Pop quiz!

Where do I work?

A) a newspaper
B) a pre-school

For the past few months I would have answered A, but this morning's memo was written in a tone that would suggest B.

Fig. 1: Highlighting (and Gaussian blur at 9.1 pixels) mine

In case people, entertainment, food, cameraderie, two concerts, a great line-up, and "a [blank] to cap off the evening" (an orgy? Maybe) do not entice you, surely you are lured by the chance to meet people you talk to on the phone but have never met in person.

Is that even a thing? I could see if you were three and you were told that maybe Santa would be there, and wouldn't you want to meet Santa because you write him all those letters? But you're not three years old, you're a grown-up; you wouldn't get a parking spot otherwise. Does anyone have such scintillating business conversations over the phone that they need to meet the people they speak with? They don't, but even if they did they don't *need* to meet the people; it's just "very pleasant" is all.

No, I won't be attending the festival. The last thing I need is to get caught as I drunkenly slash the executives' tires. Besides, the only person I talk to on the phone at work is the ads manager, and the only "very pleasant" interaction I could imagine having with her would be when I tell her that there's no room for her in my lifeboat as an oceanliner sinks in the background. (Don't tell her, but there's actually lots of room in my lifeboat.)

So maybe the executives are idiots who think their employees are even bigger idiots than they are (that's some sort of philosophical Möbius strip I'm wary of unravelling) but they're also poets. Check out this haiku I got via email yesterday:

Fig. 2: It's a haiku if you include her name

What I love is that in the first image I went to great pains to blur (Gaussian blur) out any identifying details of where I work, but in the second image I leave in this woman's probably unique, definitely google-able name. Duh, if I blurred out her name you wouldn't know it was a haiku, and everybody knows that art is more important than everything ever, especially when we're talking about the magic of spontaneous haiku.