I’m two weeks into my pretend job, and the commute is killing me. This morning, I found myself mentally calculating the potential loss to humanity if I ran over that MIT student instead of stopping in front of the crosswalk. He had a girlfriend with him, for God’s sake. How brilliant could he be? Definitely not a mathematician…probably just a linguist…a sociolinguist. So a couple of papers on conversational H-dropping would go unpublished. Floor it!

One nice thing about corporate America that I had forgotten: free tampons. In an effort to squeeze every ounce of productivity out if the menstruating portion of the workforce, the Powers that Be have arranged it so that we don’t have to spend a single minute tracking down feminine hygiene products or the quarters to pay for them. Thank you, Powers.

One rotten thing about corporate America that I had forgotten: company e-mail. Not just the general principle— anyone in the directory can, and does, reach out and e-touch perfect work-strangers at any given time, resulting in an incessant series of electronic sighs signaling new messages— but also the specific shortcomings of the application in question, Microsoft Outlook. Have those people in Redmond ever heard of a spam filter? I spend half my time deleting messages with the subject, “It’s not a dating service, it’s a SHAGGING service!” thus negating the productivity gains resulting from the free tampons.

I can hardly wait to go back to being the kind of consultant who phones it in.