You know, these days, I can remember strolling down stairs one fine hung over Sunday morning at the ripe old age of nineteen. Being a college sophomore and, well, Irish, I did what any fine young lad should do the night before: got shit housed.

I remember hearing my sister who was a few years out of college ramble on about how she had just been promoted, but work had gotten, “kind of depressing”. I sat there grilling about six pieces of toast thinking to myself “ I stuff bread in my stomach it will somehow absorb the alcohol and take the sharp pains out of my frigging head,” but, besides that, thinking to myself, “what the hell is this chick babbling on about? She majored in economics, what did she think she was gonna be? Indiana Fricken Jones?” I firmly set out to avidly avoid any corporate sell out career path and promptly skipped the business section of the course guide. Instead, I majored in history and criminal justice, thinking I could either go to law school, become an archaeologist, or perhaps gunfight with drug dealers. Something inherently badass was in my future.

Flash forward seven years later. Monday morning. 6 AM. Have to leave in an hour. Wake up, throw alarm clock at pile of magazines.

6:45. Finally roll out of bed. Look at Moneyball on the floor. Read two pages. Think about how this guy spent a portion of his life writing about baseball and I’m about to strap on my fag suit and best shit-eating grin to go to some place I hate. Promptly throw Moneyball at same pile of magazines.

7 AM. Time to leave. Log on to email. Read and respond to cute bartender who thinks I’m funny. Watch Youtube videos of sports fans fighting at games.

7:30. Running late. Go to get ice coffee. Look at obnoxiously long drive in line, and decide to wait in that and listen to radio instead of walking my lazy ass in.

Walk in to work late. Asked why I’m late. Respond, “because I didn’t get here on time”. Make peace with fact that this response will likely not advance my career. Sit down at cubicle. Toss homemade sandwich into top drawer, because I suddenly realize that I don’t even give a shit to put it in the fridge. Cold or disgustingly warm, the damn thing will suck anyway. Stare at Tom Brady and Jon Papelbon figures in cubicle for inspiration. Get depressed. Log in to system. Move papers I don’t want to work on. Realize I got notices that are virtually meaningless that I don’t even want to respond to; shred said notices. I then spend about an hour and a half clicking between my work screen and fantasy baseball wondering how the hell to save my team’s season when my two best third basemen are out for the year. Walk to the bathroom, stroll past “company guy” co-worker. He asks how I’m doing. I respond, “livin’ the dream”. He gives me awkward look and responds, “having fun, huh”. Look back with maniacal death stare and say in straightest face possible, “ALWAYS”.

Spend twenty minutes on the shitter reading sports transactions while pretending to take the Browns to the Super bowl. Return to work for about an hour or so. Give up. Start researching vacation packages to see where the Vikings lived. Run across “Viking Resort” which is essentially a sex club. Realize they offer a $7800 package that guarantees two women of your choice every night.

Realize there are bigger losers than me out there.

Re-energized. Do about another hour of work. Realize that I have this blinking red file that I haven’t looked at in three months and will probably get me fired if I don’t finally do it. Instead, go to sporcle.com and start quiz naming every NFL MVP ever. Slap myself so hard girl next to me hears it and asks what’s going on, did I screw something up? Respond with, “How the hell did I forget Eric Dickerson?” Fake an hour of work by moving things around and walking back and forth to the mailboxes. Go to movie and music store at lunch. Feel the awkward stare of the people my age making half what I do judging me for being a sell- out. Mentally agree and avoid eye contact. Go buy John Wayne movie since I realize I need to figure out how to get my nuts back. Return to work. An hour passes. Decide to rebound from my failure to name all the Batman villains in quiz by taking on quiz to name the top then rated TV shows in every decade since the 70s. Fail again. Refuse to believe Magnum, P.I. was not in the top 10. Get really pissed off when phone keeps ringing. Finally answer. Response to phone conversation goes something like this:

“Oh, let me stop you there, I can tell by the file number, that’s on the old system, and I can’t access that right now…Oh, I don’t know, I can’t get into the old system, for some reason I couldn’t log in today….No, I’m not sure what’s wrong, I haven’t actually asked anyone…well, I can’t say when it would be fixed, like I said, I haven’t even talked to anyone about it, so I’m not sure if its broke, could just be me….ya, ya, well, listen, why don’t you call back next week, I don’t want to tell you I’ll call you back and then forget or something”.

