Renewed a correspondence today with an old friend by the name of "Dute". He founded our company's unofficial "Disturbed Loner's Chat Room", which consisted of a Lotus Notes address group of ten of us serving as an outlet, a forum for injecting creativity and color into all things corporate. The emails were as jejune as they were politically incorrect. Dute, though, is one heckuva writer, as you'll shortly see:
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An intranet site had a "Question of the Day" about China: "Which direction has China moved since Tiananmen Square 10 years ago (i.e. toward democracy or away)?"

Dute emailed the group: "I think China has been moving northeast since Tiananmen Square in the last 10 years. During the late Cretaceous period (80 - 65 million years ago), the Indian subcontinent drifted away from Madagascar and at a speed of 15 cm/year, its tectonic plate subducted beneath the southern margin of Asia. Around the same time, Australia separated from Antarctica, missed Borneo, and is currently in collision with China. This carom will send China east, toward North America, closer to the heart of democracy as we know it. However, if the continental subduction of the Puerto Rican trench and the Scotia arc become more volatile, North America will also drift east to collide with Western Europe in some 250 million years, leaving China farther away from democracy than ever. That weasel Clinton and our incompetent Congress will no doubt sit idly by doing nothing about this but the usual partisan bickering."
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Refuting an email that went around titled "Why Beer is Better than Jesus":

Why Jesus is better than a beer:

10. Time isn't marked 'before beer' and 'after beer'

9. Beer never predicted its appearance centuries before.

8. A beer doesn't give a rat's -ss about you.

7. That the perfectly balanced universe is like a sharpened pencil standing on a table is not because of beer.

6. Beer makes you feel good, Jesus makes you good.

5. Beer tells you the world is okay even though everything's f--ked up.
Jesus tells you the world is f-ked up but that everything will be okay.

4. Beer today, gone tomorrow. Jesus today, Jesus tomorrow.

3. Praying and driving isn't against the law.

2. No one ever died for a beer.

1. No one ever gets a "Jesus belly".
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Dute was assigned to work New Year's Eve from 6pm to 6am to make sure our Y2K implementation was successful...Here is his reaction to learning he would be working that evening:

"I'm inviting everyone to a fin-de-siecle siege party in my cube from 6 pm 12/31/99 to 6 am 01/01/2000. I am going to provide the sandbags, bottled water, weapons, canned goods, paranoia, cheese fondue, ammunition, "cube rage", ham radio crystal set, surly disposition, an itchy as hell trigger finger, sunglasses, and coffee. I am asking for volunteers to bring nachos, paper cups and napkins. We will usher in the new year in true style as entropy kicks in, hotwires the gregorian calendar, and drives the new millenium, full throttle and top down... Watch milk curdle in the dairy case and cereal go all soggy right in the box! Watch airplanes fall out of the sky like a rock! Watch the electric grid fail and plunge the world, one hemisphere at a time, into total darkness! Watch anyone who was a Cobol programmer in the '60s and '70s look at others with shifty sidelong glances! Watch all commerce grind to a standstill as--oh, wait, what am I thinking? Commerce will be on vacation, like everyone else and his sister that f-ing day. Damn."
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In December of '99, the corporation offered a forum for Y2K questions. Here was my query:

"I heard a rumor the real scare of Y2k isn't bank failures or electricity outages, it is a takeover of the ENTIRE WORLD by a clandestine operation out of Brussels that has successfully hooked up all computers over the entire world by their entrails and will engineer massive fraud (i.e. quiet government coups will ensue by replacing world leaders with 'twins' who were genetically manufactured, i.e. cloned, off stray DNA that the Brussels group obtained). Most of the massive Y2k expenditures that companies have been spending are not to accomplish Y2k compliance, but to effect the coordination of the Fortune 500's computers into the Brussel's main hub. Use your commonsense - it can't cost a company $100 million to expand to a 4-digit year!! Helll-o! Me and a buddy could've done it for 1 mill and a Guinness to be named later. The world cartel has been salivating for this moment. What can we do to prevent it?"

To which Dute answered at great length, excerpted here:

"I've stockpiled a load of tepee poles and animal hides, because who knows whether our houses, all constructed in a year beginning with 19, will even be standing come 1/1/00. It's worse than you think, Paranoid-Man. No one knows the full story. No one. The Brussels cabal is just a smokescreen, nothing more, nothing less. Brussels won't even take a shit without the say-so of their order givers...."

