After a week of silence, you might be asking yourself "Where's Enke?"

Enke's got sidetracked with some other stuff and entered a short term shame spiral for neglecting his readers.

Enke's ship has been righted. Expect his regular return no later than next week.

Thanks for keeping the faith.

Matt's art dealer friend showed up Tuesday night to check out the mummy. He had a moustache with a little goatee and shoulder length hair cut straight at the shoulders.

It made him look like Robin Hood.

He said he might be able to move it, but the foul odor and salsa stains were going to make it difficult. He said he'd make some calls and get in touch with us yesterday. He never did.

The mummy's gotten better about leaving the volume on the TV at an acceptable level and he doesn't usually break stuff in the cabinets if we leave him some food before we go to bed. Matt got hooked up with a couple cases of fruit snacks and the mummy seems to like those, so I think we're in the clear for the time being.

Yesterday they moved Oscar to the cube in front of Angela. The desk is right under the heating vent and Oscar's really fat, so he spent all yesterday bitching about the heat.

At one point he said he was "hotter than a ten peckered mink". Later, he said the heat was drying him up "like a camel's cunt".

They might as well have moved Oscar's desk right into HR.

This mummy sucks.

On Thursday the cops came because "we" were watching a 'Planet of the Apes' marathon with the volume all the way up.

We kept them waiting at the door for way too long as it took us awhile to distinguish 'cop banging at the door' noise with 'mummy ripping the fixtures out of the kitchen walls' noise.

When we finally determined the source of the noise to be police at the door, we rock-paper-scissored it to see who would go out to talk to the cops while the other two were subduing the mummy.

I 'won'.

I got out and the Chinese family from upstairs and body builders from the downstairs were standing behind two very pissed off looking police officers. One of the cops asked why it took me so long to answer the door, and I told him I was sleeping.

He told me I was lucky because the people behind him hadn't been able to get to sleep on account of the noise coming from my apartment. He told me to tell whoever had the TV on to keep it down or they were going to come back an issue a citation.

I heard bottles breaking as I shut the door behind me.

I walked into the kitchen to see the mummy standing in front of the fridge with half the contents emptied out on the floor. A couple of pickles were laying in a pool of broken glass and brine. The mummy was standing on a tube of mustard with its face stuck in a jar of mayonnaise.

Gerald said it went for the fridge the instant they turned the TV off.

Matt taped up the volume button on the remote so it wouldn't work. We didn't have any problems for the rest of the night.

The next day Gerald and I went through work half asleep. I could hear Angela making wedding plans all day.

First she called up the bakery to talk about the cake. Then she called her fiance to talk about the cake. She accused her fiance of not caring about the cake and not caring about the wedding. Then she called her mom to cry about her fiance, and then went off to the bathroom for 30 minutes for the assumed purpose of crying some more.

Sue came by and asked where she was. Gerald said she looked drunk when she got in.

When we got home that night it smelled like the mummy had pooped in its wrapper. We weren't sure whether it was actual poo or whether the thing just stunk from all the food sitting in its body undigested.

We wanted to change its bandages so it would stink less, but Matt's antiquities trader friend is supposedly coming over Tuesday to take the thing away (hopefully).

On Saturday we found out the mummy had changed our Tivo settings and we had about 10 hours of QVC saved to it. We ended up getting a bottle of Tequila and watching it with him. I think we might have even had him answer the door when the pizza came.

Somehow, between the booze and the sleep deprivation, we've found a way to live normally around a 3,000 year old man that smells like a dumpster watching the same 10 hours of people peddling collectible dolls and antique swords for 30 hours straight.

Gerald's even gotten comfortable enough to take advantage of the situation. He blamed the mummy for his dirty dishes and all the pornos that showed up on our cable bill this month.

He's also been saying, "Mummy - kill!" when he sees someone he doesn't like on TV. Matt and I both wince every time he says it, but it seems to crack Gerald up pretty good.

So far, he's put hits out on Rachel Ray, Dr. Phil, this lady from a Febreeze commercial, Ryan Seacrest, Anderson Cooper, and the Hamburglar.

I've told Gerald there's blood on his hands if any of them end up dead.

Matt's friend will be here tomorrow to look at our friend, so we ordered pizza to celebrate. We got the mummy a jar of queso and a 2 liter of creme soda from the dollar bin at the supermarket.

Might as well send him off in style.

Last night Gerald, Matt and I barricaded ourselves in the room again. We didn't want to be accessible when the mummy found out we locked the cabinet with all the snacks in it.

This time, he watched old war movies with the volume turned up all the way.

We got up this morning to find one of the cabinet doors hanging off the other by the baby lock Matt had put on. The mummy had consumer a jar of salsa and half a container of powdered cocoa mix.

He was laying in the box right where we left him. There was a salsa stain on one of his bandages.

When we got into work, we rode the elevator up with this guy who works on our floor with the blind guy who hates the animal lover. He always asks us if we just started and then introduces himself like we've never met before.

Gerald thinks he suffered some type of brain injury that keeps him from forming new memories. Today I told him my name was Clarence.

When we got home, Matt was standing in our doorway talking with two of the upstairs neighbors. It was a little girl and her grandmother, who only speaks Chinese.

The grandmother would yell at Matt, and the little girl would translate for her. It was pretty funny, as the girl kept acting out her grandmother's mannerisms as she translated.

They were complaining about the noise and said they'd call the cops tonight if it happened again.

Matt said we should write the mummy a note, but I wasn't entirely sure he could read. If he could, I assumed he could only read heiroglyphics, and I can't imagine there's a glyph for "television".

We ended up drawing a picture that showed a TV with jagged lines coming out of it to symbolize sound and a stick figure holding his hands over what would be his ears. I hope this gets the message across.

Last night the mummy kept us up watching the Game Show Network. There was a Price is Right marathon on.

I've had the theme stuck in my head all day. I would have been happier if that mummy had strangled us.

We were all too afraid to go out and tell him to turn it down. No one wanted to see that mummy watching TV with his dried up eyes.

When the morning came, we walked outside to find the mummy in the box right where we left him. It looked like he had trashed the rest of the apartment.

There was an open box of Oreos and a bunch of half eaten cookies on the table. Beside it was an empty carton of milk.

It looked like he had been drinking it right out of the container.

We went into the kitchen to find a bunch of tortilla chips and Cheerios scattered across the floor. This mummy is a total slob.

Gerald and I had to get to work, so Matt said he'd clean up. I thought it was only fair, as he was the one who wanted to keep the stupid thing.

Gerald and I spent all day at work Googling mummies. I used a bunch of different keywords to see if I could find out who our houseguest was:

"sloppy pharoah"
"messy pharoah"
"sloppy king egypt"

etc.

All Gerald found was a place you could order Yummy Mummy cereal in bulk. That stuff has been of the market for 15 years or so and Gerald was ready to order a case of it.

I figured he'd probably eat one bowl, find out it was stale, and leave the rest of the case in the corner of the kitchen until someone threw a tablecloth on it and turned it into a wet bar or something.

I told him they took that cereal off the shelf because kids who ate it were going blind. It seemed to work.

We got home and the mummy was still in his box. Matt said he hadn't seen it move all day.

Matt had equipped all the cabinets and the fridge with those baby-proof locks in the hopes that would keep the mummy from making a mess again. I don't know why he's already doing stuff to piss the thing off, but I'm also not the one who's going to have to pick up after it.

Gerald and I got stuck driving behind a station wagon on our way to work today. There were kids in the back seat and the woman was driving real slow.

It had been awhile since I had driven behind a station wagon, and I forgot how awkward it was to drive with people looking back at you. It's like going to a restaurant and being sat at a table with complete strangers.

Gerald got sick of driving behind her and started flashing his hi-beams so she'd let him pass. She started veering back and forth on the road as if she was taunting us. The kids started rocking from side to side in the back. One of them gave us the finger.

At one point, she slammed on the brakes and Gerald sped up and drove around. I saw the woman throw a Snapple bottle at us as we drove off.

When we got to the cemetary to park, I saw the station wagon pull in not too long after us. It came to a stop about 10 feet from us as we were about to hop the fence.

The woman driving had three kids in the back seat in addition to the two in the way back. The space that wasn't taken up by kids was filled with garbage.

