Dear Andy:
“My name is Sunshine P. and I’m a junior geophysicist for a Vancouver-based startup E&P company looking to explore for dry gas in western Canada. My employer recently forced staff back to the office, but I’d much rather work from home as I’ve been doing for the last 14 months. I don’t want to lose my job, but I don’t know what to do. Begging for help.” – Sunshine P.
Dear Sunshine:
Okay here’s the deal. First of all, your name is Sunshine and you live in Vancouver? Oh… there’s no way your granola folks have never smoked grass… no way! Second of all… WAIT!!! You’re a rookie geophysicist working for a startup that’s exploring for dry gas in Canada? WTF? How are you even working? HOW IS YOUR COMPANY EVEN AROUND? Be honest with me, it’s a money laundering front, huh? You guys could generate more revenue returning empties at the bottle depot than prospecting for and producing dry gas! Okay, okay… back to why you wrote to me… COVID royally sucks balls. But one great side effect and bonus for slacker employees is to “work” from home for over a year! We all knew it wasn’t gonna last forever, and you’re one of the first casualties of the WFH scene. But worry not, Sunshine, I can help. I’ve coached a number of people through a back to the office transition using the tried, tested, and true techniques below.
1) More Coughy Please – Hack up a lung whenever you’re around anybody in the office, especially in the kitchen near the coffee machine and water cooler. And when I say cough, I’m talking cough like you’re trying to wake-up the dead. Dig deep. It starts from the diaphragm. The idea is that you cough so hard that your disposable mask will fly 7’ in front of you. When your coworkers report that cough to HR, you’ll be outta there like a fat kid playing dodgeball.
2) Where’s the Sunshine – Carefully place a blow up doll in your office chair – one that you’ve re-engineered with sound-activated movement and mumbling. Considering you work for a startup exploring for dry gas in the WCSB, you HAVE to be surrounded by clueless idiots who won’t even notice it’s not you. Meanwhile, you’re at home munching on Cheetos and checking out Playgirl centrefolds. Bonus points for placing a fake steaming cup of coffee in your doll’s hand.
3) 🎵 Talk like an en-gin-eer 🎤 – Remember that nauseatingly annoying tune from back in the day Walk like an Egyptian sang by a bunch of hotties? Remember how nauseatingly annoying the engineers in your office are? Well, I’m no rocket surgeon, but if you put 2 super annoying things together then the result will be inversely proportional to the cube root of the distance between here and the Sun. So let’s get at it. This one will take some prep before it really starts to kick in. To make this “be like an engineer” thing real, you’ll have to completely ignore personal hygiene (I’m talking don’t shower, don’t brush your teeth… nothing). After about 3 weeks you’ll really start to look and smell like an engineer. Once you get to this state, walk around the office with a rented HP-48GX calculator and some graph paper mumbling incoherently under your breath. They will send you home, or to a head-shrink, before you know it. This is guaranteed.
So there you go, Sunshine P., all the best. And if these techniques don’t work for you in your back to the office transition, then perhaps our readers will suggest their own ideas on what they plan to do when it’s time to hop on the loser cruiser and head back downtown.
Andy Killinger, Staff Counsellor 2P News