Bitter Post

For those of you who have never worked a menial job, one where you spend your days doing things below your intelligence level I will provide a few examples below of my particular recent experiences.

Note: For anyone not aware, I work in a fairly good sized corporate office in Los Angeles; I am an office assistant/receptionist.

Toner

We live in a modern world. It's hard to imagine that a working professional, with a degree, would need assistance with identifying, locating and installing toner for a basic desk printer. But as it would seem it is clearly a difficult task that involves my advanced knowledge. I have on numerous occasions had to assistant (read: do it for them) people in this basic office task. It usually goes something like this; I receive an email from someone saying their toner is out and that they can't fine more, I respond letting them know where they can locate said toner, they respond again saying they looked but it does not seem to be there, I walk into supply room, find toner right away and bring it to them. There is nothing like having to paint a detailed picture of what a box of toner looks like to make you lose faith in humanity.

Candy

Candy is fairly straight forward thing, it's generally unassuming and easy to handle. I don't think there are many issues in the history of the world that revolve around candy. Of the few that do however, it seems a great number of them take place in my office. We have at the reception desk a bowl of hard candy - just the general stuff, mints, jolly ranchers, caramels, etc. If I had to describe this bowl of candy in one word, given the circumstances, I would say: innocent. But this bowl of candy has been thrown into what I know will be a ridicules discussion that will go on far to long and likely end with little to no resolution, and oh yeah it will be about candy. One of the executives in my office has, for awhile, been suggesting that we get different candy. Apparently they have nothing else to do but think about how the candy selection in the office could be improved - I'm starting to think that I could run a real estate office. So I casually emailed my boss (the office manager) today, saying that this person had suggested that I order a different variety and I just wanted to let her know before I put in the order. This was done as more of a courtesy, as my boss needs to be 'in the loop'. She responds that I should hold off so that she can follow up with the executive to see what specifically she would like to see replaced and what we should order instead. That's right, we need to have a discussion, that will involve higher ups in the company, about which types of hard candy we will be ordering. Who would have thought that Werther's would be such a hot topic

Desk

Some of menial things I do to fill my day are self initiated. I don't have a lot to do, what can I say. Today I spent a part of my afternoon cleaning out the pencil cup on my desk. I discovered that a pen had exploded and now covered most of the pens in a red ink. You might think that the most logical step would be to throw away the pencil cup as they are generally quite cheap, I however chose to clean it. I removed all the pens, washed the cup in the sink and spent a good amount of time cleaning each pen and pencil before I returned it to the cup. Somewhere in this process I was overcome with a feeling of dread as I realized...this is my life. If I ever needed proof that my degree was going to waste, I got just it today.