• This bitch stiffed me yesterday when I needed a travel requisition. And now I have to kiss her ass? Shoot me now.
• If they had a single candle for each year, this would be a fire hazard.
• Blow on my kazoo! Wee! Wee! Happy cuckoo kazoo! Wah-Wah-Wah!

Strained smiles and forced laughter all around. Cake ravenously devoured or toted back to desks. The birthday boy or gal left with a few friends, the rubble, and office manager, thinking, This is nice, but it won't happen next year, as I will be somewhere better.

Next year? Some of the faces change, but the song remains the same. The fat lady sang, amigo, and you pretended not to hear her.

Scrooge? In Charles Dickens' timeless classic A Christmas Carol, Ebeneazor Scrooge is presented as an archetype for learned and cynical inhumanity who must be transformed to full, compassionate humanity, lest his life and the lives of others suffer as a consequence. This damn story is always on the TV, in one form or another, from mid-November to early January.

And you know what? Scrooge isn't that bad a guy. I've had bosses who would make Scrooge their prison bitch. This story needs to be revised. I'd have Bob Cratchett beat Scrooge to death on Christmas Eve with a coal poker. He steals all of Scrooge's money and spreads it among friends and family. The ghost of Scrooge comes back not to haunt Cratchett, but to give him sound financial advice, as he has zero investing savvy. Together, they build a dynasty of Victorian sweatshops and quintuple Scrooge's money. Cratchett, realizing what he has become, commits suicide the following Christmas Eve. Scrooge comes back from the dead, having signed a contract with Satan, and takes over Tiny Tim's body. The moral? There is none! Welcome to Corporate America!

Advertising Hoochie. Recently, I had a one-day assignment in an ad agency--ironically, at the first place I worked in New York. I was lucky to be laid off after six months from that first job--the pay was awful, and no one was keeping score, to the extent that I and a few dozen other recent hires and near-retirees got the axe one fine day just after the holidays. It should have been a horrible setback, and it was, until the next day when I went to a headhunter and realized I could make about $5,000 more in various low-level publishing jobs being pushed my way.

I've since worked in another smaller ad agency and enjoyed it, despite the low pay and lack of job security. (The advertising industry isn't built on sand; it's really used cat litter.) Advertising tends to attract a lot of younger people, as, hey, you get to wear jeans a lot! It's a gulag--but you get to wear jeans!

Advertising should be fun, but it isn't. Creative people get hounded by the account side, who deal with clients always on the verge of bolting, and everyone works late hours as there's an unspoken industry standard that only people who don't care about their jobs work eight hours, even though their work days are padded by hours of fucking around and grandstanding.

This makes for a lot of unhappy people. But I'll tell you this--that myth of fun also makes for a lot of hoochie. Pardon the gutter lingo, but that's a good word for it. This temp spot made me feel like Buck Rogers in Amazonia. There must have been 40 people working on that floor. At least 30 were beautiful women in their prime who would just as soon flirt and talk about music and movies as grind out a marketing update.

The work itself sucked, but, the mis en scène was kicking. I thought about coming in for free the next day. It hit me then that all creative industries (television and movie, fashion, recording, publishing, graphic design, etc.) are like this. Anyone who puts in a few years of advertising knows it's a ragged business. And as anyone who leaves it for the more reserved environs of the corporate world knows, there is often twice as much money to be made for the same work. True, the atmosphere changes, but so does the person, who is a little older and less enticed by more casual dress codes and a flashy-but-empty image.

This may be why I saw so few women past the above age range. But it was downright refreshing to be in this kind of work environment. Much is often made of the working relations between men and women, which makes for a nice lead-in to my next topic . . .

The Bitch. I've worked for men and women--about a 50/50 split. Frankly, this doesn't matter to me, as I respond more directly to the humanity of the person, or simply whether we get along or not. It's like dealing with cats and dogs; some cats act like dogs, and vice-versa. Women don't have dibs on shifty deception, and men don't have it on full frontal assholery. But every place I've ever worked has had one or more female workers known as The Bitch. There will often be male coworkers who are just as abusive--but it's understood that guys are assholes. Bitches and assholes run most offices.

It's often true that women who get called bitches are, drum roll please, bitches. They're pushy, arrogant and obnoxious--no different from their male counterparts. Maybe it's a strange sort of reverse sexism, but men in business aren't expected to toe some imaginary line of personal morality and are expected to act like selfish babies. Women should be above that? Waving a cape made of $100 bills in front of a greedhead will illicit the same response no matter what that person has between his or her legs.