She said, "What the fuck are you doing driving like that?" Gerald told her that wasn't any way to speak in front of her kids. She swore some more.

We hopped the fence and started walking to work. I looked up and saw Sue looking down at us.

I didn't read anything in the employee handbook about not making arrangements to park closer to the office, but I have to imagine they'd rather not have said arrangements involve a cemetary.

Sue walked by us as we walked in and didn't say anything. Either she doesn't care where we park or she's getting ready to fire us.

When Gerald and I got home, Matt was sitting in the living room with the crate on the floor in front of him. He said Mitch, the guy who took the slushy machine, had brought it back.

Mitch said he couldn't find anyone interested in a crate of fragile steak knives. I could see the crate had been pried open.

Matt said he decided to open up the crate when it came back, and said we should have a look at what's inside. He lifted off the top to reveal what looked like at first like a bunch of sliced up sheets and some large pieces of beef jerky poking out of it.

Beef jerky shaped like two hands. Beef jerky shaped like two feet. Beef jerky shaped like a head with a face.

It was a whole body of beef jerky. It was a whole body.

"That's a body," I said.

We all paused a moment. Gerald said, "That's a fucking mummy, dude!"

We all sat and stared some more. It sure looked like a mummy.

Gerald wanted to get rid of it. He said his cousin lived next to a cranberry bog, and we could dump the thing in there.

Matt said we weren't going to dump it. He knew someone who 'traded in antiquities' who'd be able to come by and have a look at it in a few days.

I wondered if this was the same person who traded in groundhog hats and slushy machines.

I told Matt I liked the cranberry bog idea better, as there was a lot less potential for getting strangled in our sleep by the undead. Matt said there was no way we could get rid of it tonight, as none of us have a car that could fit the box and we didn't have a bag we could load the mummy into.

So, the plan is to barricade ourselves overnight in my room and use tonight's success at not getting killed to forecast how the rest of the week will go.

Today Gerald got in trouble for trying to give part of his sandwich to the seeing-eye dog of this blind guy at work. I guess you're not supposed to feed them, as it keeps them 'off task' when they should be keeping their master from walking over open manholes and such.

The blind guy's job is to come around and collect the trade sheets we fill out whenever we perform a transaction on someone's account, but it seems his job also entails keeping people from bothering his dog.

He's even gone so far as to put a sign on the dog's harness that reads "Please don't feed or pet me while I'm working".

It's funny that he wrote the message as if it came from the dog, but I guess it's no more feasible that he wrote the thing himself.

Fitzy was telling me the blind guy works next to this woman named Ruth who's a real animal lover. I guess she kept buying the dogs treats and toys until the blind guy finally flipped out on her.

They had to have a meeting with HR to resolve the whole thing, and now their correspondence is limited to e-mails passed through their manager. I guess Ruth has been caught using a dog whistle on more than one occasion since.

We haven't been parking in the remote lot since Gerald rented that plot in the cemetary next door, but today someone mentioned how the "beater everyone threw their trash in" had been removed. I guess someone saw a bunch of coyotes hanging around there late one night and complained.

We got home tonight and the box was still gone. Matt said he had found someone interested in the groundhog hats, too.

It's a President's Day miracle!

We had today off from work on account of it being a market holiday. I think our company likes their customers to think we're answering calls on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and they feel shutting down the call center when the market closes maintains this illusion.

Gerald and I had a fairly uneventful day drinking beer and watching Animal Planet. After the weekend, we needed a day to decompress.

That box really scratched the hell out of our floors, but Gerald said the landlord might understand if we told him the situation. I agreed with him, only because I wanted to see him explain how the marks on our floor were caused by a haunted box we stole out of the back of someone's car.

After telling him that, I got that feeling you get after feeding peanut butter to a dog.

On Friday I told Matt he was going to have to store the steak knives in his room if he wanted to keep them. Saturday morning I found him sleeping on the couch in the living room under a bunch of towels.

He said he woke up to find the box next to his bed "chirping". He ran out of his room and was too scared to go back in for his blanket, so he ended up grabbing towels out of the bathroom for warmth.

We both decided the best thing to do was to get rid of the box, and brought it out to the curb.

That night Gerald and I went to Reynaldo and Marcia's party. We didn't really want to go, but we figured we'd head there a bit late so a crowd would have already gathered, say hi, then take off unnoticed.

Gerald said there was a bar down the street that had $5 pitchers and free hot dogs, so we could go there after.

We got there a little after 10, and the party consisted of Marcia and five people from the prison she works at. She said Reynaldo had just left to drive her cousin home and would be back in awhile.

They were all in the middle of a game of poker, so Gerald and I grabbed a beer and sat on the sofa next to the table. One of the guys was telling a story about how he paid someone $50 to take a shot of pepper spray to the face.

No one really acknowledged our presence. It was sort of like we were watching the whole party through a two way mirror.

Gerald got up after finishing his first beer. Around 30 seconds later he called me on my cell phone and said he was waiting outside. He told me to make up some excuse to get up so I could meet him out there and we could leave.

I asked Marcia where the bathroom was. She pointed in the exact opposite direction of the front door. I went into the bathroom, washed my hands, and walked back through the living room and right out of the apartment.

When I got out, Gerald said he didn't want our exit to be all awkward. I failed to see the grace in making me look like an asshole.

We went to the bar with the free hot dogs afterwards and went home to find the door to our apartment was left open. Matt wasn't home and the place smelled of old leaves.

I was taking my shoe off in the hallway when Gerald walked into the living room and asked what the box of steak knives was doing in there. I walked in to see it standing right in the middle of the room.

I wondered how in hell it got the door open.

I stood there staring for a bit while Gerald looked at me and asked again. I told him Matt and I had put it out on the curb.

He asked how it got back in the apartment then, and I said I thought it got itself back in the apartment. He laughed and asked how the thing got the door open.

I had been a bit reluctant to let Gerald in on what had gone on around the box, mostly because I didn't believe a lot of it myself. I wasn't entirely convinced it wasn't just me until Matt got spooked by the thing, too.

I explained to Gerald what happened, and told him I thought we should leave the box back out on the curb. He wanted to crack the thing open, and went looking for tools.

He ended up trying to pry it open with a hammer and a screwdriver, but ended up breaking the screwdriver in half. He said he'd keep the box in his room if it scared me that bad.

Later that night, I woke up with Gerald in my bed. He said he woke up to a thump and turned on the light to see the box move.

As he was telling the story, we heard a thump again. Then another one.

It sounded like the thing was making its way down the hall.

The rest of the night Gerald and I sat awake listening to this box thump its way around the apartment. It stopped at some point, and both of us managed to fall asleep.

When I woke up Gerald was spooning me, and Matt was standing above us asking why we brought the box back in the apartment. He didn't seem to want to cover why we were in bed together.

We walked out of my room to find the box lying diagonally in Gerald's bedroom doorway.

Matt said he had someone coming by with a truck to drop off a few TVs. The guy had is own waste disposal company, so he'd ask if he could take the crate with him.

The guy came by and asked Matt why we were getting rid of it. Matt said no one wanted to buy a crate of fragile steak knives.

Matt's buyer didn't show up for those creepy steak knives tonight, so I ended up sleeping on the couch. There's something wrong in principal with being driven out of your room by a box you believe to be haunted, but I wasn't so interested in getting into a war of ideals with possessed cutlery.

When I checked this morning, the box was laying across my bed over my pillow. I think I made the right decision.

Gerald drove to work, and let me know on the way he had made arrangements to park a bit closer than the remote lot today. We drove towards the office, and too the right before that into the cemetery behind our building.

Apparently, Gerald had the idea awhile back that he was going to play a plot owner a small fee to park on their empty spot, and one Ernest DiGiacomo was all to happy to take him up on the offer. We got a spot right in front of the fence along our parking lot, right next to Mr. DiGiacomo's late wife.

They moved Angela to the cube next to mine. She said it was too loud where she sat and asked to be moved.

Angela is marrying this guy named Joey this summer, and she beats him mercilessly. She must have called him five times over the course of the day.

"No, Joey! Call her back and tell her we want the red ones. The RED ONES!"

