Category: The Office

Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Breakroom! Another Independence Day is behind us, a time to eat red, white, and blue foods, shoot off illegal fireworks, and think back to all of freedoms and rights that we have seen slowly ripped away from us. That is right, I am not feeling all too patriotic this year but that is my right as an American. That I can call out and say this country needs to do better, starting with bringing back my Roe v. Wade that I (like so many others) look back and miss every single day. So this year, perhaps instead take the time to acknowledge that our country has been falling behind the rest of the world for many years and we need to catch back up to them. That being sad, you can certainly do so with a shortcake cupcake with strawberries and whipped cream like I did. As I proceed to get off my soapbox having gotten that off my chest (it needed to be said, sorry/not sorry) perhaps I better get to breaking down what has happened around the office. Being a holiday week and now back for Friday, I think perhaps all of our emotions are just a bit off today. That being said, if you have any sort of neighbors next your house the you should not be launching off fireworks. Some of us with dogs, actually hate fireworks and spend the entire day trying to comfort our dogs stressing out. Move out to the country where you can do whatever you want without impeding on other people. Second soapbox over, on to the office!

To start, Michael actually decided to pull off a joke on our usual suspects for a change, that being Jim and Pam. He found a program that allows him to type in words that his computer then repeats audibly, so he decorated him with eyes and a mouth and introduces himself as Harvey. It was going pretty well with Harvey being crude to Pam and Jim, until Michael began to misspell his words which resulted in the speech being incorrect as well. That is unfortunately the big problem with doing a prank like this; for the record, a very quick Google search tells me that the average error rate in typing should be around 92%, that equates to 8 errors out of every 100 words. It has been a long time since I’ve tested myself but I would put myself in that area, although I do feel motivated to try to test myself and see where I exist. As you can expect, Jim and Pam turn the tables on Michael and his joke and he quickly kicks everyone out because they “ruined everything.”

The morning was otherwise okay, aside from the fact that Dwight was incredibly late to work. So much so that it was sort of obvious Andy was trying to call attention to it in order to get Dwight in trouble with Michael. Fortunately he did show up before it was too late, especially because of a new sales plan that they were trying today. Instead of focusing sales solo, today each salesman is teaming up with another one and heading out on a joint sales call. Michael was proud of this plan and likened it to the Amazing Race show on television, where teams get together and race around the world. Now I agree that this has a feel about the show because they are in teams off to complete a sale, but I am surprised at the missed opportunity in which Michael chose not to make it a competition. While promoting competition in the workplace can sometimes go wrong, when done right it is a great motivational tool to encourage employees to work harder. While most of the employees will vie for the simple fact they want to win the prize, there are some of us who are naturally a bit competitive and revel in the fact we do better than other people. These teams that got chosen, along with their Amazing Race title, would be:

Michael and Andy: Firefighter heroes
Phyllis and Karen: Mother and daughter
Stanley and Ryan: Retired marines
Jim and Dwight: Gay couple

From here they head out and commence to compete on their sales! Phyllis and Karen were able to complete their sale, Phyllis had some inside knowledge on the client and she arranged for them to get makeovers to they look like his wife (smart!). Jim and Dwight also had a one-two punch plan to prove that no company would offer the same level of customer service as them and clenched the sale. Stanley and Ryan were not able to close the deal, evidently Ryan insisted on leading the meeting and he choked. Michael and Andy also failed, not sure what happened since Michael is usually such a great salesman, so perhaps Andy is the one who is not as amazing as he likes to think he was. What I thought was most interesting was it really encourages coworkers to learn one another’s strengths and weaknesses, ones they man have not been aware of recently. For instance, Phyllis is normally so quiet and reserved you might not know how strategic she can be when preparing for her sales. In comparison, Ryan portrays himself as confident and bright, yet he is actually terrible when it comes to sales. While that was going on, the oddest think was happening at the office: Angela and Pam were hanging out. Ever since Dwight rolled in late this morning, Angela was in this bright and bubbly mood. So much so, she had told Pam they should go out and get coffee for the office and has just been so giddy in general. Not going to lie, just didn’t quite seem right based on what I am used to.

