Casual Friday

That’s where the company-wide Casual Friday idea came from. The boss man drew up a plan for boosting employee morale and production in response to Gerry’s lackluster report. The casual dress thing came from the fact that he could never button all the buttons on his suit jacket and after lunch he always felt the need to unbutton his pants. This meant that he couldn’t stand up from behind his desk to greet associates who came into the room. It goes without saying that this made the crucial seal-the-deal handshake impossible to execute.

Besides, if he was to start making his own coffee, there was a slim chance that coffee might inadvertently spill on his shirt, rendering him sloppy and unprofessional looking. If he was going to look sloppy, he may as well be comfortable while he was at it. Any excuse to trade in his business attire for a pair of sweats was more than welcome. And here it was disguised as a business plan. Genius! Pure Genius! Needless to say boss-man ran like hell to the CEO with the idea, taking full credit of course.

So Casual Friday was reborn to include the higher-ups and coffee was now made by a machine that told you to “Have a nice day!” after it gurgled out some scalding hot brown liquid purported to contain caffeine. That’ll teach them all to scoff at my 98 cent travel mug that continually leaks all over me, my clothes, my papers, my car, my friends… Anyway, the point is, things were changing around here and presumably for the better.

But reorganization, however positive the change may be, inevitably leads to chaos and that’s where something of a mutiny arose from, a hostile-yet remarkably civil and polite-takeover was in the works. Maybe I’ll tell you the story of the coup over drinks sometime-when all of this is a distant memory and I can “look back and laugh.” Right now I need only look around me to find a laugh, but that makes people uncomfortable and is considered rude in some circles. So I must make a swift exit now before they discover that I ransacked the toner closet and also took those little mini post-it notes everyone is always fighting over….