"Don't wait for me in the parking lot Joey. I'll call you when I get there."

"Joey, you're not listening, Joey! Joey, are you playing Tetris? ... Well, I hear the music in the background!"

As much as I've disliked working with Angela thus far, being around her sort of makes me appreciate the times she's not around more. Poor Joey doesn't have that pleasure.

Today two people were driving through the cemetery as Gerald and I hopped the fence and got into his car. I think I could have gotten a nicer look from them if I had exposed myself.

Last night I fell asleep with the crate of steak knives sitting on the floor across from my bed. I had a dream I woke up and I could hear someone crying inside the box. Matt ended up giving me this big metal spoon his grandmother brought over "from the old country", which I used to pry the crate open.

I don't know if such a spoon exists, but it made sense in the dream.

When I got it open, a man with no skin popped out and started gnawing on my arm. He said he wanted to eat my muscles.

I'm unsure how he said it while chewing on my arm, but I remember that part distinctly. I also remember being most freaked out by the fact he didn't have any lips. The "no skin" and visible musculature didn't really phase me all that much.

I woke up kind of shaken up by the whole thing to find the steak knife crate standing upright in the corner of my room. I had to sort of sit and stare at it for awhile to make sure it wasn't part of the dream. Then I heard a rattling sound that I *thought* came from inside the crate and ran for the door.

Matt's girlfriend must have been using the bathroom while I was asleep and locked the door from the other side, trapping me in my room with the definitely moving and potentially rattling crate of fragile steak knives.

I ended up climbing out on my fire escape and banging Gerald's window with a hockey stick so he could let me out of my room. I slept on the couch for the rest of the night.

It was snowing all last night and Sue sent out an e-mail before we left work letting us know the blizzard was NO EXCUSE for not showing up for work on time. Gerald and I both got up late because I wasn't sleeping near my alarm clock, and Gerald didn't have me to wake him up on time.

We got to the remote lot a little later than usual. Whoever plowed the lot had pushed all the snow around the garbage car we stole the steak knives from so all you could see was the bent door of the trunk sticking out.

A bunch of empty coffee cups and other breakfast related rubbish was stuck in the snowbank right above where the trunk would be. I guess old habits die hard.

Gerald and I got to the office a bit late, and Tom was waiting by our desks. I told him we were late on account of the storm, and he told us it wasn't snowing in California.

I told him it wasn't 9 AM in California. He went back in his desk to verify the fact.

When I got home the crate was still standing in the corner of my room along with a bunch of other boxes that weren't there when I left. Matt said his buyer couldn't make it out due to the storm, but should be here tomorrow.

He said the other boxes were surplus Groundhog Hats that were supposed to be sent to the Groundhog's Day celebration in Punxatawney, PA and ended up getting 'misrouted'. Something tells me they were misrouted off a loading dock into the back of Matt's car.

He apologized for throwing them in there and said he didn't have anywhere else to put them. He said he'd give me 15% of whatever he took in if I let him keep them there.

I said it was OK, more because I want the 15% so I can calculate what the going rate is on 600 post-holiday groundhog hats. With my luck, tonight's the night we get raided.

This morning I walked in on Matt's girlfriend while she was peeing. I turned back into my room pretty quickly and stubbed my toe real bad on that stupid crate.

It was bleeding, and I had to sit on my bed and wait for her to get done before I could get a band-aid on it.

Matt said he had a "buyer" for the steak knives coming tomorrow. I guess he gave up on waiting for the owner to come forward.

Today this guy at work was celebrating his birthday. Someone dropped a manila folder off at my desk with a card in it for me to sign.

I was one of the last people to get the card, so all the good birthday well wishes were taken ("Happy Birthday", "Happy B-Day" and "Happy [whatever your age is]st"). I think a whole lot of hand wringing could be saved if everyone would just agree to write their name under whatever salutation the card company saw fit to place on the inside.

Neither Gerald nor I knew the guy very well, so we decided to get creative. We figured they wouldn't be able to figure out which Gerald wrote what if it ever got back to us.

I wrote "May you have many more" and Gerald wrote, "Stay Gold!"

Later on they had cake for him, and Sue said we could each take shifts getting off the phone to grab a slice and bring it back to our desks with us. We don't normally have cake for birthdays, but Fitzy told me it was because he had a bout with cancer that went into remission a little over a month ago.

I guess I could have picked a better phrase than "May you have many more."

Today Gerald called out sick so he could get a doctor to check out his nose. It was still kind of purple and made a whistling sound when he breathed through it.

When I got to the remote lot, no one seemed to notice the rear of the garbage car had been smashed beyond repair. People had even been so courteous as to throw their trash in the newly opened trunk rather than resting it on the car where it could blow away.

At work everyone was asking me about Gerald. My desk is in front of the fax machine, so a lot of people like to talk to me after their fax goes through so they can continue not doing their job.

I normally don't mind, although there are times when I think I should have pigeon wire installed on the walls of my cube to keep people from leaning on them.

Reynaldo came by around lunch to tell me Marcia said she had a good time, and wanted us to come to a party at their place this coming weekend. He asked about Gerald, and said it looked like it was broken when we left the bar.

Then he told a story about seeing some guy riding a bike get whaled in the face with a softball.

When I got home from work, one of the bodybuilders on the first floor was checking his mail as I walked in. He asked if someone was doing work at our place, as he heard banging all afternoon.

I got upstairs and Matt was out, Gerald was spread out on the couch with some "tasty" painkillers (his words) he had gotten at the doctor, and the crate of steak knives had made its way from the closet to the middle of my room. It looked like Matt had tried to open it earlier that day.

I was kind of pissed he had left the crate like that, but I had spent the weekend squeezing past it to get out of my room and figured climbing over it to get into bed was the more desirable of two shitty arrangements.

I can't wait for him to sell that slushy machine.

On Friday, Matt met Gerald and I at the remote lot after work. There was this bar nearby with a mechanical bull Gerald wanted to check out, and Matt didn't want to miss out on the action.

We got there a little after 7, and there was already an hour and a half wait to ride the bull. Some guy was on it that must have weighed 300 pounds. I wasn't sure how long the bull would hold out.

The bartender told us to take a number and we'd be called up when it was our turn.

We managed to get a table with a view of the bull. Matt kept ordering pitcher after pitcher, filling up our glasses before we could finish.

I guess he's not secure enough in his alcoholism to get drunk by himself.

After about a half an hour, Gerald came to the table with Reynaldo and his girlfriend, Marcia. I guess he had run into them at the bar.

Marcia was at least 10 years older than Reynaldo, and worked as a correctional officer at a county jail. Matt kept asking her to tell stories. Most of them involved the phone and/or poo.

Reynaldo was pretty quiet the whole time.

At some point Matt ordered shots of Jack Daniels for everyone. I find the sensation of drinking Jack Daniels akin to forcing a cactus down my esophagus.

I'd rather he bought me a punch in the face.

I forced mine down and everyone except for Reynaldo finished theirs in one gulp. Reynaldo sat taking measured sips of it as if it was a glass of iced tea.

Marcia was showing Matt how to perform a thumb hold no one could get out of when Gerald's number was called. The bull was in the center of this wide pen with padding on the bottom, and everyone was hooting and hollering as Gerald walked out.

He started playing up the crowd, pointing his finger up in the air and such. Based on their condition, I think Gerald could have been out there to operate a wet/dry vac and gotten the same response.

Gerald seemed to do pretty well the first minute or so, and gave the guy operating the thing a signal to crank it up. He did.

The bull jerked a little faster, and swung Gerald forward just fast enough to meet the front as it was coming up with his nose. You could see a blur of red, which turned out to be Gerald's face when the thing slowed down.

Everyone went "oooo" at the same time. Reynaldo said he should have stayed relaxed over the bull's center of gravity.

Gerald got off and someone came out to meet him with a cloth filled with ice and then walked on to spray his blood off the bull. He tried to act unphased, but you can only play it so cool after your face explodes in front of everyone.

We decided to leave after that.

Gerald had driven that day, and when we got back to the remote lot he realized he had lost his keys. He said they must have fallen out on the bull, and he didn't want to have to go back in and walk out in the middle of the crowd to get them.

