2 Office-like stories

oh man, tonight is The Delivery episode of The Office. only two hours. my sister is bring over her knitting club, and my neighbors are coming over, too. it'll be a full house, but i like it that way. i know they're a fictitious couple, but congrats to Jim and Pam on the scheduled birth of their baby! (hey, that's pretty realistic to me. i mean, preggo #2 in our office had her appointment at 7am and she's still on maternity leave - shout out!)

ok, our Office-like story today is about a call taken by a Customer Service Rep that will not be named (but we'll say it's a girl, since the probability of this rep being a female is just that high. if you work in an office, you know i'm right).

this poor girl took the call at 10 minutes till 5pm. anybody in customer service dreads taking calls right before the end of the day, hoping that the odds fall in their favor and the caller has all their information ready and only has one question. well, this was the other kind of call. it was about 10 after 5pm when she asked me to take over the call, since she really needed to go. i understand wanting to leave at the end of your shift (last night, my phone rang with one minute to go. nice woman, tons of questions. 10 minutes.)

i took the call. i was a little scared already, since this girl was either laughing or crying, which was causing the other of the two. i wasn't sure of the cause, and that makes a difference in how you want to answer. and then i answered. and i couldn't help myself. i had to hit the mute button just in case my laugh actually vocalized. although, i was warned. when transferring the call, the rep said, "country." i should have listened better. but i couldn't understand more than 2 words at a time. have you ever talked to someone who slurs together their words so badly that "a" and "i" sound the same? i have.

bonus Office-y story!
i just remembered this, which happened yesterday. i went to make a new pot of coffee in the kitchen. i was talking to a couple people in there, so i was distracted (not an excuse, just a description of facts).

anyway, i went to make half a pot of coffee because it was 4pm, most of the office was leaving but since i work a later shift, i wanted some coffee with the half-cookie i had vultured from the kitchen when the visiting company was done with their Panera-catered lunch. yum. so, in the process of making coffee and talking at the same time, i half-filled up our little pitcher with water from the sink. and then i went over and poured it into the coffeemaker.

yeah, i forgot to empty the old coffee out of the pot.
yeah, i forgot to replace the filter and put new coffee grounds in.
but wait - there's more!

so the person i was talking with comes to help. together, we manage to take the old coffeepot from its place in the coffeemaker, allowing the water -- which is running through the old coffee grounds -- to spill onto the table on which the coffeemaker is sitting, and throw the old coffee grounds into a bowl that had just been washed. utter chaos for about 3 minutes, while we run out of paper towels and get more, and clean up the re-dirtied bowl. 


in the end, i did do it the right way and got my well-deserved cup of coffee. so, happy ending. :)

word of yesterday: fictitious

word of today: "atchit" - pronounced like "hatchet" without the "h" and tacked on to the end of a verb. as in, "Google-atchit."