Hang up phone. Tell my friend, “Can you believe that bitch? She told me it was need to know information? Really? It’s frigging insurance crap. Need to know information involves your nuts, jumper cables, and a car battery”. Hear friend’s manager walk up behind me to inform us that they are monitoring phone calls. Thank her and tell her it’s been a pleasure working with her, because, “guess I won’t be around much longer”.

What the hell happened to me? I went into college all bright eyed thinking I’d actually do something. Instead I’m surfing the internet, developing office physique, and taking mediocrity to new levels. All while under the watchful hell of those goddamn fluorescent lights and that awful re-circulated air. I thought I was going to be Indiana Jones or something. How the hell did I end up here?

“25 grand is simply not enough money for me to get shot dead in some ghetto.  I will call ‘em back when they raise the starting salary back to a living wage.”

This is what I told my mother when I was fresh out of college, waiting tables for cash and a 3.30 an hour paycheck at a local greasy spoon and pretending to apply for jobs post-college.  I was twisting in the wind, failing to land publishing positions and uninterested in selling insurance, knives, or the Yellow Pages (yes, people still do that).  I had just taken the NYPD test because I figured it provided an opportunity to ward off my parent’s exhortations that I make a career decision pronto.  I simply wasn’t into it. As far as I was concerned, waiting tables and drinking Negro Modelos on the public beach at 3 o’clock in the afternoon after a day shift was all I needed in life, until I decided to write the next classic American novel. After all, it worked for Kerouac and Thompson.

Anyway, I could never be a cop. Cops get drug tested. Cops wear stupid haircuts. Cops berate kids on the beach just looking to have a good time for drinking a couple of beers and starting a bonfire. Cops are “that guy.” No one wants to be “that guy.”

Fast forward to 2009; I’m a salesman, like every coasting, middle class American male my age who never made a decision. I sling telephone systems and voicemail systems to small and miniature sized businesses in the five boroughs. Because of the recession most of my business has been the latter, and so I carry my demo set wherever it takes me in hopes of convincing customers to buy five to ten phones at a time from me so that I might be able to afford groceries this month.  Five sales a month keeps me in the black, and I’ve got two knocked out for the week, as I proceed with cautious optimism to the grimiest sections of Brooklyn to meet with some non-profits of note that have cash to burn in the immediate future.

Meetings one and two go on without a hitch and I’m soaring in my head. I realize that while the next month may be another one spent eating Chef Boyardee, spaghetti, and peanut butter and jelly, September will be prosperous. I will be able to go out regularly like I did pre-recession without bean counting, and maybe I will even develop a weight problem to worry about as a result. I never thought that would be welcome.  Things are looking up!

I quickly exit the subway station at Rockaway Boulevard and realize I’m not in Kansas anymore.  A short view of the landscape reveals a few crack heads and welfare moms. I am somewhat unphased, because I’m a 6-4, 200 pound man who has taken a beating or two in his lifetime and I carry a large screwdriver that I might use as a weapon should trouble approach. None seems to be approaching. I pull out my iPhone and discreetly begin checking the GPS, and in moments I arrive at my destination.

After a quick survey of job site 1 I begin searching for directions to job site 2 and I find them. I proceed west only to find a structural disconnect between the maps direction and the way the streets flow. I hold my phone up in front of my face and being proceeding like one giant sore thumb towards the intersection.  Somewhere, a “lost white boy” signal must have alerted the neighborhood.  Across the street, two elderly men sitting in front of a garage beckon me. “Say hey whiteboy, don’t be walkin over there, dem brothas is trouble” is what they say, and unfortunately, I continue walking , and what they say doesn’t register until one of the four fine young gentleman across the street screams “ayyo white boy, let me git a look atchyo phone.”