The strange part is I will constantly hear women coworkers describing the bitch thusly: I would rather work for a man than that bitch. Often, depending on the person they're talking about, I'd rather work with members of the Manson Family at Spahn Ranch. But it's odd how they will single out a woman, when there will be one or more male workers who are as bad or worse than she is. Maybe it's because women in higher authority positions is a relatively new concept in the corporate world so coworkers feel the need to single them out. But I often see little or no difference between a woman who has lost her mind to corporate insanity and a man. I avoid each like a plague of locusts.

Corporate Brainwashing. Let's not get into the larger issues of how corporations affect society. I'm staying within the office and how workers treat each other. And how that differs from how sane people treat each other. Why do otherwise intelligent people, who see themselves as fair and just, so readily apply themselves to an artificial corporate structure that will directly negate that old saw, All men are created equal?

What was that? Let's all say it in a low, groveling voice: money, money, money. Corporate brainwashing isn't much different than military brainwashing, where people are encouraged (to put it mildly) to turn themselves into machines. At least with the military, I can understand the thought process: to survive in a battle situation, troops need to be extremely organized and responding to what will hopefully be qualified authority figures to kill their opponent.

Is the act of making money really that dramatic? Life or death? Do we all have to over-act like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street? For a lot of people, money makes them act like teenagers in love: it's an all-or-nothing proposition, dude. And no matter what Martin Sheen said, you better judge a man by the size of his WALLET.

If you blow a deal or don't perform adequately at your job, you will not die. You might get fired. Feel like a piece of shit. Grow bad facial hair. Take out a loan. And then go on. Unless it's drastic and you have addictions of some sort, you will not be homeless. You will not be labeled a pariah in your industry. Even if you are, you can take your skills and find another one. The worst that can happen in any office situation is that you will lose your job, and as anyone who's ever lost a job knows, after a bleak period, you get your shit together and go on, often to better things.

So why does that gut fear of the worst that could possibly happen on a job (barring gun play with maniac employees and breakroom parties) make people, pardon my French, so fucking crazy? Because in the false structure of corporate brainwashing, failure is not an option. But we fail all the time, every day, in some sense, usually in ways that don't kill us. Memos go out with the wrong information. The client gets the unrevised report faxed to him, god damn it, the one we worked on all night. Shit, we forgot to CC Stu in Accounting, and as a result will have to revise the deadline.

I have tons of this shit in the cellar of my memory bank--crises galore, from every job I've ever worked. It's as totally meaningless now as when it was happening. I think when someone sees that how one responds to these inevitable situations is what counts within the corporate structure, corporate brainwashing begins. People make themselves care passionately for things that don't matter, don't apply to them, or mean anything valuable to any sane person. When they die, no one's going to say, I'll never forget the way he processed that Z-25 form just in time for the teleconference and helped land Numbnutz Enterprises, our biggest client.

Well, that's not true, people may say shit like that at funerals. But they're assholes, if a human passing away can only arouse meaningless, dispassionate memories. I would rather people show up at my funeral and throw buckets of burning shit on my coffin.

When a worker personalizes his job, and this happens with any job whether one wants it to or not, he ties in his self-worth with his performance. The level of corporate brainwashing will be directly proportional to how clearly a worker can delineate between his real self-worth and the self-worth imposed by his job. They're not the same. One (the job) is a subset of the other (reality). But you will find that many successful business people have inverted that equation, virtually defying reality, and made the job the main indicator of self-worth.

And when that happens, look out--you may as well have a cubicle between Charlie Starkweather and Jeffery Dahmer, as their views on humanity will seem charitable as compared to those of your ambitious coworker. Whatever the company line is, this person will toe it to advance his career. His first job may require him to be nice to coworkers. Another step up the corporate ladder may not, and like a chameleon, he will match his personality to his new environment.

Sooner or later, he'll reach a point where he can do whatever the hell he pleases. Corporations are filled with these type of go-getters who are not overly concerned with personal morality or character. They're building their lives the same way Donald Trump builds a skyscraper: with a whole lot of capital and very little regard to the surrounding neighborhood.

Actually, in view of the mass sea of greed and selfishness that drives Corporate America, it's amazing that humanity exists there at all. But there are plenty of people simply going through the motions to support their families, not making enough to be insane or trying to hold on to their humanity. They're like dolphins swimming in a school of sharks.