Matt asked why there was a car covered in garbage in the corner of the lot, and we told him it had been there for a week or so now.

Gerald was pushing for me to go back in the bar and get his keys for him. I told him we should probably call a cab anyways, seeing as we were all drinking. I was really more concerned with not looking like an asshole stopping everyone's mechanical bulll fun while I searched through the creases in the padding for Gerald's keys, but I made a far better point with the drinking thing.

We went back and forth on this for a minute or so, and we heard a car start up. We looked over and Gerald's garbage car was backing out of its spot towards us with Matt behind the wheel.

Apparently, Matt doesn't need keys to start a car.

Gerald looked walked around and said "See? Problem solved!" before getting in. As if nothing could possibly go wrong with three inebriated people and a stolen automobile covered in trash.

Before heading home, Matt thought it would be a good idea to hit McDonalds and then ram some shopping carts in a supermarket parking lot.

When it turned out the lot was icy, he opted to do doughnuts.

Gerald and Matt cackled in the front seat as the car spun around. The cackling stopped when the rear of the car slammed into the concrete base of a lightpost.

We all flew to the driver's side of the car. Gerald's leg had somehow wedged it's way in between Matt's underneath the steering wheel, but none of us were hurt.

I looked back and saw the trunk had popped open, and then felt like I was going to get sick.

I tried to get out of the car to puke, but the driver's side door was broken and I ended up letting loose all over the floor of the car. Gerald and Matt got out to assess the damage.

When I got out Gerald and Matt were looking at the trunk. The whole frame had been bent in so the door wouldn't shut.

In the trunk was a big crate that said:

FRAGILE
STEAK KNIVES

I've never heard of a fragile steak knife.

Matt said we ought to take the car to the remote lot an park it where we found it. He said it would look like someone hit the car while it was parked and took off.

He called his girlfriend and asked her to meet us there.

When we got there, Matt started moving the box of steak knives out of the trunk. He said they'd probably get stolen if they were left there, and we could keep them at our place until the owner came forward.

He also said he knew someone who could move them if no one showed up to claim them.

The box was really long, and Gerald and I had to lay it across our lap for the whole ride. It was pretty heavy and smelled like old leaves.

When we got home, Matt asked if I could keep the box in my closet. He was keeping a slushy machine in his.

Today the old driver picked us up at the remote lot. Gerald sat shotgun and they traded stories about Tijuana.

I sat next to Reynaldo, who I haven't really talked to since training. He said his desk is kind of isolated, as Sue keeps her door shut all of the time.

He also said a guy from the mail room uses the phone in the empty cube next to his to call his AA sponsor. Reynaldo said he heard the guy telling a story about having to go to the emergency room after drinking hairspray.

As wrong as it is, I'm glad Reynaldo doesn't know enough about anything to know not to repeat that story.

Gerald keeps hinting that we're not going to have to park in the remote lot for much longer. I don't know why he won't just come out and tell me what he has going on. It's really annoying.

My bet is his plan is for us to take the bus to work.

Manager Tom was listening in on our calls today. He was sending e-mails to me as I was talking with a caller telling me what I was saying wrong. His suggestions were full of spelling errors.

He had a big problem with your/you're and their/there/they're.

"Your pausing too long. Theirs too much dead air."

I heard him yelling at Gerald for telling callers our systems were down when they weren't.

Later on he sent out an e-mail telling people to get back on the phones, and said "WERE ARE VERY BUST". Gerald and I spent the rest of the day using the word "bust" in front of him.

"I'm sorry Tom, but I'm far to bust to QC my own trade sheets."

"I'll take a shorter break today. I know how bust we are!"

I went out with Gerald and Matt after work for a few beers. They were going bowling after, but I thought I'd go home and watch TV.

I arrived home to a living room filled with fake Christmas trees. I ended up going to bed instead.

Angela sent out an e-mail this morning telling everyone there was banana bread in the kitchen.

I've never been a fan of banana bread. It's like cake that went to dessert school and dropped out before the course on having flavor.

She sent out the same e-mail about 45 minutes later. I walked by the kitchen and it looked like no one had touched it.

A half an hour after that she sent out the same e-mail again. Sue responded with an e-mail letting everyone know that e-mail was for business purposes only.

Later that day, Angela was using the fax machine in front of my cube. She asked me if I had tried any of her banana bread, but I held up my finger and started talking as if I had someone on the phone. Then my phone rang.

I tried to pretend like I was putting my imaginary caller on hold, but she just stood and stared at me for a bit.

She turned to ask Gerald, and he told her he couldn't have banana bread due to a potassium sensitivity issue.

I saw her ask a few other people over the course of the day. I imagine she baked poison into it and was out to kill us all, as she was pushing the stuff like Kool-Aid at Jonestown.

I had my break with Oscar this afternoon. He was talking about how the vending machine gave him an extra bag of Cheetos by mistake.

He said he wondered if they charged the person who stocked the vending machine for this, and how they should since they should stock the machine so two bags don't come out at the same time, and how, then again, they probably factor that into their budget as these things are bound to happen.

It was less of a conversation, and more of Oscar laying out the various potential loss prevention structures of Frito-Lay while I peppered the conversation with the occassional disinterested "Yeah."

When he was done with his Cheetos, he went over to the counter and grabbed a slice of Angela's banana bread. He ate the whole slice in two bites and then grabbed another one.

As he was eating it he told me it was "the worst banana bread in the whole world".

We'll see if he shows up for work tomorrow.

Today I got to work and found someone had stolen my chair.

I ended up having to pull a chair out of one of the conference rooms and I couldn't get the settings right. The back was set at this real awkward angle driving my shoulders forward while my butt was a good foot behind it.

It felt like some medieval torture device.

When I got back to my desk, Tom asked where I was. I told him the situation, and he said people in Pennsylvania aren't looking for their chairs.

What he meant was people would be calling in whether I had a chair or not. The managers use that phrasing a lot here:

"There wasn't a blizzard in California."

"New York didn't miss the shuttle at the remote lot"

"You think Missouri's grandmother had a stroke today?"

Normally it works, but Tom's statement only conjured up an image of the entire state of Pennsylvania wandering around some cube farm in search of seating.

I told Tom I'd stand next time. He didn't seem to understand I was offering a snappy answer.

The phones were real busy today, and Sue kept yelling at people from the Watchtower. At one point she called me as I was getting back on the phone to ask why I wasn't on a call.

Our call center is evaluated on 'service level', or the number of calls we answer within a certain time frame. In our case, we're supposed to enter 92.5% of all calls in 30 seconds or less.

I'm not sure what having a 92.5% chance of not having to wait longer than 30 seconds means to me if my call is answered by someone like Fitzy, who just today told a caller there are only 3 quarters in a fiscal year.

He said it was kind of like a hockey game.

Gerald and Matt "fixed" a No Parking sign right outside our building over the weekend so it can be removed from the ground. The no parking zone takes up about a car length from the sign to the corner of our street, so Gerald's been taking the sign out to park there and putting it back in when he leaves.

He also said he has a plan to get us out of parking at the remote lot. I really feel like I've hitched my reputation to a winning team.

This morning I woke up at 2 to the sound of people in my living room banging on snare drums singing "Yellow Submarine". At 5, I woke up to the sound of an old woman searching the garbage can beneath my window for empty bottles.

I thought the whole point of cashing in bottles for a living was not having to be up at 5 AM.

I woke up later and found Gerald on the couch in his underwear. I got him up, and he asked if I could drive to work. On the way in he was shaking.

Last night I went with he and Matt to a bar down the street to watch the Superbowl. When I left, they were ordering shots of a drink called Prairie Fire that consists of tequila and tabasco.

This weekend it was kind of wet and then got cold very suddenly, fusing all of the various items of trash to Gerald's garbage car in a veneer of ice.

There was a Snickers wrapper plastered flat on the trunk with the word "HUNGERECTOMY" pointing up at me.

Gerald held it together for the first few hours, sweating booze in his cube and taking calls. Then lunch came and he ended up getting a seafood salad sub by mistake. He opened it, turned green, and disappeared into the bathroom for awhile.

I also got to see a burial in the graveyard behind our office. A bunch of people were standing out there for what seemed like 20 minutes.

It was absolutely freezing out there. I wondered how in hell they dug the hole.