It is in moments like these when the shitpile that is my worthless lower middle class mid 20’s life reveals itself to me.  Here I stood on a corner in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, outside of Crown Fried Chicken and across from a community garden built where no one felt it worthwhile to erect a building after the last one likely collapsed, demo phone kit in my bag. I am holding up an iPhone that I could never afford were it not gifted to me in celebration of my 27^th year of mediocrity on this planet and might as well be screaming “rob me, please,” and wearing a pink shirt that says “easy mark.” I am quickly, predictably, approached by four “urban youths” in doo rags and team caps whose only occupation seemed to be beating down white stiffs like me. So… I did what any red-blooded, 6-4 200 pound American male with an improvised weapon in his possession would do in the face of such odds…

I sprinted to the subway station 5o yards away and didn’t look back until I was safely seated next to a friendly looking old woman on the C train with the grandma glasses and the white knit sweater over her shoulders.  I called the customer and relayed the afternoon’s events to them. They were not sympathetic. “What kind of a retard stands on a corner in the ghetto sticking his PDA up in the air for all to see?” Needless to say I did not get the sale as a result of my inability to survey “Site 2.” Another wasted opportunity.

You can mock me for my behavior, and you could call me less of a man, and you’d probably be right.  I’ve been kicked around and my life hasn’t turned out the way I wanted. I have a job I hate and bills that I can barely pay, and I visit the bank of mom a little too often for my liking and I can barely afford to take my girlfriend out for ice cream. I haven’t authored the great American novel and I probably never will. This is nothing more than another sad event in what’s been a fairly underwhelming life, and I guess you can say I acted rather predictably; you can say all that, and you’d be right, but in the end, I can hold my head high knowing that I’m a man of principal, because I stood by my pledge:

“There’s just no way I’m getting shot dead in some ghetto for 25,000 a year.”

You got the confirmation. Welcome to Corporate America! It doesn’t matter who you work for because you now have health insurance and a steady paycheck. This may not be your dream job but now you can get screened for sexual diseases in the comfort of your in-network doctor’s office. Life is good. This is your first corporate job and before you lay your clothes out to work like this is junior high, this is what you can expect in corporate America.

Fat Asses
A nice fat ass would probably make you think this is an article enforcing the joys of corporate America. This isn’t that kind of ass and that kind of article. I’m talking FAT asses. Asses so fat you could comfortably rest a champagne glass on it while he/she is standing. At first, that would be hilarious, but weird gi-normous asses have limited appeal like freak shows. These rumps might seem tempting to snack into like Christmas hams but the massive rolls accompanying them will make you feel like you’re raping the Michelin Man. The fat asses in corporate America are glaringly scary. If you’re a woman, expect to grow one of these. If you’re a man, settle someone down, quick.

Self-Loathing
As you go through the rounds of conversing with your new colleagues, you will see a common personality in every cube row. That character trait is self-loathing. Corporate America is full of people who hate themselves. Your smile will be chalked up to being the new guy, similar to the soft untarnished skin of a new inmate. Your coworkers have given up on being happy. You can spot a self-loather by the constant frown they have smacked across their face. If you ever ask them about their weekend, they drone on about their kids and the issues they had in taking care of them. The self-loather has the power to make you hate his/her life along with your own. Ironically, the self-loather lives by a quote about happiness. Sadly, they can’t live by it so everything is miserable on their end. As you see them each week, you can only hope that one Monday they won’t show up as their general outlook finally caused them to go down the road as opposed to across the river.

Irrational Decision Making
Let’s say you have a small business where the staff consists of six people. Your staff is needed for a business meeting located a hundred miles away. At most, you will need one laptop bag as everything is online these days. You are put in charge of providing transportation. If you rented a Greyhound bus for this business meeting, you would be fired. In corporate America, these types of foolish decisions are made every day. The money isn’t accounted for so the value of the employee’s worth is lost. For example, in your corporate job, you can expect to find an employee photocopying for 5 hours (at their pay rate of $20/hr) instead of outsourcing it to a copy shop for $35. It doesn’t make sense or dollars. You will see this everywhere. Don’t bother questioning your boss about irrational decision making because it would be the equivalent of whipping out your junk and peeing on a monkey, you will have your junk ripped off and handed to you. If you decide to say something, be sure your resume is polished to reflect your newly lost job. This is corporate America, you don’t ask questions.