The Strangest Thing I've Ever Seen. Naturally, it took place in a men's room. And I didn't see anything unusual. I was working at an advertising agency for a few months when I had to use the men's room. I especially liked this men's room because it was huge--at least 10 urinals and as many shitters. (I once caught one of the mailroom guys hanging over the edge of the first stall--just after he had locked them all from the inside. Rather than turn him in, I helped him down and congratulated him on his ingenuity.)

I walked in, and the men's room was empty--paradise. I went to the urinal and did my business. Going to wash my hands, I noticed one of the faucets left running and reached over to turn it off. A voice said, Excuse me, could you turn the water back on?

Someone was in the last stall, with his feet tucked far back on the seat, like he was riding a racehorse. I didn't recognize the voice; it sounded like a nervous middle-aged man. I thought, This is strange. I simply turned the water back on and washed my hands in another sink. As I was leaving, a coworker I didn't know came in, and we nodded at each other. He was probably going to think I left the water running.

A few moments later, as I was sitting at my desk a few feet from the men's room, I heard a scream then a man yell, Turn the fucking water back on! I'm not going to ask you twice! That coworker hurried out of the men's room, snickering. A few minutes later, one of the senior vice presidents, who was third in line for running the company, came out with The Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm and a tight grimace on his face.

From that day forward, we all knew that if we went into the men's room and a faucet was running to leave it on.

The Day of Dread. Via temping I've noticed something strange regarding how the mind handles the issue of security. The longest job I've had lasted almost five years. I hated it. Not from day one--more about day five or so. It was a pure grind. True, I met some good people there, taught myself a ton of stuff about computers and managed to get a nice foothoold in the company as an unofficial "computer whiz." But mostly it was hell--a massive workload, always tackled at breakneck speed with no real incentives to work harder or move up. I stayed only because it paid very well.

Or so I thought. When I receive a new temp assignment, there's always what I call the Day of Dread. This is when my counselor at the agency phones me with information about the upcoming spot. I'm glad she's phoning--it means I'm going to keep working steady--but when she describes a new assignment, it always sounds like a shit job. Drab financial institutions. Flighty fashion conglomerates where the whole place is an organizational mess. She might say, "Bill, I understand these people can be difficult," which is congenial shorthand for "assholes work here"-- that goes without saying for every place I've ever worked. But it always unnerves me to hear qualifiers like that.

To make matters worse, she'll sometimes give me special instructions on simply how to get into the place. I'll have to pick up a visitor's pass. Or log in at a lobby desk every morning. The spot I'm at now, if I were to do it right, would have me go to the 8th floor every day, let the receptionist take one piece of any photo ID I have, print out a pass, then have her call the office manager on the 16th floor to come get me. At the end of my day, I go back to the 8th floor, drop off my pass and retrieve my piece of photo ID.

Kiss my ass, you Nazis! I go to the 16th floor every day and stand in the lobby, waiting at the locked doors like a dog in the snow, until someone with a pass lets me in. This can take 15 minutes; the office manager told me to do this. Could she give me a temporary pass for the length of my assignment? Sure. Only that this place, like so many others, is so overwhelmed with paranoia that they suspect I might be a spy from a competing company who will steal all their old memos. Frankly, I could easily do this during the work day and take the booty home at night on a compact disc in my gym bag. If they searched my gym bag, why, I could surely insert the disc into my anus. But the truth is my used jock strap means more to me than even the most confidential memo in any office. Like any sane person, I don't give a shit about their silly reindeer games.

Even with this hassle, over two weeks, I've grown to feel comfortable in this place. I'm writing this now, as a matter of fact, at my desk, where people take one look at me and think, "Christ, they're really working that temp to death" as I feverishly type away. It's a low-key assignment, with short bursts of work between hours of doing my own thing.

Here's what I've learned: I value even the illusion of security. After only 10 days in this place, I can feel it. Doing this repeatedly as a temp is like leaving home every few weeks. A giddy feeling, but also slightly apprehensive as I'm not sure what the future will bring. So far, nothing too abominable. But I can feel the pull of knowing where you're going each morning, how you'll get there, the people you'll meet, the situations and crises you'll face, even the small routines, like hitting the soda machine every morning at 10:30. Even if you don't like any of these things about your life and firmly believe they're doing something dramatic like stealing your soul, it generally takes a severe shock--like a layoff or a job offer--to jolt you out of that security. Besides which, in terms of your soul, I've found it better to be bluntly honest in terms of blame: how can they steal what you're already giving away?