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We received this in a corporate email:

"The [Corporation Name] Pride Club is hosting a holiday party on Sunday, Dec. 5 from 3 p.m. - 7 p.m. For further details contact..."

My response:
"Uh, didja notice that the "Gay" is mysteriously missing? When I first saw this entry, I thought "hmmm....a pride club. Pride in what? Pride in our country? A veterans group perhaps? Or just people who were proud of themselves? It slowly dawned on me that this was the gay club. Isn't it kind of oxymoronic to say you belong to a 'gay pride club' but then to leave off the gay? I mean, are you really proud of being gay if you name your club "Pride"?"
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Our corporation sponsors an annual picnic lunch for the homeless. The email promoting it urged contributions, saying "give the homeless of Columbus a day off!".

Ham of Bone, that wag, said "Ye wizened round-tablers, please explain to me the meaning of the phrase 'to give the homeless of Columbus a day off' found in the note below. I was of the opinion that the homeless have EVERY day off."

To which Dute responded, "To me, a day off means an opportunity to get away from the mundane routines that define and structure my life. So maybe you should take a day off that day, and sit on the curb at Pearl Alley wearing an 8-ball jacket and a 3-day-o'clock shadow while you jangle change in a tin cup. Let one a them scruffy [dudes] sit at your desk for a day, but make sure you write down all your passwords on a post-it note though, so as not to create any confusion."
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My email:

The big news in nytimes today is that women can cut their cancer risk by cutting off their breasts - no kidding - masectomies are recommended to avoid breast cancer. Have we come to an age when self-mutulation is the way to avoid risk? Will it come to killing ourselves so that some disease won't first? Call me old-fashioned, but I miss the days when no one worried about health risks so much.

Hambone answered:

I believe that increasing the regularity of breast exams would decrease the risk just as well, and I know that there would be alot of volunteers for that important task...
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From Neil:

From: [Name Withheld], Data Center

Many employees have notified me they have received chain letters and other inappropriate e-mails over the last month. As you may know, our company discourages these sorts of e-mails, as they are hard on the mail system and can bring down our servers. If you would like more information on this, please see the note sent this past fall by John Doe, senior vice president and chief information officer. Please forward this message to 5 of your friends. This message has circled the world five times and if you break the chain you will be cast into the endless void and your hair will fall out.
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John was born a coalminer's son in godforsaken Pike county in southeast Ohio. His vision was tunnel, his daily food coal dust, his drinking water laced with uranium that leaked like a sieve from the nearby nuclear power plant. He grew a third eye as a result, and was resigned to a life of the circus as a side-show act until he challenged the big employer to the north on the grounds of diversity (i.e. three eyes are better than two). XYZ Corp hates the smell of lawsuit in the morning, so they hired him as a 'vision consultant' but in practice he just sends out mind-numbing communications.
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On finding out the very liberal "Community Fest" aka CommunistFest, would not be allowing alcohol or pets for the first time in twenty years:

To the CommunistFest Kommittee Members:

I'm outraged that your webcite sez the following:
NO ALCOHOL NOT BOUGHT FROM THE FEST!!!
NO PETS AT THE FEST!!!

As a member of the human potential movement, E.S.T, and Rastfarians for Bush, I do not feel it is in keeping with the spirit of these organizations, or in the best interests of the karma of the organizers to make dogmatic, militaristic, and plain ol' mean statements like that. But if you must, then I like imported beers, preferably specialty ales. I don't like lines, they're bourgeois. Ann Archy Rulz!

Pravda baby,
-T
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From Bone:

At the company meeting last week we received saltine goldfish crackers and a plastique bucket & shovel. Why not empower ourselves, take it a step further and bring the sea theme into the everyday workplace? I'll get a couple, five, bags of sand to provide a nice sandy beach in the cubical. A few heat lamps, pair of shades, a couple margarita's and we'll be set.....we'll be called the sea men, or semen for short...but wait! hey that's not a Cap'n Dick Seaworthy Combination Telescope and Periscope Kit! That's a hidden microphon-- (And that's when we lost transmission)
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