Fitzy said over the summer he saw a funeral where they were burying someone in a plus-sized casket and the harness snapped on one side. They ended up having to get a backhoe to haul the thing out. He said the last few burials were pretty boring, so we were bound to get a "good one" soon.

I've never heard anyone feel they were due for a cemetary mishap.

When I got home, Matt apologized for all the noise and said he hoped he didn't wake me up. I said it hadn't, and he said he felt bad about it.

He wanted to give me a case of Right Guard as a make-good, but I told him it was nothing and he didn't have to give me anything. He told me I was a "good shit" and gave me the case of deodorant anyway.

I took it back to my room and put it in the corner. I hate the smell of Right Guard.

I spent most of this weekend setting up my room at Gerald's place. Our other roommate, Matt, doesn't have a job, per se. Gerald says he buys and sells stuff online.

On Saturday there were a bunch of bikes in our kitchen, and some guy with a van came by later in the day to pick them up. Matt showed up with four snare drums later that afternoon.

Gerald said one time Matt came home with a bunch of tropical birds - macaws and such - and had a real hard time getting rid of them. He said they made tons of noise and stank up the apartment crapping all over the place.

Given that neither Matt or Gerald own a computer with an internet connection, I'm really wondering how Matt moves this merchandise.

On Friday, I finally got to meet Tom, my manager. I guess he was at some management seminar all week.

I thought Fitzy was joking about him not being able to be around microwaves, but then he took off at 11:45 and didn't come back until a little after one. Our cubes are right next to the break room, and Tom doesn't want to be too close when people start reheating their lunch.

Later on that day, he just sort of started spacing out in his cube, and Fitzy told me to watch as he was bound to "rev up" at any moment. Tom ended up snapping out of it pretty quickly, and you could tell Fitzy was bummed.

He said someone was probably just heating up water for tea or something.

We had to be in at 8:30 this morning for a pre-work meeting. We were told one of the companies we deal with was closing a paper mill in Idaho or somewhere thereabouts, and we were probably going to be getting a lot of angry calls from account holders.

I must have taken 10 calls from them in the first hour. Half of them made some reference to NAFTA.

One guy got real mad at me and say he was going to come down to Chicago so he could talk to me in person. I told him I thought that was a good idea.

I'm not even in Chicago.

Gerald decided to take calls this morning, and said someone told him he was going to "put a cap in his ass" after hearing he wouldn't be able to get a check for his account for 5 to 10 business days. I'm unsure what would prompt someone to make such a statement. Gerald was the only one out of the two of them with the other's address.

Around 1:00 someone sent out an e-mail letting everyone know they were towing from the lot. Sue sent an e-mail right after telling people they were not supposed to park in the office lot to begin with, and would not be allowed to leave their desks if they did.

A few people made it out before Sue's e-mail, but a couple people had to watch helplessly as the trucks drove around and hope they didn't stop at their car. Everyone else stood up and looked out to see if anyone would start arguing with one of the drivers.

One guy made it out just as his car was being hitched up. I could see him handing the truck driver cash and the driver lowering the car down afterwards.

I heard a couple people groan to see him get off so easy.

Gerald sat in his cube the whole time playing online mini-putt. I didn't see him at the remote lot this morning, so I was sure he had parked at the office, but, then again, I didn't see him at the meeting either.

Today I counted three new coffee cups on the car Gerald started the trash pile on, along with some ketchup packets and a few empty bottles of Zima. I hope whoever owns that car gets back soon. It's starting to become a real eyesore.

Gerald was at the remote lot again when I arrived this morning. He had his breakfast set up on the trunk of the same car as yesterday.

His trash from the day before was still sitting there - a cup half filled with frozen coffee weighing down the wax paper yesterday's sandwich came in. Whoever owned the car must have left it there overnight.

It looked as if other people were following Gerald's lead with the garbage, as there were two other coffee cups and the wrapper to a breakfast bar there as well. Another week and the car is going to attract seagulls.

Gerald said this parking situation was "beat" and that he was going to have to find a way around it.

At work today a man with a really high voice yelled at me for calling him "Ma'am". He was obviously very touchy about the issue. There was even a note in the account that read, "Account holder is male. Do not address as female."

Later in the day I got an equal response for pronouncing the last name "Kochless" as "Cockless". There was no note in this instance.

I think people might have been reluctant to write the word "Cockless" in our computer system.

Gerald's figured out a way to call himself so it looks like he's talking with an account holder to the people in the Watchtower. He spent most of the day on dating sites or playing Risk online.

I don't know where the hell our manager has been this week, but his "hands off" management style combined with Gerald's work ethic is like handing a toddler a bowl of scissors.

Towards the end of each day, we get a photocopy of a menu from the place we're ordering lunch from, as we have to have our order in that morning to ensure it arrives by 12.

Today's menu was from a place Fitzy called the "Smelly Deli". Everyone was pissed because the buffalo chicken sub was scratched off the menu and that's the best thing there.

I'm really hoping this doesn't get back to me.

Gerald was at the remote lot this morning. He was eating an egg sandwich and drinking a coffee when I got there. It was set up on the trunk of a car like it was his own little table.

He left his trash there when the van picked us up.

The Angry Haitian was driving again, and Gerald sat shotgun. Gerald told him there was another route that could get him to the office much quicker and then told him to slow down when they were coming up on this parking lot he saw a cop parked at yesterday.

At one point, the Angry Haitian nearly cracked into someone while he was making a left turn. The other driver stopped and flipped him off.

Then Gerald told him this street was could be really dangerous, which is another reason why he takes the other route. The Angry Haitian turned up the radio after that.

Today we ordered lunch from a place Fitzy calls "Ass on a Bun". The company doesn't want us off the phones all at once, so they buy us lunch and have us eat it at our desks in between calls.

I ordered a buffalo chicken sub.

The delivery was late and there were only three managers available to hand out lunch to about sixty reps, so my sub waas cold by the time I got it. I was starving at that point, so I didn't care all that much.

Whenever I'd try to take a break, I'd get a call from the Watchtower asking me to get back on the phones. I guess calls always spike around lunch on account of everyone slacking.

The first call I took was from someone looking for their account balance. It was a simple enough request, but I put him on hold so I could take a few bites out of my sandwich and look like I was on a call. I did it a second time with a guy who needed to change his address, and the mic from my headset got stuck in the sandwich.

When I pulled in out, it was all gunked up with bleu cheese. I tried to wipe it off, but a big chunk of it was lodged in the hole the sound goes into.

I call that part "the sound-hole".

When I got back on the phone, the guy couldn't hear a word I said. He knew I had picked up because the hold music stopped playing, and kept saying, "Hello? Hello?"

I ended up having to hang up on him and clean out the sound-hole with a thumb tack. The Watchtower kept calling, so I stood up and waved my headset at them so they could see something was wrong.

They sent a manager named Peter over to see what was going on. I told them some stuff from my sandwich got stuck in the hole in my headset.

He asked if I meant the sound-hole. I said I did.

He asked if I had the buffalo chicken sub. I guess this happens a lot.

Today was our first day on the phones. Paige came around to help us get signed in to our computers, and then took off.

Gerald kept taking time off the phone to tell me about his weekend. He and Matt had their bowling night and he ended up hooking up with the woman who rents the shoes.

He also apologized for the whole scene with Ryan's girlfriend. He said she was there well into the night, crying and yelling and such. Gerald said he heard her smash some stuff before she left, but he was pretty sure none of it was mine.

Every time he got into a story, he'd get a call from the manager at the Watchtower telling him to get back on the phone. By the end of the day, they were just yelling at him across the floor.

It turns out I get two 15 minute breaks that day. I guess they give you a half an hour break every day, and you have the option to take it all at once or break it up into two smaller ones.

I don't remember choosing either, but I was informed I did at some point.

My first break was in the morning. Cheryl, the friend of the one with the big ones, was in the break room talking with a couple of friends.

I went to the other side of the room to a table with a bunch of newspapers on it. Someone had taken most of the newspaper and only left the car section.

I decided to see where I could get the best deal on a Nissan Pathfinder.

Cheryl was talking about someone and described them as "not the brightest knife in the drawer." I don't think she was going for irony.

