon

Office Assistance for the Fish