Is it all that bad? Yes. I work in a corporate job and my only respite is a morning beat off session and imagining what it would be like to balance a glass of champagne on a fat ass. However, the hours of 9-5 don’t define me. If you value any semblance of your life, you will find a creative outlet that you can one day turn into a profit or a crippling drinking habit your future son can use to profit off as a tell all biography.

As you enter the working world, the language you are accustomed to using in an email will be replaced with politically correct business terms.  Here are five terms you should understand before clicking send.

We’ll Discuss
This term is usually handed down from a superior. Despite being two simple words meaning conversation there will be no discussion.  Instead, your boss will be yelling at you in the near future.  The only words that will come out of your mouth will be “okay” with a side of “my apologies” to finalize the point that you are the one on the bottom and your boss is on top of you more than an ugly hairdo at the Lemon Tree.  Ebonics Translation: “Eh mothafucka, next time I see you, Imma make you hold mah pocket”

Thanks in Advance
The beauty about this term is that it is two fold in its meaning.  The sender is expecting the recipient to get the task at hand done.  In addition, the recipient better not expect a conclusive thank you as this formality has already been handled like receiving fellatio before but not after intercourse.  This term is generally reserved for pricks who think they are too important to take the time to thank someone and people who punch their kids without reason.  Ebonics Translation: “Jus get dis shit done already.”

Going forward
You will quickly learn that everyone in the corporate world is looking out for themselves; this expression is the no fault clause people enact when they don’t want to take the blame like Nazis sneaking into the United States after WWII. It is a way of setting a new rule for something you had no idea about in the first place.  When someone drops this bullshit, sit back and realize that you aren’t to blame. If they don’t cover their ass with this nonsense in an email, they will have two tickets to a shit show they will gladly take you to.  Ebonics Translation: “Eh yo, dis is how is gonna be”

Despite the forgoing
In the real world, this doesn’t exist. In the corporate world, this phrase is used more than that box of tissues next to your friend’s bed which he claims is for blowing his nose but you haven’t seen him catch a cold in the eight years you’ve known him.  Scan every long email towards the bottom from this saying on as a means of saving you time. You can safely ignore everything said before this business colloquialism (which is 95% of the email) and use the 5% as the answer you are looking for.  Ebonics Translation: “Imma do me, son”

Please Advise
If you have no idea what is going on, this term will get you clarification like the doctor saying, “everything came out positive, except the AIDS test because it was negative in a good way” If something was supposed to get done and you need to send out a second email, this is the politically correct way of asking that this should be taken care of as soon as possible like an abortion or mailing out the utility bill. This term is closely related to the widely used net term, “wtf?” Ebonics Translation: “Let a brother/bitch know! Aight?”

It is guaranteed you will encounter one of these five phrases every time you open your email inbox.  If they make their way into your normal conversation and you don’t feel like sucking down 9mm, then you can safely embrace the fact you will be a successful corporate drone. If they don’t, you might have some shred of a personality that is greater than corporate email.  Either way, welcome to your inbox! The only box worse than your coffin.

Mondays are not unlike the crippled ginger love-child of Dane Cook and Carlos Mencia; they’re hated by everyone, and for good reason. Mondays are when we realize that we’re stuck with four more days of Debbie/Cathy/Carol/Eileen playing Sarah Maclachlan on adult alternative radio from her neighboring cubicle, gabbing it up with every other Debbie/Cathy/Carol/Eileen about American Idol when all you want is for her to waddle her fat clerical ass down to the supply cabinet and fetch you some paper clips, because you’ve got chains to make.

Mondays are when you try to kill half an hour in the stink of the office bathroom, lamenting not packing up all your crap and moving to Fiji to start your own fruit stand when you had the chance. Worst of all, Mondays are when new episodes of Two and Half Men air, just to remind you that even though you punched out hours ago, you haven’t escaped the Monday scourge.

