Good morning and welcome back to the Breakroom! I am taking today off but wanted to stop in to not deprive everyone of their Breakdown. It happens to be my birthday this coming Sunday so I decided to treat myself to a nice three day weekend! My goal is to relax and take it easy, maybe get around to a few things around the house I have been putting off. And of course, I get to spend my birthday with family and friends do our rescheduled dungeons and dragons session for the week. And no, I will not be watching the Super Bowl as I am not a sports person but I certainly hope the rest of you enjoy it.
Even with all of that excitement going on, I do just want to remind everyone ready to stay vigilant and on top of what is currently happening here in the United States. Every day we see the rights our citizens under attack, in particular our trans friends and family members have been targeted. In addition, we have Elon Musk overstepping his authority and accessing the private information of all citizens. Remember to reach out to your respective members of Congress and urge them to stand up against these atrocities. We cannot standby as these “leaders” line their pockets and recreate Nazi Germany here in our own backyard.
Having hopefully inspired you, let us move to this week’s Breakdown!
This morning we got to a rocky start because Michael doesn’t even make into the office before he ends up with gum in his hair. How did that happen? Evidently he saw something shiny below Stanley’s car and thought it might’ve been a quarter. But when he went down to grab it, he ended up with gum in his hair. Plus, it was only a piece of aluminum foil. So for the next hour Michael was trying to work the gum out of his hair with Dwight’s help by applying peanut butter to his hair. Now I did reach out to my husband, who is a hair stylist, to get his opinion on the use of peanut butter to get out gum. Now this really is one of the best tools to work it out. The key is about getting the section of hair with gum to be covered and worked through with an oil-based food. Peanut butter works because it is one of those staples that you can find in most homes and even offices. Cooking oils could certainly be another alternative, but most offices are more likely to have peanut butter rather than coconut oil. But once the gum is coated in oil, it cannot hold onto the hair as easily and can be combed out. The downside of having this happen first thing in the morning at the office is you end up smelling like peanut butter the rest of the day so I hope you love that nutty scent.
The gum was only salt in the wound for poor Michael who has been struggling as he tries to get back into the dating field. If all of his struggles last week weren’t bad enough, he has gone on more dates since then and just cannot find anyone good enough. In his own words, their personalities have been fine but he has been hoping to find someone more like Cindy Crawford. He means they haven’t been as attractive as he thinks he deserves so I think most of us can only feel a certain level of sympathy for him.
Besides having to listen to Michael’s grumbling, we have been complaining ourselves with new mandates coming from Ryan at corporate. He is mandating we all come in on Saturday to do more work by entering in all of our sales through Dunder Mifflin Infinity, his fancy website for the company. It is pretty insulting considering he is only requiring us to do this to make it appear like the website is more successful and legitimate than it is. Besides the fact that sales haven’t been increasing as much as he’d like, the website’s social media feature was recently used by sexual predators to harass people, plus customers are calling the sales team to assist with using it. Overall, Ryan is banking his career on the success of the website and is trying to market is as the key to the future of the company. Truthfully, I believe Ryan doesn’t really care about paper or the the company. He is idolizing the young and powerful tech moguls and sees this as his chance to be the next Zuckerberg (no one should want to idolize that). On his way out (he literally came to Scranton to explain why we needed to work this weekend) he bragged to Michael about all of the girls he is meeting and said he should feel free to head on by anytime.
I think we all know what proceeded to happen from there. Michael decided to call it a day and convinced Dwight that they should head up to New York and hit the town to meet ladies. And off they went, finally resulting in some quiet around the office. Near the end of the day, Jim came around with a big idea. He realized that if we all stayed a few hours late we could get the information entered and not need to head into the office over the weekend. Naturally, we loved the idea and we got to work to try to power through it all given that we did not have Michael and Dwight to distract us. Everything was going according to plan, we got the work done early and called it a night, ready to enjoy our weekend. And when we got to the parking lot, we realized the gate into the park were closed and locked, meaning we were trapped. It seems that while Jim thought ahead to speak to all of us, he failed to notify Hank from security to let him know that we’d be staying late. Although why he didn’t think to question why the vehicles for a dozen people were in the parking lot, I’ll never know. But if you’ve met Hank, he is very much the “not my problem” type of mentality. Just a piece of advice to those like that, although it might not be “your problem” there is always the chance it will come back and be an issue that you have to fix, so sometimes it is easier to pay attention.
While we were dealing with everything at the office, Michael and Dwight had gone to some bar in the city to surprise Ryan and his friend Trevor. Oddly enough, they were ecstatic to see the pair and quickly got them drinks and into the spirit of the evening. Michael did his best to find a special lady but kept striking out, evidently that particular bar had a pretty low age group. Some girl had never even heard of the movie Back to the Future which I do not know how that is possible. She obviously had poor choice in films, so Michael is better off without her. They moved to another bar and were able to make their way through the doors by being paired with some female basketball players they met. It was actually Dwight who had the idea that they could get in when they attractive girls like that, or Amazons as he called them. I have no idea how but Dwight was evidently killing it that night because of the girls even ended up making out with him. I know this because Michael took a photo and sent it to all of us to ensure we knew that they were having a good time. But in the end, their club adventures came to a crashing halt when Ryan got caught up in some sort of argument and was escorted out of the club by security. Being good friends, Dwight and Michael escorted him back to his apartment so he could sleep off what appeared to be he drank too much. His friend Troy bugged out and left them, although he pleaded that they do anything but call the cops. In the end they just crashed at Ryan’s place; Michael didn’t meet anyone but said that just companionship with the guys was all he needed.
In contrast, we were still stranded back outside the office. Pam had locked the office itself on our way out so we had to wait in the downstairs lobby. Despite her position, Pam does not have an emergency key because Dwight has both backup copies. When asked “what if you die Dwight, what then?” He responded back with “If I am dead, then you have all been dead for weeks.” And that, everyone, is why none of us having additional keys that we could have used to get into the office. Jim was able to get in touch with Hank and he said he’d be right over, but after over an hour we begin to doubt if he was even coming to help us. If that wasn’t bad enough, we had a very awkward moment where Toby places his hand on Pam’s leg after telling a joke. And this was a pretty intimate style of touching her and we all clocked this right away. Most of us knew that Toby had a crush on Pam but this was the most he has ever done to express those feelings. It must have suddenly dawned on him what he did because he simply announced that he has decided to move to Costa Rica, and proceeded to run across the parking lot, scale 15 to 20 foot fence and run home. If I had not see this happen, I would never have believed that he could possibly do all that, but there he did.
Just when we were ready to write this night off as a failure, and a weird one, a vehicle suddenly pulled up with the building’s housekeeping staff. Jim and Oscar ran up to greet them, I don’t know how Jim knew they’d only speak Spanish, but he explained everything and they were able to let us out. Finally, we were on our way out and could enjoy the weekend after being there all night. Only later did I think about the fact that Hank supposedly was still coming to let us out, but I’m assuming Jim gave him a call so we are all good. And with writing this, we are on our weekend!
I hope you all enjoyed that Breakdown, not too much business teachings but I will instead point out to Ryan’s whole requiring us to relog all the sales into his website. I have a feeling that this will come back to bite him because although no one else seems to be saying it, this is all sort of shady in my book.
I hope you all have a great weekend, and prepare for more snow that is supposedly in store this weekend. And as always, I’ll see you around the Breakroom.
