The Office: Season 3, Episode 9 “The Convict”

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Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Breakroom! I hope all my Midwest readers were able get through our recent storm event that occurred Wednesday evening. There were warnings of possible tornados, large hail, and severe thunderstorms. Here in Duluth, it was over within perhaps 5 or 10 minutes and was not a big deal. I did hear about elsewhere that tornados did actually occur and there truly was gigantic hail falling down. I hope no one was hurt and that you’ll be able to rebuild any possible damage that happened. And all of those poor potted plants that were left outside! That being said, why not into today’s Breakdown?

One big change up with absorption of the Stamford branch is that we acquired Hannah who is a new mom. She brought in her baby today so most of the office was saying hi and fawning over them, until Pam had to go ahead and refer to the baby as a her when they are so clearly a him. Pam tried to backpedal with how he is wearing pink, but it seems that is his favorite color. Well I am afraid I need to call out both of them right here and now, along with perhaps defending them both as well. First of all, Hannah should be easy on Pam for simply getting the baby’s gender mixed up if she didn’t know the name. Nearly all babies look the same at that age so it is very hard to tell what their biological gender might be. However, I stand by the fact that Pam should have simply said I’m sorry rather than trying to argue that because he was in pink, that he must be a girl. While it is true that most parents will place their babies into very specific gender norms, not every parent is like this and you should not automatically assume every parent does this. When I do not know a baby’s gender, I usually do a very generic “And who is this?” in my best baby voice and wait for some to give me their name, alongside the pronouns they are attributing to them. I will reiterate, aside from their genitals, babies all look the same and do not really fit any look that people might associate with “masculine” or “feminine” and they all sort of look the same anyways. I am aware that is a pretty controversial opinion, but I think all of my fellow non-parents will agree with me. Now, while I have called out Pam I also need to call out Hannah because I feel she took this whole incident to whole other level. Babies do not actually have a favorite color so my personal belief is that she likes the color pink and she also loves a sense of drama. I firmly believe she enjoys being able to tear people down when they get the baby’s gender wrong. This is just like her whole pumping from her desk all over again, it really seems like she just wants someone to say something. So aside from this crazy drama around the baby, it was a pretty okay morning.

Later on there ended up being a bit of a mystery over in Accounting. It seems they received some sort of rebate check from the Federal Work Opportunity Program and no one one could understand what it was, so they got Jan on the phone to figure it out. She explained that it’s an incentive for hiring an ex-convict and since it happened after the branches merged, it must have been set up by Josh and it was a pretty smart move. This is when Jan made one of her biggest mistakes, and she decided to look into who the person was, and she revealed that it was Martin Nash.

Before moving on, I did look into the Program and found that it is actually much more expansive than just an ex-convict. This offers a tax credit to employers who hire individuals from certain target groups, those which traditionally face a barrier in attempting to finding a job. In Martin’s case, the explanation would be a Qualified Ex-Felon, which means they were either convicted of a felony or released from prison for a felony within the past year. Other examples include a Qualified Veteran, recipients of long-term family assistance programs, or even a qualified summer youth employee (someone between 16 and 18 hired during the summer months). And there are more, so for those business owners out there who might be interested in a tax credit as well as the chance to help those struggling to find work, this could be a program to consider looking into¹.

Well, Jan should have known better to let any of this information slip because this essentially became the entire day with the biggest question being “what did he do?” Angela and Dwight seemed to go straight to murder and assume he is a dangerous individual who should not be around them. I will mention that if he was truly a danger, I do not believe he would’ve been eligible for this program so I do trust that they do their background checks. Michael is actually the one to defend him and is quick to explain “In our society, a black man can be arrested for almost anything.” It is not often that Michael can be seen as the most rationale person in a room but oddly enough, he seemed to hit the nail on the head with this one. The black community, along with essentially any person of color, is at a very high risk of racial profiling and unless you have been living under a rock since the dawn of America, we would not be surprised to hear that he was brought in falsely. In this case, he really was guilty and deserved to go to prison. What did he do? He used to work in finance and was caught committing insider trading, the same thing that they got Martha Stewart for. A simplistic explanation is that you trade stock for a company using information that is not public, so you’re trying to make money using private information of a company or perhaps also trying to pass that tip on to someone else you know. While I do not exactly what his prison was like, I’ll be honest and say that as a white collar crime, their prisons are necessarily like the ones you’d catch on television.

To Michael’s relief, the majority of the office doesn’t job him and actually sound interested in knowing more about his experience. This is where he explains his prison’s amenities such as being able to take college classes or outdoors time. And before long, people are joking about how much better prison sounds than working at Dunder Mifflin. Michael will not stand for this, to him there is nothing better than working here so he has got to get us all scared straight on the fact that prison is terrible. We get called into a conference room meeting and meet Michael’s special guest, Prison Mike.

So who is Prison Mike? He was arrested for stealing, robbing, and for kidnapping the President’s son and held him for ransom. Although, he was supposedly never caught for the latter. But he paints us a pretty poor picture of what prison is like. The only food available is gruel, although you can also choose to eat your own hair. Very vulgar language, such as calling people “bitch” so there is a great deal of rudeness. He does point out that Ryan would be the “belle of the ball” and should be sure to not drop the soap. But the absolutely worst thing about prison was the dementors, flying all over the place terrifying everyone and then they’d come down and suck out your soul. Do not get these confused with the Harry Potter franchise because there are no movies in prison. More than anything he really wants us to understand how lucky we are to not be in prison and an be free to do what we want. Oddly enough, Martin said this was nothing like his experience in prison. Michael (Prison Mike left after his speech) did not take this well and actually just locked us all in the conference room to give us our wish of being in prison. Pam, thankfully, had the sense to call Toby who was back in the annex and he was able to diffuse the whole situation and get Michael to see reason. Unfortunately, this was a little too late because Martin decided he couldn’t rationalize putting up with this sort of abuse at work. That’s right, an ex-convict who would struggle to find a job decided they would rather risk looking for a new job rather than stick around working for Michael. I think he might have made the right decision, unfortunately I cannot see this being the only time this sort of thing happens.

And that, unfortunately, is what happened at the office. Yet again, we have lost another member who transferred over from Stamford and again it seems to be tied back to Michael is some way. This is starting to become a bit of a pattern, will we be able to hang on to the other three? You’ll just have to stick around and wait to see what happens with them. As always, feel free to subscribe and comment to my posts (the comment option is visible on the post’s individual page, not from the home screen). In the meantime, I hope you all have a fantastic weekend as we are only a week out from the official start of summer, and as always I will see you around the Breakroom!

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