Career Ending Moves: CEM

I’ve been employed for nigh two years now (13 or 444 depending on which timeline you’re following). One thing is for sure, wherever you work, whatever you do, whoever it’s for, however questionable the legality, it’s a horrid, soul-sapping experience. You’re better off lounging at your parent’s place with their abundantly-stocked fridge at your disposal, eating them out of house and home like they expected you to. You let your parents down, Man. They anticipated a failure but look at you, you’re not even a father yet. So, Working Class Man, GDP Contributor – you need a way out, don’t you? You can’t possibly spend another day being productive! How can you tolerate the shame of being punctual and responsible and fully-clothed? Your 12-year-old self would beat you up if they saw how great you are with a stapler and email. Look in the mirror, look what you’ve become! You’re contributing to team success. You have excellent peer relations. You haven’t been chastised by HR once. You’re even gonna have that presentation ready for Thursday’s meeting. It’s a damn disgrace. Another day of making a difference in the world is going to kill you.

Told you

Time to exit gracefully. Allow me to introduce you to CEM: Career Ending Moves. A careful application of a combination of these can unburden you from the merciless reality of being an upstanding member of society. Never again will you be shackled and obligated to answer a telephone or open Microsoft Word on purpose. Toss that unflattering uniform and ID card out the window today!

“Work for who?” – Queen Elizabeth

CEM #1:

If anybody asks for the date that your project will be completed on, give them the finger and reply, “The first”.

CEM #2:

Walk around the office barefoot. If they allow that, walk around with shoes. They can’t control you, Malcolm X.

CEM #3:

Tell your boss, “Nice mammory glands”, if she’s a her. Mix it up with a wink if your boss is a guy. (Hint: If he responds to the wink positively, resign)

CEM #4:

Wear an offensive T-shirt on a non-casual Friday. Something really bad like “This is my kidnapping shirt” or “Chloroform Everyday” or “One Direction”.

CEM #5:

Come to work covered in blood.

CEM #6:

Listen to the upbeat Taylor Swift songs loud enough for Eric, who sits next to you, to hear and be appalled.

CEM #7:

Clip your nails at the desk where you’re all singing Happy Birthday to Sandra, the lady whose husband just left her days before her birthday.

CEM #8:

Mention how work is gay and only enjoyed by Nigerians and women. (The bonus points here are for being racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic in just 10 words!)

CEM #10:

Get drunk and show up at your boss’ house asking for leave for tomorrow.

BONUS (For Software Developers):

CEM #11:

Use whatever bullshit subversion client your team uses to log onto your source code repository and delete a folder called “trunk”.  Ignore any warnings, Maverick.

CEM #12:

Log onto the most important production database server. Don’t punk out – people are watching. Open a new query to the biggest database. Type in “BEGIN TRAN”, execute the query and take a coffee break. YOLO.

There you go. You’re welcome. Come relax in the leisure zone, a paradise of pure laziness. It must feel like how Mandela felt after his long stay on Robben Island. Liberty, can you taste it? Welcome to unemployment, to care-free days of waking up at 11AM. To constantly having to borrow money from your parents, and giving excuses to your friends because you can’t afford that trip to see Ed Sheeran live. Congratulations on now having time to play cricket with school teachers while there’s still daylight, and doing the community service you incurred after being convicted of robbing an old woman of her pension, because you’re strapped for cash like all the time now. Every single day you, Captain America, will have the freedom to finally try and play the guitar, experiment with getting high on bath salts, and put up with various family members trying to fix you a job. Hey, you know better than to fall into that trap again.

PRO TIP: When people ask what you do for a living now there’s so many lies you can tell; you’re an actuary, you cameo’d on The Big Bang Theory, you’re busy finishing your second degree in financial quantum mechanics, you’re involved in studying mind control in dolphins, you felt it’s time for a break after the Nobel Prize scoop – you can be anything. Be proud of yourself.

I Promised I Would Blog About Murder

Right, so – murder. Murder murder murder. Bad thing that, murder. The Senate assassinated Caesar back in the day because they just couldn’t handle how smooth he was at conquering and stuff. Kind of like how you’re jealous of my well-formed sentences in that secret love letter I wrote to Jojo. Do you want to kill me then? Of course not. We aren’t savages.

The question does arise however; how do you handle the instinct to kill? That killer impulse, the primitive blood lust. Everyday it’s gnawing on the inside of you, desperately searching to be free, to be unleashed on the people who deserve it, who deserve your brutal wrath. Or not. You could be clean, good and wholesome. Good luck with that.

In old times, not last week or something, I’m talking centuries ago, people could just die on any day. Life expectancy was like 42 or something in the Middle Ages. That could be historically inaccurate but how do I know you’re a history teacher? So you could just wake up on your birthday or Tuesday and die. And because you were expecting to die in a barn or at the river at anytime, murder was more commonly practiced. You had a problem with grandma, you took her out, with a sword even. Some guy insulted your upbringing in the swamp, you handled that situation honorably with an axe at sundown.

Wars were fought every second month, and this lot of people intentionally murdered another lot of people, often over some crops, a beautiful princess, or for Birmingham. Men were conditioned to kill. They desired to grow up and be shot in head with an arrow for the King or Duke or Pope or Turkey. These were the guys that got all the chicks. Interestingly enough, they all died fighting in vain before reproducing. This resulted in less than optimal breeding partners; like accountants, engineers and sociology majors, being your great grandparents. Their weak genes being passed on explains your unglamorous demeanor today (sorry).

Peasants were slightly oversensitive and prone to violence

All people, men especially, are born with an insatiable thirst for glory on the battlefield. Our entire civilization is built on the murder of people who were stubbornly standing in the way of the ideals and mechanisms that shaped our current mediocre society. We showed the hippies. Something in our jeans genes compels us to be warriors. In the modern context, there exists no formal way to appease that appetite. Naturally, and we are especially great at this, we have discovered some discount substitutes.

Ever since you were born by accident, you’ve been in competition with everyone around you. Everyone in school wants to beat you up. We’re all so perversely competitive all the time. There’s no war, no fight for survival, so – what do we have instead? People try to outdo each other in Pokemon trivia, playing ping pong at church and repairing telephones. Everyday stuff.

School fights have evolved

There exists an infernal disco in our minds at most times. Other times it’s a silent, brooding anger. Sometimes it bubbles over into an outburst at your mother over a lost sock. Sometimes you supplement with Austrian torture porn or violent video games. Or that one Manson song in your playlist surrounded by all the other usual boy band offerings. It’s the reason why head shots in Battlefield are so satisfying.

Atleast you can shoot Unicorns with a bazooka on Playstation

In fact, all modern technology is the bastard child of military efforts to discover new ways to kill each other. How many ways can you kill a man with a microwave? Think about it. It’s a death machine.

After a while, all the milk-tossing isn’t enough, the persistent internal screaming gets too loud, and Miriam loses it. Miriam surrenders to the barbarism, having been conditioned all her life by The Vampire Diaries to have absolutely zero respect for the sanctity of life, she runs you over with her 2011 Toyota Corolla. Murder, Son. It happens. Because killers are what we are by nature, and everyday it’s becoming less mainstream to do it, to kill. Civilization has left so few people to massacre and even fewer excuses to dismember them recreationally. But don’t do it.

No matter how bored/great-with-nunchuks you are. If TV teaches us anything, it’s that, if you do a murder, Horatio or The Mentalist will catch you in next week’s episode.