*This post may contain affiliate links. This just means that if you buy something listed here, I make a little bit of beer (or dessert) money.
My dear readers. Welcome back.
I have a large collection of photos that I want to share with you along with some short stories that I hope will make you laugh, at least a little. A snort if I’m lucky.
I want to say something off the bat so nobody gets me wrong here. I am a hard worker. My last place of employment could be extremely demanding at times, and at other times, some people went out into the world (or conference room 6C) and left what they consider to be gifts behind. It was probably good for team morale.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. But in all reality, I think it did keep us all smiling and friendly even on our worst of days.
Basically what is coming up took place between my friend “LT” and I. We are on the same level I think maturity wise (haha) and some of the shit we’d do to each other would sometimes send one of us to the bathroom laughing and needing to save our pants in an urgent kind of way.
Here is our story of our year together that was filled with absolute shenanigans, while simultaneously getting shit done.
New Last Name
As many of you know, in September 2014, Sammy and I got married. I was off of work for something like 8 days and came back with a new last name: Kliewer, pronounced Klee-ver for anyone that doesn’t know. I allowed LT eight whole days to print and cut out a whole bunch of little June Cleavers. I came back to pictures of June Cleaver taped on my phone, on my shelf, on my computer. This one was my favorite for obvious reasons.
It’s 100% accurate considering the Long Island variety is the only tea I’ll drink. Although June Cleaver was an angel and I swear like a sailor, and the only pearl necklace I know and love is my very special orange and maroon gift from a good friend, I appreciated this all the same.
Whiteboard Artistry
Brace yourself for this one…
It all started with Stewie.
*Some mystery person* just decided to draw Stewie Griffin from Family Guy in a conference room one afternoon. Stewie was left behind to overlook this meeting, and the one after that, and the one after that.
At some point, considering it was around Christmas time and the Muzak Christmas station I’m sure was driving everyone to drink and bang our heads into a cement wall, because that’s what the Food Lion Muzak does when you hear Taylor swift 18 times per shift, a character got added to the board.
The Grinch and Stewie Griffin. Two cynical, plotting bastards living together on one white board. Imagine that!
After this, it would appear that the mystery artist couldn’t stop. Spreading Christmas cheer one character at a time.
This one is admittedly terrible. But it was probably a real weird Wednesday.
Side note, my boss’s boss was named Mike and he was always cheerful and nice to me. I decided to print off a little gem for him and I left it tacked to his cube mysteriously one afternoon.
I never did hear him talk about it, so I wasn’t sure he had noticed it. One day I was in his cube, I had to ask on my way out, hey look! There’s a camel on your wall?! He told me that he had no idea where it came from but it makes him smile every time he sees it. I knew I couldn’t tell him just yet that it was me. It was way more fun as a mystery.
Mystery artist has a sense of humor, I gather.
And they must enjoy Looney Tunes?
Lots of Looney Tunes.
And then there was the Family Guy series… since it did all start with a mean old baby with a football head named Stewie Griffin, after all.
My old boss almost had me peeing my pants one day saying something along the lines of, “we were about 30 head in conference room C, and everyone was sitting at the table waiting on the host of the meeting to start. All we could look at was Glenn Quagmire on the whiteboard. The meeting host went up to write something on the board, and everyone was holding their breath wondering if he’d erase it or respect the art. As it turns out, he respected the art and wrote his meeting notes beside it, not that anyone could focus on them while we were getting Giggity’d!”
They got “Giggity’d”. That’s a new one.
And I love it.
Peter and Lois had their time to shine too in case anyone is wondering, but photos were not captured.
Ren and Stimpy, without question the absolute weirdest cartoon ever made, but it must hold a special place in the mystery artist’s heart. Just a guess.
Snoopy was interactive. He was alone, with his hat and his Christmas gift.
Then another person came along and gave him a doghouse with flowers, and wrote “hello” above him. Teamwork!
Homer was alone at first too. Then someone in a different meeting added to him by drawing his daydream about a donut since one of his signature quotes is “mmm, donuts!” It was the circle of art and the season of giving.
There were others that weren’t captured, but you get the gist.
What kind of weirdo would do such a thing?
