Man Up Your Work Day

COFFEE BREAK (A.K.A. The Morning)

Once you get to work, the first thing you should do is take a deep breath, because it's going to be a long day, and the office life will kill you if you let it.  So make a resolution to yourself that you will defeat it at every available grappling point.

Then, you'll want to get a cup of coffee.  Use an average sized mug.  Getting too big of a mug will A) make you look like a cartoon character and B) lessen the total trips to the coffee machine you'll have to take.  And you want to take a lot of them.  Each trip represents four to five minutes scraped off your ugly day.  If you happen to drain the pot and have to start the brew up again, that's another few minutes, plus you'll get to control the caffeine intake of the entire office.  A careful manipulator will be able to pretty much set everyone else's clock for the rest of the day.  Want an office-wide afternoon crash?  Double up on the coffee and watch the magic happen for an hour before everyone's moving through jello.  You may even trip a few people's latent incontinence.  Be careful, though:  while it may be fun to re-name the guy everyone calls Smitty as "Shitty," you don't want anybody to actually have to go home to change clothes.  That's only going to shift the workload toward you.

Just keep drinking coffee and checking your email, though, and it'll be lunchtime before you know it. 

DEALING WITH YOUR BOSS 

Obviously the most important aspect of dealing with your boss properly is knowing your boss.  You have to have an ability to read him or her, or you're not going to be able to get what you want out of this relationship.  For the most part, though, the best boss strategy, unless you want a permanently brown nose and a fast-track to middle management, is to be a ghost. 

That is, don't mess anything up, stay out of the way, get your basic tasks done (if they even need to be done) and move on with your busy life.  With all the stuff we've got planned for you today, you're not going to have much time to muddle up with boss relations, so unless you're going to American Gigolo your way to the top of an all-female managed company, the best move is no move at all.  Status quo, son.  Be cordial and otherwise non-descript.  

MESSING AROUND 

If you're not wasting the majority of your time doing basically anything you can come up with except work, you're wasting the fact that you have a job.  Most offices have such obscenely low expectations that you probably won't have nearly enough work to fill up a workday, so anything you can do to fluff your schedule is going to make you seem busier and thus a better employee.  And so you'll be able to continue receiving the paychecks that keep you coming in smelling like you're sweating whiskey every morning.  At any rate, here's a list of just a few of the things you can do.  For your convenience, I've put the things I've successfully done while working in an office in italics, and the things I've always really wanted to do in bold.

• Run all over the place while holding a file.  If you have a staircase in your building, you really should be chugging up and down that bad boy a few times a day.  When you pass co-workers, say things like, "Man, they've got me running all over today," and, "God, this place is crazy!"  This will make you seem like a go getter, and your simulated hard work will engender respect around the office.  Also, all that running is good exercise, so not only are you burning time at the office, you're saving time.  The time that you would have otherwise spent exercising can now be spent cooking and eating bacon stew.
  
• Completely fill a file folder with pricing information and contact phone numbers/email addresses pertaining to exorbitantly priced French castles.  If anyone asks what you're doing, you wink and tell them, "Extra credit."  Nobody questions extra credit.  It's extra.
• Go to the bathroom.  A lot.  You don't need to go to the bathroom to go to the bathroom.  You just have to want to.  You can't be discriminated against because you have an intestinal condition, but before it even comes to that, how do they know you're sitting on the toilet reading a 409 bottle to kill time?  You're probably running a file somewhere or another.  After all, you're always doing that.  You're a monster of efficiency.  Oh, and if your office's bathroom has a key, hide it in someone else's desk when you're done, because that throws the entire office into a confusion that will allow you to glide more smoothly beneath the radar.
• Get a screensaver that shows a status bar slowly loading over an otherwise normal screen.  How can you be expected to get any work done while your hands are tied by inadequate processing power?
• Make personal phone calls using your work phone voice.  If you use the same tone and inflections for your personal calls that you use for your business calls, you can talk to whomever you want and you'll just fade into the gray drone of the larger office.  This doesn't work if you're sharing a cube.  You'll be too close for your cube-mate to avoid hearing what you're saying about how -- for some reason -- every time you get drunk you end up waking up wearing only a jacket, and it's generally not even a jacket you recognize.
  

THE ACTUAL WORK

The actual crux of your work day (you know, the "work" part) must be utilized. It's all about a balance. If you work too hard, you are given more work. If you work too lazily, you are fired (and then you'd have to wait for our "Man Up Your Horrible Unemployed Life" installment to the series). The most bad ass way to do work is to appear to be doing much without doing any at all.

This requires some leg work and effort, but much much less brain power than doing any actual work would require. The key to looking busy is using your phone as often as possible. If you just pretend like you're responding to a lot of emails, they're gonna catch on that someone's running World of Warcraft on the server sooner or later and you'll get a thrashing (because your boss, I imagine, beats you with a bundle of thin reeds).

The beauty of making phone calls is that they're so rare these days that if your boss catches you making a few every day, he's gonna think you and him are "old school" and share some sort of 1970s business school bond (even though you're 25). The key to this stunt is to pick the right person to call. The obvious choice is your town's local "time and temperature" number (which can be further exploited if you fake-disgruntledly claim you're on hold and then switch to speaker phone so your boss can share in your "frustration"). You could also hit up a pal (and thoroughly confuse him or her by just going into your sales pitch...that's always a blast).