My second break was around two. Gerald and I had it at the same time, but he said he had to go out to his car and make a private call. I went to the break room and sat with this guy who sits in a cube a few rows away from me. His name is Oscar.

He said he's been on the phones for awhile. Before that, he worked in a factory that made transmissions and got to travel to transmission factories all over the world. He was halfway into a story about his trip to Germany and how they made transmissions over there when Sue came in to tell us our break was over.

After meeting Oscar, I think that fifteen minute break is way too long.

On Friday we had our final training sessions and then took some calls at the end of the day. Paige said she'd put us on the "overflow queue" so we'd only take calls if there were people being put on hold, and she'd be monitoring so she could help us out if it sounded like we were getting stuck.

I ended up getting put on the line for people looking for assistance in Spanish by mistake and had to field calls in a language I don't speak a word of.

I told Paige after the first few, and she ended up giving me this script in Spanish and told me to read it, put them on hold, and transfer them when a Spanish speaking rep was available. I remember the script began with the phrase "Bienvenidos el programma de retiros..."

I kept looking over the script to see if I could find the Spanish word for "updating".

After about an hour, Paige brought Reynaldo over. Apparently, he speaks Spanish and we were going to trade phones.

I only took one call after that. It was from a guy who wanted his account balance and spent the next 45 minutes talking about the town he lived in. I guess Garth Brooks grew up there and hadn't done a "damn thing" for the town since he left.

Before we left for the day, Paige said to plan on working some overtime next week. I guess their call volume was still very high, and everyone on the floor would be working 9 to 7.

I looked around to watch everyone act not disappointed. Reynaldo looked at Paige as if she was serving pie.

Over the weekend I went to move my stuff into the new place. Gerald said Ryan, the guy who was moving out, was still there, but he said it would be OK for me to drop my stuff off.

When I got to the apartment, it was just Ryan and his girlfriend there. His girlfriend was sitting on the couch and it looked as if she had been crying.

Ryan walked with me into the room and told me that he had just told her they were breaking up, but it was still OK for me to bring my stuff in if I wanted. I guess he was moving to Phoenix to work as a greenskeeper on a golf course and had just gotten around to telling her now.

I really didn't want to be there, but I had already rented a van and packed up all my stuff.

Every time I walked in the front door, the place would get really quiet and I'd see Ryan and his girlfriend staring at me as I walked past the entrance to the living room. Then I'd hear whispering as I walked through the bathroom to my room, followed by silence as I walked by them again to get more stuff.

I ended up trying to make as much noise as I could walking out of the bathroom so they'd know when to stop talking.

There was this huge puddle on the bathroom floor and I kept tracking water all over the place. It looked as if someone had showered with the shower curtain open.

When I got my mattress up there, I realized I was going to need someone to help me lift it through the bathroom so it wouldn't absorb the water and get all mildewy. I was standing there trying to think about how to pose the question to Ryan when I heard him ask if I needed any help.

I think they were getting tired of waiting for me to leave so they could resume breaking up.

I walked in and explained the situation. He was really cool about helping me out, but his girlfriend sat glowering as the whole exchange took place.

I felt kind of bad, but probably would have felt worse sleeping on a moldy mattress.

Tonight we all went out for drinks after work and some guy punched Gerald in the mouth. I guess Gerald was talking to his girlfriend and started spouting off when the guy stepped in.

I didn't hear much of what Gerald said, but I believe it was the phrase "Take it easy, beefcake" that set the guy off.

As it was happening, everyone was looking at Reynaldo to step in. He just stood there and watched like the rest of us. Afterwards, when Gerald told him he could have used his help, Reynaldo said the first rule his sensei taught him was restraint, and it wouldn't have been right for him to use force seeing as the situation was defused.

That guy defused it all over Gerald's face.

Angela wasn't at work today. Paige said she was sick, but everyone thinks the pressure's getting to her.

I'm not sure what pressure she's been under, but given the work we've had to do thus far, there isn't a scenario where I could see myself being too ill to do my job that doesn't involve a trip to the third world.

We had to take messages again today, and I ended up getting a guy who must have spoken with Gerald yesterday. He said I told him we'd be overnighting a check to him last night, and he never received it.

I tried to explain to him that I didn't know anything about the check, and he might be confusing me with someone else. Then he told me he wrote down the name of the person he spoke with.

When I told him there was more than one Gerald at the company, he asked how many there were.I said that as far as I knew there were two, and his response was, "You mean there could be more?"

He sounded truly alarmed by this.

He ended up asking for a manager, and Fitzy took the call pretending to be one.

Gerald did something with his phone so it wouldn't receive calls. When Paige stopped by to see why things were so quiet, he said his phone hadn't been ringing and assumed it wasn't that busy.

She asked someone to look at his phone and said she'd take him to the "order desk". It sounded exciting, but later Gerald told me it was pretty much a big cube where they boxed up the trade sheets to be shipped to another building where they were scanned into the system

He said a couple of the boxes had fallen down and spilled all over the floor, and he had to reorder the sheets by date. I bet he would have traded that for another day of giving out fake answers to irate callers.

When we were walking out of the bar, Gerald invited me out tomorrow night. He said he and Matt were going to cook a spiral ham and go bowling.

I thought I'd sit that one out.

The Angry Haitian picked us up at the lot again. This time, he parked the van way on the other side so everyone had to walk across to get in.

Everyone seemed pretty irritated, but I think they were all too scared to say anything after hearing him yell into the phone yesterday. He was listening to this Carribean radio station and had the volume turned up really loud on the ride in.

Paige walked in first thing and told us they needed our help on the phones this morning. She said account holders would be receiving their statements over the next couple of days and a lot would be calling in with questions, so we had to help handle the volume.

All we had to do was tell the caller our systems were updating, take down some information (name, SSN, phone number, etc), and tell them someone would call them back later on.

The first caller I took got mad when I told him this and said all he wanted was his balance. Then he asked what we were updating.

I told him we were uploading vast amounts of market data to the server, and he seemed a little less irritated after that.

I had no idea what I was talking about.

At one point I looked over at Gerald. He was dealing with someone really irate. He kept saying, "I know sir, but I can't help you. Our systems are updating."

When the guy was giving him his phone number, Gerald gave me a look and started moving his hand like he was writing the number down in the air. Later on I heard him giving someone else an imaginary account balance.

I don't think I saw him write one thing down the whole time.

After about an hour and a half, Sue came and collected the message forms from us. I saw them piled up in a recycling bin not too long after.

When we got back the the classroom, Angela seemed kind of upset. Her eyes were red and puffy as if she'd been crying.

I guess a caller had said some real nasty stuff to her.

Paige said people will do that now and then, and one of the toughest parts of this job is not letting it get to you. There's a lot of not letting things get to you at this job.

We spent the rest of the day learning the computer system we'd be using. Reynaldo ended up performing an actual trade during one of the exercises, and Paige had to call the trading desk and get them to cancel it before it was executed. Then he clicked some button that jammed up a printer on the third floor with a 40 page spreadsheet.

I kind of wish Reynaldo's cube was closer to mine. This guy is going to be a disaster.

A new guy was driving the shuttle from the remote lot today. He stopped way before the garbage can and totally screwed up the order of the line. I didn't care much as I was last anyway.

The woman with the big ones was first in line and ended up having to sit shotgun. The driver didn't seem to care too much about her big ones. He was having a pretty heated conversation on his cellphone.

The driver was Haitian, and the whole van stayed quiet as he yelled Creole into the phone. The guy in front of me tried to start a conversation with the person next to him, but the driver just yelled louder.

When I got to the office, everyone was already in our classroom except for Gerald. Angela was telling a story to a few of the other folks about how she works weekends at Starbucks to pick up extra cash.

She was saying how she doesn't like people adding sugar or milk to their coffee. Apparently true coffee lovers don't.

I guess Starbucks must stock cream and sugar so they know which customers to hate.

Gerald came in right at 9:00 and totally stank of booze. He told me later that he and Matt drank a bottle of gin and watched "The Wizard of Oz" last night. He said he was probably going to bag out sick before lunch.

