Good morning everyone, and welcome back to the Breakroom. I hope you all have had a great week, here in this household we are still just trying to get rid of this darn cough we cannot seem to kick. It was not lost on me that perhaps getting out in the fresh air might help and this week we have been productive in exercising our green thumbs. As part of a recent Costco run we got some new plants for the garden, as well as an adorable bonsai plant. It was then while we were clearing dead foliage from our garden that I decided we should finally start composting. So I went ahead and found this compost bin which was officially delivered today and have gone ahead and set it up, along with some food scraps. I went with this model because I am supposed to be able to rotate the body to mix it up, rather than needing to do it by hand. I would love to hear from others on if they have some tips about getting into composting. Or simply share some great gardening tips for us who are a bit newer and just trying to have some fun. I know one personal goal I have is to get away from the classic grass lawn and try to develop a lawn of native plants that do not need to be mowed. A big part is because I know they tend to be more environmentally friendly, especially if they can are beneficial for our pollinators.
For those of you who saw our Facebook post will know that it is officially Pride Month. Breakroom Breakdown is created by and ran by the LGBTQ+ community and will always standby my fellow members, not to mention any marginalized group. I firmly believe we need a sense of community more than ever this year and will not be backing. For those of you finding it hard to stay optimistic about our future, please remember that you are not alone and you can always find support out here.
In other news, I think the main story from the business world is coming from multiple sources. I would not have predicted that Donald Trump and Elon Musk would have chosen Pride Month to have public meltdowns but here we are. Like that one toxic couple we have all seen in our lives, I feel we can anticipate some shocking level of escalation the remainder of the month. With that to look forward to, let us know jump into today’s Breakdown!
Naturally we have a classic Jim prank here, one that is both simple and yet brilliant. Jim had found ethernet cable on sale at a local flea market and decided to link it to Dwight’s computer and then run it all through the office. The result is Dwight confused as to the purpose, and he is ripping everything up trying to track down where it leads to. Jim chose to lead it all the way outside and up a telephone pole. Just because Jim was able to do it, I still feel this was a bit unsafe as of course Dwight would go up there. That being said, there are few people in the office that I would trust would be safe in attempting to scale the pole and Dwight is one of the few. Additionally, I feel this is one of the pranks that you could get away with pulling on one of your colleagues and they would actually find it amusing.
Now for the meat of the day, it started when David Wallace contacted Michael to assist with a project. They have yet to hire the regional supervisor position and are asking Michael to assist with some of the tasks they would normally assign them. This was the job that Michael had interviewed for way back when, I feel they should just give him a chance at the position because right now they simply have no one doing it. But this particular task is that they would sometimes investigate local competitors to see if there is a way to get an edge over them. This makes sense, if you have a bakery you would want to keep a pulse on what your competitors are doing so you can remain in competition with them. Unlike large brands like Staples, this is a small mom-and-pop shop that they cannot get a proper read on. I will be honest that it is when big companies come from these small entities that I get annoyed. Why are you spending time trying to mess with a family business, when you should be focusing on competitors who are as back as yourself. Staples and Office Max, those are the ones who you should be focusing on. But Michael agrees to do this, and enlists Dwight to assist.
Now in my opinion, Dwight and Michael choose to partage in what is known as corporate espionage. We normally think of espionage as sexy spies taking government secrets from foreign nationals, but it exists in the corporate world as well. The business world can get very competitive, so some companies will lie, cheat, and steal to get their hands on trade secrets, top personnel, and client lists. And corporate espionage is very illegal and, depending on what is involved, can result in prison time and/or heavy fines. Maybe this just me being a business nerd, but I personally love a good corporate espionage story because I truly get the thrill out of it as if it were about a spy in the Swiss alps trying to seduce an ambassador. There was recent incident (which is still unfolding) in which it was discovered that the company Deel sent in a spy to infiltrate their competitor Rippling. Over the course of months, this employee stole price points, package plans, and client information so that Deel could making competing products and underscore them. This even resulted in the said employee flushing their phone down the toilet just to hide evidence, and then the CEO of Deel being so unavailable he could not be properly served1. As more information comes out, I feel like that story alone might deserve its own Breakdown to cover all that happens. And for the record, there is a difference between corporate espionage and simply doing your homework. Really any information you can ascertain from online searches or even from the company without any falsification of your identity can be considered you doing your own due process. Honestly, even if you were to go on Reddit and find that a disgruntled employee chose to release private information, you had no hand in initiating it so you are simply accessing readily available information. It is when you might pose as a customer or get hired to take the information, then that is where you need to evaluate the laws you are breaking. Yes there can be a grey area in that if the company was really trying to remain private they should also do their due diligence to be more secure of their secrets. But most companies would like to think that people have the decency to not try to steal from them, wouldn’t you think?