This leads to a good deal of vitriol throughout the day from everybody everywhere. It leads to Facebook status updates along the lines of, “Jamie wants Mondays to die” and “Kittenpaw demands that Mondays be removed from the school week”. Now at first glance, these propositions definitely seem like something we should all get behind. In fact, it seems we’ve already started to, as there are 62 Facebook group results for a search of “Die Mondays” (Though this should be taken with a healthy grain of salt, since this includes such extraneous groups as “Rice Addicts Never Die On Mondays” and “Anal Monday Will Never Die”). But before you go writing your congressperson to get them to pass legislation to eradicate Mondays, let’s take a look at some unintended consequences that may come of this.

First let’s look at Kittenpaw’s proposal: removing Mondays from the school (or work) week. Now, would that mean that Monday would join Saturday and Sunday as part of the “weekend”? This certainly sounds nice, but it would mean that the weekend would constitute three sevenths of the week, which hardly seems like an “end”. More like nearly a second half. As such, weekend, a word we all cherish very highly, would suddenly become a misnomer. Though this seems like a fairly innocuous consequence, can we really afford to bastardize our language even further in our current world of lols and ~cUTie~♥ ♥s?

On the other hand, what if Kittenpaw’s mandate took the form of wiping Mondays out of existence entirely? This sounds pretty desirable at first glance, since we would just go from Sunday straight to Tuesday, which are both pretty solid days. But wouldn’t we wake up every “Tuesday” with at least a fleeting feeling of uneasiness, with the faintest sense that something is amiss? We could call it a Tuesday, but if it quacks like a Monday, would we just be fooling ourselves? Maybe this is actually what Monday wants to happen. I hate Mondays as much as the next guy, so I’d hate to think that Monday could be hoodwinking us like that.

More importantly, if we get rid of Mondays, then we’ll have six-day weeks, so no day will stand out as being the exact middle, or “hump”, if I may. That would mean that Wednesday would lose its “Hump Day” moniker, so I wouldn’t have an excuse to engage in some serious heavy petting with Cathy by the water cooler. I’m all for getting rid of Mondays, but not if it gets me slapped with sexual harassment charges.

Here’s another concern of mine: Throughout antiquity, man has feared the almighty power of the moon. The moon watches menacingly from a distance, toying with the tides while we slaughter virgin goats in hopes that we’ll never have to see its dark side. We even have a day of the moon, which is, of course, Monday. Now wouldn’t you be pretty pissed off if you had your very own day and some ungrateful bastards got rid of it? The moon might come hurtling at us in a violent rage, bringing about all sorts of The Day After Tomorrow terror (Or just “Tomorrow”, if today is Sunday). In fact, it seems like the moon is already pretty steamed about this whole Mondays Suck mentality. I’d argue that the negative portrayal of Mondays in Garfield is at least indirectly responsible for 2004’s Boxing Day Tsunami. Do you really wanna roll those dice?

The whole doomsday scenario sounds pretty bad, but I promise it can get infinitely worse. Brace yourself for this…

Ok, here goes. Remember “Manic Monday”, The Bangles’ 1986 hit? It’s the one that sounds like a bunch of chalkboards and horny, diseased cats in an industrial strength washing machine. If there are no Mondays, then we’d never have to hear that song again, right? WRONG. If we ditch Mondays, then a song called Manic Monday would become instantly ironic, which means it will immediately be embraced by hipsters. Eventually the hipsters will stop blasting it from their ‘ostensibly’ ironic Hello Kitty Walkmen, but only because they’re sick at how horribly popular it’s become. By that point the Bangles will be selling out Giants Stadium. Kanye will sample the song as part of his collaborative venture with Bob Dylan, allowing for the song to be played on just about every genre of radio station. A video of Barack Obama dancing awkwardly to the song will storm through the internet, getting forwarded from cubicle to cubicle. And I’ll come into work and Debbie will be trying her best to imitate the awkward dance, as Carol laughs menacingly. They’ll both grab me with their pudgy fingers and make me dance awkwardly with them, singing along to The Bangles all the while. And I’ll collapse to the floor, wallowing in my own tears as I pray for the moon to have enough mercy to end this hell we’ve created.

So next time you feel the urge to wish death upon Monday, remember that things could be infinitely worse. It seems like Mondays are certainly a necessary evil. Plus, Anal Monday sounds like a pretty sweet time.