My personal favorite was to attempt to call people I knew I'd never be able to reach...like, say you're in the sales department for a tech company...why not try to reach Angelina Jolie? Makes perfect sense, right? I'm sure she'd flip for a discounted order of ergonomic mouse pads. That's her "thing," I'm told.

Another way to seem busy (outside of pretending to be on the phone) is to simply tell everyone that you're really busy. This trick works especially well in America. For some reason, if you say something as a fact, Americans believe you're telling the gosh darn truth. There ARE weapons of mass destruction in Iraq...and fuckin' A, bro, am I busy.

If you get nothing done, though, you're going to get caught. But you still shouldn't actually do any work. That's straight vaginal. The obvious first step is to make sure you have a great subordinate in place who can not only get your work load done but get it done in the proper time frame (the "not too fast, not too slow" method mentioned above). If your company can't afford to get you a secretary (or if, perhaps, you ARE the secretary), you should hit up local colleges and high schools in your area and recruit...you guessed it...interns (hey DV interns...this is NOT why we hired you...trust me... Wink Wink). If you feel bad about dumping your work on an unsuspecting teenager, just think to yourself, "If MacGyver had a desk job what would he do?" You know he'd totally hire an intern, bro...then he'd have more time for his soap box time machine derby.

FILING 

This gets a separate entry from "Doing The Work" because it's not even work...it's just plain bullshit. Filing papers is the bane of most of our lives. Everyone, from a TV Producer to a school teacher has to file damned papers and it WILL be the death of us all. Your boss tries to stress how important it is to keep accurate files and records (that are neatly organized), but in actuality, unless it's your own company (or one you care about working at and becoming a partner of in the near future), these files don't matter.

Lukas had a particularly funny method of "filing" all his paperwork for a job he held for nearly two years--he jammed it all in a credenza above his desk and left it there for his replacement to find. Sure, he received calls about it after he left but he still got his references from that job. How? He blamed the improper "filing" on the guy who replaced him (he even went so far as to come up with fictional colors for the folders that were supposedly housing the files ("You mean he lost the BLUE FOLDER?! WHAT THE..."). 

LUNCH BREAK

Unless you're a construction worker, bringing your lunch to work is straight up lame (those construction workers, though...keeping a pb&j sammie locked up tight in a steel case is straight bad-ass). For the normal employee, bringing your lunch to work says one thing: give me more work. It shows your boss you enjoy spending your well deserved free hour AT WORK...and the next logical step is, well as long as you're already here...

Now we understand that you couldn't possibly afford to buy lunch every single day (unless it's pure bargain basement fast food crap). The manlier (and, by proxy, ballsier) route is to somehow find a way for your employer to pay for your meal every day. On one of his old jobs, Lukas, one of the co-authors of this article, had to turn in his boss' lunch receipts every day for reimbursement (of COURSE the higher ups get free shit and the assistants get bupkis). Without question, Lukas used to just turn in the receipts of all of his lunches with his boss' expenses. Since his boss was of a...particular girth, we'll say...no one seemed to bat an eye that there were two lunch receipts turned in under the same name EVERY SINGLE DAY.

If your boss is either on the ball or is rather skinny (thus making the two lunch receipts a problem) and if no one gets free lunch at your work, but you're in, say, a sales job, you could get one of your friends to pose as a potential client who always wants to meet for lunch. Then you have a "valid" excuse for a free lunch for you and your bestie.

In the worst case scenario, save all your receipts and turn them in with your taxes (claiming they were expenses for your home business...you know, cuz you, like, are a freelance flower salesman during your lunch breaks and weekends and you sell your wares at the Applebees near your office). This WILL work...for a while at least. Lukas' sister was able to pull off this maneuver for three years (though she was finally audited at the end and had to pay up). I'm sure you'd agree that an audit is a small price to pay for free lunch. Am I RIGHT, people?!
 

LEAVING EARLY

Unfortunately, if you work somewhere where you have to punch in and out, this is only going to work with the buddy system.  That is, you buddy up with someone and agree to a schedule through which one of you either clocks both of you in or clocks both of you out.  This can be a very effective strategy for a long time.  I actually once had a friend who would punch in, walk out to his car and play Game Boy for eight hours, walk back in, punch out, and go home.  He of course was fired, but only after three months.  Certainly, the buddy system can do a lot better than that.

If you don't have a punch card system, you're pretty much free to come and go as you please.  If you think you can go, go, and be advised to have a series of back-up plans if you're ever questioned on where you were.  Plausible deniability is the name of the game, so stick to the basics.  You were probably in the break room for part of the time due to your labor department mandated break (make sure to drive home that government mandate whenever possible), and the rest of the time you were probably just bouncing around the office -- throw in the buzzwords of your choice here -- "finding ways to improve the overall office dynamic."  If that line wouldn't work on the person you're talking to, hey, you're a busy guy.  You could have been going to or from pretty much anywhere.  For instance, you could have been coming back from the copier.  Or you could have been going to the movies.  It's anybody's guess, really.