As with all good things, they must come to an end and in this case that end is named Andy Bernard. He somehow came across a toll receipt which proves that Dwight didn’t sleep in this morning, but was actually at New York City this morning. Turns out, he even signed in at the corporate office but there is some mystery as to why he was there. Strange coincidence, accounting had just needed to get their tax forms over the corporate office sent by express. Strange, we almost could’ve had Dwight take care of this for us. But the problem is, when Michael confronts him he refuses to explain why he had gone to the corporate office. Naturally, Michael thinks back to when Dwight tried to take his job so he doesn’t trust him at all and refuses to accept this. Ultimately, Dwight announces to the office that he has chosen to leave the office. That’s right, Dwight K. Schrute whom we assumed would die here in his chair, has instead to leave his job. Most of us were truly stunned, a few people didn’t seem to care, and Angela was surprisingly shook up about it. And Andy was far to smug about this ordeal, I think we can all agree he may have had a hand in trying to come to this result.

And like that, we saw the end of an intense era with Dwight leaving the office. His overbearing void will surely be filled soon with this sudden power gap, and I think we can assume it will be Andy trying to fill this void. I guess we will need to wait till next week to actually see how this entire ordeal turns out. Until then, I hope each and everyone of you have a great week and take the time to think about how we, as a nation, can do better. Additionally, I hope you stick around because we have some very interesting updates on some projects in the coming week. Until then, feel free to follow and comment this blog so I can get your feedback and involvement, and why not treat yourself to Office memorabilia, as we never can have enough. Until then, I’ll see you around the Breakroom!

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Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Breakroom! Now I did not have time this week for a Coffee Break, as you may have noticed, because besides being busy with work we did have a sick pup in the house. Our Loki threw up several times on Monday (starting at 1am) so he has been our priority this week. He is doing much better, still on some rice and beef and some anti-nausea medication but it’s looking like it was just a stomach bug so I will be back with a Coffee Break this next week. As always, if there are specific topics you’d like me to cover then feel free to head over to the Contact page to get in touch directly, or you can leave a comment on one of my posts! Additionally, I hope you will consider subscribing so I can make sure you stay up-to-date with anything new here at Breakroom Breakdown. With that, let us get into today’s Breakdown and I hope you are ready for a bit of Christmas in June!

It was our office’s Christmas party and the day started off with a miracle from above, or across the road. On his way in to work today, Dwight ran over a goose and had the foresight to get out and grab the goose to bring in to prepare for dinner for everyone! The Schrutes do not like to let anything go to waste, the goose alone will provide a delicious meal, feathers, and goose grease. While some of us were okay with looking forward to a tasty Christmas goose, Toby was indignant that he can not butcher and clean a goose in the office. True to form, Dwight had attempted to do this very thing when he brought in a live duck awhile back. Ultimately, we wear Toby down and he is okay with Dwight preparing the goose as long as he cleans it in his car. Unfortunately, he throws the dead goose in the fridge and we never actually get to partake in it as dinner. I considered doing goose for Christmas a few years ago rather than the traditional turkey, but my word gooses get expensive! Does anyone lean more towards goose than turkey for their Christmas meal?

Besides the loss of a tasty meal, we are all trying to celebrate the season of giving this year with a big toy drive to donate to local group. Michael is so giving he brings in a full bicycle (that looked suspiciously like his old bike). My company does a big toy/gift drive every Christmas and it really is a great idea for your office. If your company doesn’t already do one, consider looking into a local group or even one of the larger organizations (like Toys for Tots) so you can promote thinking about others for the season. It can be a lot of fun shopping for different toys, clothes, and even art supplies to donate to those in need and it really offers you the chance to do something special.

