You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Office Space.”
My name is David Zuva. I'm from Russia, from Odessa. I've been here twenty years. I'm a shoemaker. I repair shoes. This my profession. I worked in Russia in the same profession. I learned when I was small boy. My father teach me. All the family shoemakers--my whole family--my wife, me, my father, my brothers, my grandfather--all shoemakers. Zuva means [...]
It was during my second month in the new office that I determined I was in love. She was standing next to the fax machine, paperwork in hand, bending over slightly so she could read the message in the small screen. She had a short skirt and long legs. They looked very shapely but solid. Clover never asked me to [...]
On my first day of the assignment I was pointed toward a stack of newspapers and told to find a pair of scissors so I could cut out any articles mentioning Hillary. My supervisor’s name was Jennifer. She was waving an adding machine above her head and ticker tape hung by her face like a fez tassel. “Howard! Is this [...]
Jimmy, the boss, and I are in the basement still mourning the passing of 16A, when the passenger car opens and a white envelope dances out of the elevator. The white rectangle shimmies and gyrates obscenely, beckoning us. We are powerless to resist. As we near the object of our desire, the envelope, and the hand to which it is [...]
When I walk through Midtown Manhattan, I think of The Jetsons. One episode in particular, where George and Co. bought a new apartment, and that apartment was taken up by a big space-age crane and placed in an empty hole in an apartment building, thus making it full and round. That’s how I think of the offices in those huge [...]
The world of magazine publishing in New York is extremely competitive. No matter how talented one is an editor or a writer, one must have contacts in the industry to obtain that first, entry-level job. Mrs. Carpati, my landlady, happened to work at Cosmopolitan in ad sales, and she was glad to introduce me to Hearst Magazines. I got lucky [...]
On the first day of the New York City transit strike of 2005 I went to talk to Rosa Gutgold. She sells pearls, and is usually good for a few pearls of wisdom. But Rosa did not come to work on the first day of the strike. Nor the second. On the third day the tiny kiosk she normally occupies [...]
Autumn has arrived and the cooler air has dampened but not ended the fires of this years "Summer Offensive." Somewhere the trees are changing color but here in Hunts Point it has been one of those days. We've already caught more work on this day tour than any company outside the ghetto will see in six months and the smoke [...]
The headline on the Detroit Free Press was bold. But it was just another clever way of stating the obvious. Ford Motor Company was going to announce "The Way Forward," actually a way to cut back. Ron Novack sat at his kitchen table and skimmed the story about the plant closures and layoffs that would be announced today. He sipped [...]
This morning, before I was able to take my coat off, my #1 Work Wife, Brianna, confronted me about my conduct at an after-work affair, last Friday. She scolded me for leaving her sitting unattended and drink-less at the affair. One might ask: how does one find oneself in such a predicament? I’d have to admit, it’s the result of [...]
A Goat walks in with a camera, wants to document me, the Best Administrative Assistant in the World, diligently at work. I turn off the Atari emulator on my computer, open up a word processing document, and get to my Work, processing, retrieving, shrugging off calls in triplicate. Each call and customer needs to feel like they are wanted, even [...]
It was my first day and Beth, who worked in the cubicle across from mine, was talking on her cell phone about sex. I was doing the kind of mindless work that provides a perfect cover for eavesdropping. I kept my eyes on the insurance forms I was stapling and got to know her a little. It seems she’s been [...]
Midtown is the part that nobody loves, that nobody thinks of as home. The bars have no character and the delis are as uniform as cartoon nurses. If there is an all-night bodega, it must be a joyless one. (I like all-night bodegas. They are an unfailing source of joy and surprise to me. I can spend half-hours marvelling drunkenly, [...]
Morning at a Midtown Manhattan publishing company office. Cubicles house individual workers. Cube walls are six feet high. My coworker, Lilly, is standing in the corner of my cubicle when it happens. In a fit of pique over the latest uncorrected typo, she’s suddenly throwing Kung Fu kicks, whirling, twirling, balletic, her long raven hair whipping around her face. I [...]
Twenty-one children (the first of whom were triplets), and twenty-one grandchildren. And two wives, if you're wondering. Thirteen with the first wife, nine with the next. He's not married anymore. He grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, when it was still Brownsville, Brooklyn. Now he lives in Springfield Gardens, Queens. On public transportation it takes him two and a half hours [...]
In 1991, I was a student at New York University, working at a bookstore, and this woman came up to me out of nowhere and basically asked me to come audition for her film. She was a casting director for this PBS Masterpiece Theater thing. The part was for a quote-unquote "little person." I'm four foot six, and they were [...]
"American Vogue, please!" screeched the group of blond, stick-figure 16-year olds teetering on platform espadrilles, each one clawing to get a grip on the gleaming steel reception desk in front of them. "Who are you here to see?" said the straight-faced security guy, who was, clearly, over the model thing. From my vantage point behind them , these girls looked [...]
Lisandra and I both graduated from the same college with writing degrees and hopes of being comedy writers, but after graduation, neither one of us had a job. When I met Lisandra, she was a grad student with a cushy part-time assistant job. She spent her days trolling for MP3s, making copies, and listening to her boss complain, which was [...]
Friday, June 22, 1956…one day out of Rice High School and just seventeen years old … the first day in what my yearbook identified as my career - advertising. And what more appropriate place to start? At the bottom of the (at-the-time), worlds' biggest advertising agency, the mailroom of the J. Walter Thompson Company. JWT had billings of over $370 [...]
The city was crawling with carpet salesmen and industrial designers and Formica representatives and stadium planners, and no one outside of the Javits Center even noticed. I wouldn’t have noticed either if it hadn’t been for my friend Amy, who had flown into New York from East Lansing, Michigan, to attend the NeoCon Interior Design Conference, New York’s largest interior [...]
I was temping. My ‘agent’, as I liked to think of him, was overweight and short, with a firm handshake and a friendly manner. He called me “Bud” a lot. Although he was very enthusiastic every time we spoke on the phone, he seemed incapable of placing me in a job that paid more than ten dollars an hour. I’m [...]
So I paid $400 to St. Vincent's nursing school and took their EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) training course in February 1989. I went to class three days a week and I also had to do eighteen hours of rounds at St. Vincent's Hospital, which was like, total misery and insanity. Then I found out that getting your EMT license from [...]
He was walking along Broadway passing in front of Macy's without lifting his head to glance at the windows. I was a few steps behind, slowing my usual frenetic pace so as not to catch up to him. I didn't feel like schmoozing, something that was tough to avoid when you ran into Jack. Jack. After twenty years, I still [...]
Matt worked on the 43rd floor of a building one block from Grand Central. When people came to visit, we took them up to the 46th floor conference room and let them look out the windows at the rooftop gardens and into other office windows and down Park Avenue, stretching away below in orderly blocks. Paint lines on the pavement, [...]
1. Here in New York I have been put in charge of a small tropical fish. Its owner has gone to Los Angeles to organize Vanity Fair's annual Oscars party and won't be back until the end of the month. Her parting instructions were minimal. I was just asked to sprinkle a little fish food on it from time to [...]
Recently, I was laid off from my job as a magazine editor. I cleared out my desk, carefully stashing pens and binder clips into a box. Anticipating having to write countless cover letters, I also took a ream of paper. I felt guilty about this and confided in a co-worker. "It’s okay, honey," she said, patting my shoulder. "When they [...]
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