We had a consultant named Rachel come in to teach us phone etiquette. The first thing she told us is we should always smile when we're talking, because the caller can hear the smile on the other end. I thought back to yesterday, and began to wonder how someone would react to hearing a smile from someone they just called a cum dumpster.

Reynaldo asked what they should do if the topic of the conversation was sad. She must have thought it was a joke, because she laughed and tried to move on.

Then Reynaldo told her that he was listening to calls yesterday, and a man called up and said he wanted to cash out his account because his cat needed dialysis treatment. The man got very mad when he heard he couldn't take money out of his account for pet surgery, and Reynaldo didn't think it would be appropriate to smile during such a conversation.

Rachel said it was OK not to smile if the conversation was sad, and told us to use our discretion.

We were in between exercises when I saw a couple tow trucks drive into the lot. Gerald had told me he was turning the steering wheel when he parked so it would crash into the car next to his if they tried to tow it. He said tow truck drivers are opportunists, and would skip his car for one that would give them less hassle.

Rachel told us she was going to leave the room for the next exercise and we would have to close our eyes and keep completely silent while she was gone. We were probably thirty seconds into it when I heard a smash and the sound of car alarms outside.

I took a look out the window and saw a tow truck with what looked like Gerald's car hitched up smashed into the rear of the neighboring SUV.

I whispered to Gerald to get his attention, but he fell asleep before the car alarms went off. I gave him a nudge and asked if that was his car out there.

He just got this real defeated look on his face, and sat through the rest of the exercise staring straight forward.

Before we broke for lunch, Paige came in and asked Gerald if she could speak with him. Apparently, Paige told him they don't give any sort of written warnings to employees in training, but if he couldn't conform to the company's parking policies they were going to ask him not to return to work.

I guess the other car was a senior manager with the company, so he had to go and work things out with him as well.

Gerald told me that he wasn't sure he'd still be able to drive his car after this, but he figured he'd play it safe and park in the remote lot either way.

After lunch we did some role playing and then spent the last couple of hours listening to calls. I sat with Manny again. He got a call from a women who spent a half an hour talking about how her sister was a lesbian and how she caught her peeing standing up.

I'm beginning to think they should charge admission to this place.

I told Gerald I'd take the room. There are a million reasons I decided to take it, none of which I'll get into.

Today we spent time sitting with some of the other reps and listening to their calls. The first guy I sat with was named Manny. The first caller he took called him a "cum dumpster".

The second one he took got routed to the wrong department and said he didn't want Manny to put him back in the system as he had already done that twice. Manny said he'd conference himself in with the guy and help him navigate the menu.

Manny pulled out a card that had the whole phone system mapped out, and I sat and listened as he punched the numbers in to get the guy to where he needed to be. After about ten minutes of button pushing, Manny got connected to the guy at the desk next to us.

Manny told the guy our phone system was "updating" and he'd need to take down his number and call him back. Apparently, when something doesn't work you're supposed to tell the person on the phone that whatever's broken is "updating".

I have a feeling I'm going to put that piece of information to work.

The guy on the phone got really pissed and asked to speak to a manager. Manny took off for awhile and I sat and zoned out.

Manny came back with Paige who said it'd be OK if I left for lunch a little early.

Gerald told me the guy he sat with spent the entire time on the phone with his girlfriend. He said she called in through the regular 800 number so it looked like a business call.

After lunch we did role playing, where Paige would pretend to be a caller with questions about her investments and one of us would pretend to be the rep.

She called Reynaldo first. He had a lot of trouble coming up with the right answers and kept calling her "sir".

After a couple minutes of long, awkward pauses, Paige finally gave up and said he could use his book if he wanted to.

Paige let us all use our books after that. It really took the pressure off knowing what a shitty job Reynaldo did. Even Gerald sounded good, and all he did was tell Paige he'd look into her questions and call her back with the information she requested.

When we were done, Paige said we could go back up and find a rep to listen in with. When I got upstairs, I looked out the window and saw Gerald walking to his car.

It was quarter to five anyway, so I walked around pretending to look for someone to sit with and went home.

This weekend I went to check out a room in Gerald's apartment. One of his roommates was moving out at the end of the month, and he needed to fill the spot quickly.

Gerald's place is in a real congested neighborhood with zero parking. I drove around awhile looking for a spot before parking in front of a crosswalk with my hazards on.

Gerald lives on the second floor of a three story building with no lights in the stairwell. A Chinese family lives on the third floor, and a couple of bodybuilders live on the first.

I could hear one of the kids on the third floor playing the violin as I walked up.

Gerald said the room I'd be moving into was the smaller of the three, so I'd end up paying less rent if I took the place. The only way to get to my room is through a closet in the bathroom.

Gerald said he knew it was kind of a shitty arrangement, but I could use the bathroom closet to keep my stuff in and they've got a system down so I wouldn't get trapped in my room when someone was taking a shower. He also said there was a fire escape outside my window I could pee off if things got grim

Gerald said his roommate Matt's girlfriend sleeps over a lot, so I'd probably want to get the system down.

I told him I'd have to think about it. He told me he'd be showing the room to a few more people today, and said I should call him as soon as I knew I was interested.

Something tells me this room will be open on Monday.

We got our desks today. Gerald and I got cubes across from each other near a window that looks out over a graveyard.

The cubes are about chest high, so you can see across the whole floor if you stand up. Gerald said he was hoping for a more "private situation", as he isn't hooked up to the internet at home and was hoping to get some surfing done here.

I guess he's been barred from the local library.

Fitzy sits right behind us, along with this girl with jet black hair who wears tons of eyeliner. She was arguing with a customer when we were moving in.

When I was done getting set up, I looked around the floor and saw Sue in a big cube a few rows over yelling at people to get back on the phone. Fitzy said that cube's called "The Watchtower", and it tells the managers who's on a call and how long people are off the phone.

I guess being off the phone is bad, as people calling in have to wait longer to have their call answered. Sue seems to think yelling helps.

Everyone in my training class was pretty glad to get rid of those binders, except for this one guy named Keith who was leaving his binders under a table in the classroom every night. Apparently, someone came in last night and took them, although Keith seems to think the janitor might have thought they were trash and carted them off.

Given that the same Twix wrapper has been sitting on the windowsill since I started, I don't think the janitor thinks much of anything is trash.

Paige said it was OK and she'd get him some replacement binders by Monday, but she seemed pretty pissed about it. She kept ignoring Gerald when he'd raise his hand up, and only let Angela ask one question.

I don't think Keith is going to last too long.

At lunch, Reynaldo told us he was psyched about his seat, because they put him right outside Sue's office, and he'll be able to build "rapport" with her. He said rapport is very important in business, and looked very eager to start building it.

This morning it was freezing, so everyone was waiting in their car at the remote lot. I got out of my car as soon as I saw the shuttle coming down the street, so I ended up getting a seat towards the back of the van.

As the last person was getting on, I saw Gerald running for the van. He ended up sitting shotgun and hearing about how the driver's mom just got a new Harley.

It figures Gerald gets the story about the Harley.

As we were walking towards the office, he told me how he got really hammered with his roommate last night and was shocked he got up in time.

Gerald has a habit of interrupting Paige in the middle of our training sessions. He usually says something like "So ... is this a good time for a break, or should we just press on?"

He did this a couple of times today, and I can tell it's starting to get on Paige's nerves.

Angela has a habit of asking a lot of questions and making our classes go extra long. It's pretty annoying, as most of the time people usually have to go to the bathroom by the end. I can tell it really gets on Gerald's nerves, as he'll butt in and try and answer the question before she finishes.

Then Paige gives the correct answer, Angela asks another question, and the cycle continues. The whole thing would take a lot less time if Gerald just shut up, but I think Paige does it to get back at him for the interruptions.

It's a war of attrition that has our bladders in the crossfire.

We also had a meet-and-greet with some of the other phone reps and found out who was going to be managing us. One of the guys I met had a black eye.

I couldn't remember his first name, but everyone kept calling him 'Fitzy'.

I found out my manager was going to be Tom Oday.

Fitzy works under Tom, too, and said he has a metal plate in his head and has to stay away from running microwaves. I guess they cause him to go into these fits where he swears uncontrollably.

Fitzy said whenever he swears people start looking to see who's making popcorn.