The Mailbox Series
Right off the bat, if you haven’t seen the original SNL Turd Ferguson skit with Norm Macdonald as Burt Reynolds, Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek, Jimmy Fallon as French Stewart, and Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery, you should spend the next six and a half minutes watching it.
I’m serious, watch the video!
Go on, I’ll wait.
… And now that you’ve been enlightened, let’s continue.
One day I realized I had access to a label maker at work, and the wheels started turning. Nobody should probably ever give me access to a label maker. You never know what you’ll find as a result.
LT had a mailbox right around the corner from my desk, so I secretly renamed it with a Turd Ferguson label. This prompted a series of events to happen.
-
The Email
One of the girls who actually delivered all the Construction plans to those who needed them was a complete and total sweetheart who just did not know that this was for comic relief. She came across the odd mailbox one day with an even stranger name on it. It threw her off. She had to ask around…
You guys? I died when I received these emails. It was taking Turd Ferguson wayyyy too seriously in the best way possible.
Also, “Taylor” that my boss was referring to in the second email was a joke because I bitched all. the. time. about the incessant amounts of Taylor Swift that would play on the Muzak. I mean she was really beginning to seep into my dreams and pierce my soul. Many a work shift ended the moment I would hear my fourth or fifth Swifty song of the day. It was like the dinner bell. Taylor’s voice had me checked out, man.
It also probably didn’t help that some days I would come in to work and the red light on my desk phone would be glaring at me indicating a voicemail. It would be message after message of LT pretending to have some Far East accent claiming he was trying to reach the president of the Taylor Swift Fan Club and he was given my number.
2. The New Hire
I decided to act like Turd Ferguson really was a new hire. (Why not?) We had an office admin over our entire floor, and everyone knew her, and her procedure for new hires was to send out an email with a photo and a brief description so people can learn a little about them. I took her format and ran with it:
LT was Turd for a few weeks, but then his sixth floor identity started changing every Thursday…
This one was a suggestion made to me by someone else, for the record!! Bad, I know.
But some were worse.
Yikes.
Poopin’
Like lots of places, it is against the rules to leave your computer unlocked when you walk away from your desk due to guidelines in place for protecting the information contained on it.
It is soooo easy to forget.
But it’s real easy to remember when people keep coming behind you while you’re gone and sending emails out to other people that say “I’m poopin’!” without your knowledge.
You would never know the deed had been done until someone would write back like “thanks for sharing”. This one was not my idea, but it caught on among our group and evolved into a real art.
LOCK IT UP, every time.
RG3
When I first started my job in the Construction department, I would pass by the cube of a nice man named Robert Griffin every single day on the way to my own cube. As a Redskins fan, I couldn’t just NOT do anything in this fantastic situation that I had been presented with. Someone told me he even was a Skins fan and I knew it. was. on.
I cut out the Roman numeral III in colors that were similar to his nametag and I taped it after his name to make him Robert Griffin, III just like the ex-starting QB for the Skins. I even cut him out a Skins logo of a football helmet and added that for extra flair. I did not tell hardly anyone that it was me that did this, and Robert left it up there for everyone to see for months until he finally removed it.
Falling right into the trap, one day I pointed out that he had taken his fan art down. He said, “yeah, well I figure it’ll make the person who did it come forward.” I thought for about 2 seconds before I blurted out, “okay, I did it!”
It was a full success since he liked it and left it, and RG3 he always will be.
Ball{oon}sack
This one time, a large team of awesome people completely ROCKED out this large-scale IT project and a few of us were asked to put together a celebration party to let the whole company know. I found us a balloon vendor who made us a balloon arch and many other bunches of balloons that were held to the floor with two sandbags each.
Made out of a couple balloons filled with sand but tied together at the top.
Can you picture what this might look like?
If not, let me just show you.
Your dirty mind at work yet? It should be.
These guys would magically appear on desks and in office chairs when you were unsuspecting. The traveling office ball{oon}sack was shared by many.
And my final tip for how to brighten someone’s day at work…
Just randomly Google “mullet” and pick your favorite image. Insert into an email to someone who will find it funny, and title “Open Me!”
Mullets can truly make every bad day better. Fact.
It’s science.
I am still laughing. You had a lot of fun in spite of a stressful work environment! And it was fun to re-visit with Turd Ferguson.