Did somebody clean my desk??

Work is all kinds of crazy these days -- except the good kind, which usually involves Miller Lite and Midnight Oil. But, since I fear that I'll be sent to Siberia (which is somewhere north of the Beltway, right?) if I whine too much... I must be mum. Mummm. Let me just say this: People here speak in acronyms. And I never know what they mean.

(I should just be grateful to have a paycheck. Really. I am grateful. (Could it be just a wee bit bigger??) While I sit here whining, my former colleagues in newspapers are dropping like flies. Buyouts here. Layoffs there. Oh! So depressing. )

Anyway, I'm reading this book, "Then We Came to the End," which is supposedly about life in an advertising office, but I'm beginning to secretly suspect that C., the woman who works across the hall from me, wrote it during a staff meeting last week. (They're very long staff meetings.)

To wit, an excerpt, about their boss:

"She usually didn't respond, but when she did, her communiques were brief, inconclusive, and often bewildering. She might leave us a voice mail that said, 'Forget about it,' or drop an e-mail that said only, 'Don't worry so much -- Lynn.' We spent hours trying to decode these simple messages. We went into other people's offices, demanded they stop what they were doing, and conscripted them into the ceaseless political labors of puzzling out her woefully inadequate responses. 'Don't worry so much?' we asked each other. 'Why not at all?'"

It's very funny stuff. I can't quite get my head around the narrative voice -- which is some kind of multiple first-person, i.e, it's WE, which is a little strange. And, in parts, it does tend to go on and on... But it's uncomfortably spot on. Aiee! (Girlfriend, why are you still working here, when you've got a bestseller on your hands??)