Today I got to the remote lot and a bunch of people were waiting for the shuttle. The way the shuttle line works is the first person stands close to the garbage can by the lot entrance, and people line up to the left.

The woman whose nephew got his girlfriend pregnant (who I found out is named Cheryl) and the woman with the big ones were at the end of the line. I was kind of sweating standing next to them, but then Reynaldo came out of his car and lined up before me.

When I got there, Cheryl and the one with the big ones stopped talking for a moment.

Reynaldo and I talked for a bit. I started complaining about having to lug around our binders all the time and Reynaldo said it was good for arm strength. Then started talking about how this job doesn't give him the free time he needs to train.

Reynaldo isn't shaped like someone who's trained for much of anything. His binders were piled up on the ground.

When the shuttle came, I got stuck sitting next to the driver again. He told me he thinks the black guy across the street is the one who cracked up his car.

He kept using the word "black" in all his sentences.

"When he first moved in, I thought that black guy was pretty cool..."
"That black guy drives a Monte Carlo..."
"You don't see many black guys driving Pontiacs."

By the time we got to the office, he must have used the word "black" at least 30 times. I was just glad he didn't use the term in plural.

I was really hoping Cheryl didn't have any black friends she'd be eating with today.

When we got to the classroom, Gerald was the only one there. Paige decided to sit us at the same table. She keeps calling us "the Geralds".

I remarked how he was here early, and Gerald said he's been parking in the office lot so far. I guess he got up late yesterday and he would have been late if he had gone to the remote lot, so he parked towards the back and hoped no one would notice.

He said no one said anything and there weren't any tickets on his car, so he figured he'd be OK.

At nine, someone from human resources came in to give us our benefits paperwork, and gave us a bunch of books to go with it. I don't know what the books were for, but I figured it would be one more thing I'd be lugging around for the next week or so.

Later we started to learn a bit about the different investments we'd be working with. I was struggling really hard to pay attention, and then Paige said we didn't have to worry if we didn't have everything memorized by the time we got on the phone, as there was a page on our intranet we could refer to.

I zoned out after that.

Around 11 Gerald excused himself and left the room. I looked out the window a minute later and saw him in the parking lot talking with a tow truck driver who was in the process of hitching up a car.

Gerald started waving his hands a bit, and the driver just kept doing what he was doing.

Paige caught sight of it as the truck driver was getting in his car. Everyone looked out the window just in time to see Gerald watch the truck drive away with his car in tow.

She said she forgot to remind us that they do tow from the lot periodically.

I ended up giving Gerald a ride to the impound lot after work. He told me he'd probably still park in the office lot anyway.

This morning I got lost trying to find the remote lot.

They gave me a "map" to find the place. On it, the lot was across from two rectangles - one representing a donut shop, and the other a car dealership.

When I got to the lot, there was a line of people waiting for the shuttle to the office. Two women from my class were standing their with their arms about to break under the weight of their training manuals.

I waited at the end of the line and listened to the woman next to me talk to someone about her nephew who just got his girlfriend pregnant and can't hold down a job to save his life.

She was into about the fifth job her nephew lost - he was stealing from a Hardee's he worked at - when a longish van pulled up. I was the last one in the van and had to sit shotgun next to the driver.

The driver pulled off and said he was glad it had been warm this winter. I agreed, and then he started telling me about the "big ones" this woman he had just dropped off at the last trip had. He went on about it - talking about the shirt she was wearing and such. I could tell some people in the van were getting uncomfortable, as everyone had stopped talking.

Then he started talking about how he couldn't wait for summer and said, "Know what I mean?"

I was kind of pressed for something to say, as I didn't want to look like I was taking part in the whole thing, but I didn't want him to think I was gay either. Why I was concerned with that, I don't know.

I settled on "I guess so" and then he started talking about how someone whacked up his car while it was parked outside his house and didn't even leave a note.

At lunch I noticed the woman who's nephew got his girlfriend pregnant and can't hold down a job was sitting with another woman few tables away. The woman she was speaking with turned around to look at me a couple of times.

As I was going to throw out my trash, she got up and walked past me, glaring the whole time. She looked about forty and had the biggest boobs I've ever seen in my life.

I guess she's the woman the shuttle driver was talking about.

Not much else happened today. Paige said our desks still weren't ready and asked if we could take our binders home again today. I'm already getting sick of lugging this crap around.

I started a new job today with a company that provides retirement plans to companies. I'll be working in their call center, answering questions their employees have about their investments and doing trades.

I don't know the first thing about investments.

I was given directions to a clean building with a shiny blackish-brown marble exterior and instructed to park in one of the visitor spots. I was told to go to dial a phone near the elevator and ask for Paige, who would come to get me.

I went into the building (which is equally shiny on the inside) and dialed the phone as told. I got Paige's voice mail and let her know I was downstairs by the elevator.

I was there a minute or so when this heavy set woman walked, looked around a bit, and then started walking towards the phone. I asked her if she was here for Paige, and she said yes. I told her Paige wasn't at her desk.

She kind of looked mad, then stood against the wall opposite me. I think she thought Paige wasn't there on account of something I did.

We waited a couple of more minutes and Paige came down. She apologized for making us wait and brought us up to the third floor, where we were brought into this mini break room/cafeteria with several other people. I guess I'll be working with the woman who got mad at me, and her name is Angela.

Everyone was kind of quiet. One guy played with his cellphone and didn't look up once.

After a few minutes, Paige came back in and thanked us for waiting. She said we'd be moving down to a classroom on the first floor to meet the Director of Customer Service, or something to that effect, but first we had to fill out some forms and get fingerprinted.

I guess anyone who works around investments has to get fingerprinted. I'm unsure as to why. There's nothing at all to steal, aside from office supplies.

You also have to fill out a form that lists every place you've worked at or lived for the past 10 years. I couldn't remember that far back and had to start making up zip codes and such.

After about 30 minutes of forms, Paige came in with the fingerprint guy and said we could make our way down to the first floor when we were done. We all got fingerprinted and got this white cream to wash off the ink that smells like bananas.

I was the last one printed, so when I got downstairs the director was already with everyone else. Her name was Sue. The room reeked of bananas.

Sue came up and shook my hand. I must have still had that fingerprint cleaner on it, because she wiped her hand on her skirt afterwards.

She welcomed us all to our first day, and told us we wouldn't be able to park in the main lot after today. Apparently, their office only gets so many spots in the lot and they were maxed out, so we'd get permits to park in a remote lot not too far away from the office.

She handed out tags to hang on our rear view mirrors so we wouldn't get towed, said goodbye to us, and left.

Paige got us started by getting us to introduce ourselves to the group and tell us a little about our background. I had to start.

This is my first job out of college, so I told everyone I graduated recently and was looking forward to working here. I felt like an idiot after, but it sounded much better than "this is all a history degree could get me."

They went on to the next guy, who was also named Gerald. Paige thought that was funny and made a joke that nobody laughed at.

Gerald had graduated a year ago and spent the past year working at a bicycle shop. He said he needed a change, and heard this industry was interesting. Then he said he was looking forward to working here.

Then there was this guy who worked in a pizza shop and another guy who worked on a ski lift in Oregon. It didn't seem as if anyone had any work experience that might have prepared them for this job.

I pictured some brochure being sent to our customers:

"Should you have any questions regarding your account, our call center is staffed with disinterested, barely qualified 20-somethings whose lack of direction has landed them here."

The rest of the stories sort of blended together, except for two.

Angela, as it turns out, had pursued a career in the medical field until a latex allergy made it impossible for her to work in a clinical setting.

The other was from a guy named Reynaldo, who said he was training for the Olympic Ju-Jitsu Team, but had to give up his dream to make money for his family. Later in the day, Reynaldo confided in me that he kept a pair of nunchucks in his car for self-defense.

The rest of the day we had classes on the financial services industry, investments, retirement plans, and such. We got a binder for every class we took, so at the end of the day we had about 40 pounds of reading material.

At the end of the day, Paige told us our desks wouldn't be ready until tomorrow, and asked if it would be a problem for us to bring our training materials home. It was, but no one seemed like giving Paige a problem on their first day.

I went home and watched a story on the news about these people who stole a mummy from an art gallery. Who the hell steals a mummy?