Michael and Dwight start with staking out the company to see what they can learn from the outside. The name of this poor company, Prince Paper. Dwight seems to know what he is looking for more than Michael. Michael is worried about the rain, Dwight notices that no lunch meetings seem to be going on so perhaps they are not attempting to expand more than they already are. Michael does offer a brilliant explanation of business though, and that is:
“In nature, there is something called a food chain; it’s where the shark eats a little shark. And the little shark eats a littler shark. And so on and so on. Until you get down to the single cell shark. So now replace sharks with paper companies and that is all you need to know about business.”
I get what Michael is trying to say and that is a pretty decent explanation of the food chain, although I am not a fan of comparing that to business. If all of the businesses slowly get eaten by one big shark, you are left with a monopoly and that is by no means a good thing. Also, there is no such thing as a one cell shark as one cell organisms are not sharks.
Before long, Michael heads in under his alias Michael Scarn and tells them he works at a law firm and is looking to get to know them as a possible supplier. I will mention that I have heard (likely from a television show) that supposedly if you are using an alias, it helps to use one which has the same initials as your real name. It is meant to make it easier to remember because you are able to form a connection with it. Again, I’m sure it was Leverage or Burn Notice but it sounds like something real so I’ll throw that factoid out to those who may need an alias some day. In this case, Michael’s plan starts to work and this warm, welcoming family starts to share all of their information. Dwight then comes in and uses his own identity but claims he is hoping to leave his current company to come here. Besides getting all of their questions answered, Michael is given a list of their top clients as a parting gift. That way he can call them to hear how satisfied they all are with Prince Paper. Of course, on their way out Michael accidentally drove over a parking divider and damaged. And true to their good nature, the Prince family comes out and helps get Michael’s vehicle all patched up to hit the road.
It was now that Michael was starting to have major reservations because the Prince family had been so generous and now they were going essentially destroy them. He was so close to destroying all the information they collected but Dwight is able to talk him down and explain that at the end of the day this is business. And if Dunder Mifflin doesn’t do this to Prince Paper, someone else is going to so they might as well do it. I’m just going to reiterate my earlier statement that not every business wants to be the biggest one on the block. Mom-and-pop shops are there to provide income for a family, not to take over the world and be an international household name. These large businesses need to stop trying to take out small businesses and focus on their larger competition. That or they can simply accept that they are as big as they need to be for awhile and that profits can remain steady rather than always increase. The financial struggles are tied to the fact that they continue to give themselves larger bonuses at the top, and heaven forbid they give those up. So Michael gives up the details to David Wallace who is pretty proud of Michael, and go a major win in his book.
You might be wondering what else was going on today in the office, maybe everyone was working hard with Michael gone? No, in fact none of us were actually working today all because of a dispute between Phyllis and Stanley. They could not agree on if Hillary Swank, the actress, was “hot.” This question split the office down the middle and actually resulted in some serious debates going on. Stanly, for example, felt that the hotness of Hillary gave him a reason to keep on living. Oscar, on the other hand, used koinophilia to prove that Hillary does not meet the requirements given that her face does not have perfect symmetry (which is often considered subconsciously attractive). But I feel that it is Kevin who describes it best in that it is a gut thing, because it really is. To describe someone as “hot” is difficult because each person has their own definition of what makes someone attractive, sexy, hot, handsome, etc… Now, a quick poll of myself, husband, and brother-in-law found that Hillary Swank wasn’t hot. But Angela compared her as a “female Boris Becker” which I found interesting as a young Becker just might the criteria of “hot”, although I’ve always been more of an Andre Agassi type of guy.
At the end of the day I think we can all agree that the definition of “hot” varies between each person and at the end of the day that is all that matters.
What I do know is hot is the weather because we are certainly starting to get close to summer. I hope you all get a chance to get outside to enjoy the green and maybe garden. And with it being Pride Month, how about we all support our community and maybe aggravate some bigots while we are at it. Until next time, I’ll see you around the Breakroom.
- Jones, R. (2025, June 4). The Rippling and Deel spy saga takes a turn with new allegations. Semafor. Retrieved June 5, 2025, from https://www.semafor.com/article/06/04/2025/deel-fires-back-at-competitor-rippling-with-new-spying-allegations ↩︎