Between the Christmas party and toy drive, Michael was truly walking on cloud 9 that when his girlfriend, Carol, showed up to the office he swept her into his office. She left shortly later and it turns out that Michael’s plans have gone out the window. I guess he took a photo of Carol with her kids and ex-husband, photoshopped himself over her ex and then sent it out to people for his holiday card. He then sprung on her that he had gotten tickets to Sandals Resort in Jamaica for over the holidays. As sweet as that is, I’m pretty sure it is not okay to surprise your casual girlfriend who has two kids with such a trip. Needless to say, Carol decided that these were the last straws and broke up with him. As can be expected, Michael began to spiral to the point he wanted to just cancel Christmas altogether. I was really worried that he would spiral to the point that the office would come to a standstill, sort of like this normally works out. Thankfully, Andy decided it was his job to cheer him up so he was able corral him out the door and spend lunch over at Benihana’s (known to Michael as “Asian Hooters”) and Michael decides to bring Jim and Dwight along with them. Ryan was invited too but was prepared with a thousand different excuses. Major props to Ryan, I don’t know how many people feel the need to have an excuse not to do something in their back pocket but preparing such reasons is not a terrible idea. Considering Michael has a habit of asking him to do a lot of things outside his job description, I think that is why it is so crucial for him.

While this is all going on, there is a major battle of the Christmas parties going on in the office today. It started when Karen decided to join the Party Planning Committee (still headed up by Angela) in an attempt incorporate some ideas that Stamford would to help them feel welcome (even though we are down to only three employees from Stamford). She suggests a Christmas raffle, karaoke, and a drinking game. Angela shoots them all down since they are not on theme with her nutcracker theme and kicks her out of the Committee. Trying to extend an olive branch, Pam reaches out afterwards and the two of them end up deciding to throw their own party in competition against Angela. No one goes up against Angela, especially when it is regarding her position as head of the Party Planning Committee. They decide to schedule their Margarita-Karaoke Christmas Party fifteen minutes before hers in a clear attempt to take over the office. Angela truly goes out of her way to get their party canceled, including trying to get Dwight and Toby to interfere but nothing works. In the end, both parties go off with out a hitch and despite Angela’s having all of the baked goods, the majority all go to the Margarita-Karaoke Party except for Phyllis, Kevin, and Hannah. Eventually the group at Benihana return and Michael and Andy are excited to introduce us to their new girlfriends they met at the restaurant!

Well, the party gets a bit weird at this point. It almost feels like Michael can’t even tell which one is which and he then tries talk her into going to Sandals with him as well and this proceeds to fall apart as well. On the brightside, having proved their point with hosting the most popular party, Karen and Pam reach out to Angela and suggest they combine the parties and Angela actually agrees. More than that, she even decides to perform her rendition of Little Drummer Boy with the karaoke machine. In the end, this ended up being a pretty good Christmas party, and Michael actually did a lot less damage than with his Yankee Swap debacle so win-win!

With this entire party situation, I do have to call out that this does sort of showcase the different types of people there are who throw parties. Pam and Karen are the type whose party can typically be thrown together in a couple of hours, and their main goal is to come up with fun ideas and throw them in the mix and that becomes their party. In this case, they went with margaritas and karaoke. Then there are those who are like Angela, who typically will spend weeks planning their party with every detail accounted for, and will often have some sort of theme to tie it all together. Additionally, because they often have the entire thing planned already they are not very accepting of others trying to come in at the last moment with “why don’t you do this too?” With that, I will admit I much more an Angela sort of person. If I only have 24-hours to put together an event I certainly can, but for anything arranged in advance I will plan out the menu, activities, and try to put together some sort of theme to it all. The big difference is while Angela keeps the Committee in place to have people under her to do the heavy lifting, I am normally the one who would prefer to do everything. No offense but when it comes to parties and events, I lean towards that only I can do it just the right way so it’s just easier if I take care of it all. I get that it can be fun and perhaps easy to just wing it, but a big party of my planning is I hate to have something unaccounted for. For example, I like to know ahead of time if there is any chance we will have guests with specific dietary requirements so I can either remove it entirely from the menu, or simply ensure there is a nice variety to pick from. My husband cannot eat gluten, for instance, and I can assure you that we have gone to parties where they forgot about this fact. Thank goodness for vegetable trays or he’d pry starve at those parties, but that is why it is so crucial to plan for any such instance.

Planning a Menu

With that, let me give some tips if this if you are tasked with arranging the food for a small party, and I will use a personal example to help. I was asked by a friend to be married if I would do the food for their bride/groom party (instead of a bridal shower they are throwing it for the couple together).

1. Who is the party for? This really can impact the menu because you want to design the menu differently if it is an event in honor of one person versus a variety of individuals. In this case it is a party in honor of the bridge and groom, so I want to ensure that they enjoy all of the foods and know of any dietary restraints. The bridge cannot consume gluten so my first goal is absolutely no gluten anywhere on the menu. Since the party is for the bride and groom, they should be entitled to be able to eat anything they want without worry of if they can. Likewise if she was a vegetarian, I would say no meat should be at the party. If the party is thrown in honor of a person, it is their personal diet which should dictate the menu.
2. How many people? You want to ensure you not only have enough food for everyone, but if you are preparing the food yourself you want to have any idea of how much food to prepare since that will dictate how much time you need. Right now it sounds like around 30 people. While not an overwhelming amount of people, this is doable because I know the party is happening early afternoon on a Sunday so I have already decided I would do shopping for it Friday or Saturday and then do any cooking/baking that can be done in advance on Saturday so I am not scrambling.
3. How is the food set up? This might be an odd question but basically, how do people get their food? In this case it will arranged at a table for people to grab a plate and pull from the options. I have already been told that the venue, while able to hold a lot of people can start to get tight if people group up so this did impact my food options. My personal annoyance is when people take too long to get food, think of that one person is holds up a line in putting together their plate but they get stuck in a conversation. To mitigate this risk, I wanted everything to be grabbable without anything that they need to put together themselves and could congest the venue.
4. Menu with variety. Finally, we need a menu that offers some variety so it isn’t all the same flavors. Since this party is around 1pm, I wanted to have a feel of a light lunch since people are most likely not eating beforehand. So this tells me I want to have mostly savory foods, but some sweets because people will want a bit of dessert. This is a celebratory event and people do love to indulge when they are in a festive mood.
5. Putting together the menu. This will usually narrow down your ideas and then it is about finding options in your personal cookbooks or looking online. Taking all of these details I ultimately settled on platters of sandwiches for people to draw from. I do a great dill chicken salad and then a cucumber and cream cheese, just in case there are people who might be vegetarian. For sweets I settled on cupcakes because those do not get messy to eat, I can make multiple batches in advance, and they are easy to transport. I’m looking at summer flavors but leaning towards s’mores, a strawberry shortcake, and then perhaps something with citrus. Finally, we will round it out with fruit and vegetable trays and perhaps even some meats and cheeses.
6. Final touches. Any final touches of the menu would normally fall under your beverages (unless you were doing a custom cocktail you most likely didn’t think of this yet) and then you cannot forget the plates, napkins, and cutlery. In this case, someone else is taking care of all of this so I do not need to worry!

And that, is how I came up with the menu for this event. As you can see, I do take quite a bit of time in creating a menu and I take a lot under consideration. There are those out there who probably would have just waited until the day before and headed up to Sam’s Club and the menu would be what they could find there. Not to say there is anything wrong with that, but I can assure you that unlike many parties I have gone to I always ensure that I have thought of any sort of dietary restriction if it was possible to be known about. Now if someone shows up and only recently decided to become a vegan, unfortunately I couldn’t have known about that otherwise I would have taken that into consideration because I did inquire for any such cases in advance. So what type of party planner are you all? Are you an Angela who needs to carefully plan every last detail and is not a big fan of others’ input, or are you a Pam and Karen who are of the “more the merrier” mentality when it comes to party ideas?

And with that, I hope I was able to help distract you this Friday just enough to help make the weekend seem just bit closer. It is also officially summer so here is hoping the sun comes out and we can get outside to enjoy the new season (unfortunately I think we are in for rain). As head of my own personal Party Planning Committee, I am always eager to share some ideas so please review below for various PPC-themed items that I have found (which I may or may not have purchased myself) plus some fun tools for your next party. Until next time, I’ll see you around the Breakroom.

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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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1. (2024, June 13). Work Opportunity Tax Credit. IRS. Retrieved August 31, 2023, from https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/work-opportunity-tax-credit ↩︎