As much as I should not be using my phone at work for personal calls, I can’t help but feel my ears burning red while my “big boss” stands tapping her foot in my blind-spot desperate for me to notice. She doesn’t know whether it is a client on the phone, a vendor, an overseas entrepreneur looking to expand his business, but she begins to tap the long fake nail of her index finger impatiently on my desk. The truth is I am booking a tattoo appointment, and thumbing through my calendar while we hem and haw over good times to begin the 3 hour brutalization of my left hip. She taps away and I slowly decide to turn my eyes away from the great white Shark looming over the May Month and she points at the buttons on my flashing phone demanding I hold my potentially vital phone call; for all she knows it’s the president of Malaysia. I begrudgingly hold my call leaving my high demand tattoo artist on hold, the guy I have been waiting to get an appointment with since September when I made my $100 deposit. “Can you call reception and ask them if the meeting room is free at four?” She asks. My ears are red hot like an tungsten filament, with all the foot tapping and fake nail desk drumming, and sassy hair flips and lengthy sighs, it is clear she could have dialed that four digit extension 10 times and asked that very same question ten times, and gotten that simple one word answer 20 times. The smoke begins to billow out of my ears as I nod with some monotone grunt of agreement. I take Chad the tattoo artist off hold and go back to thumbing through my calendar and book my May 15th appointment, who sasses me a little for cancelling the last appointment we had attempted before exchanging pleasant goodbyes. I call reception, I get the curt ‘yes’ which was to be expected, book the room and while I turn around to report back on my miraculous findings the “big boss” has vanished. She has cavorted to one end of the building or another with no trace of where exactly it is she has gone to. I know she has a meeting of some nature which I am sure is the reason she requested the room overlooking the beach in the first place. It’s always most impressive to book the conference room overlooking the beach, you can hear the sealions squeal and roar from their training pools, and view the sick oversized Beluga in the sinking holding tank. If these V.I.P persons she is meeting with were to see the scrambled office of hers, cluttered with stuffed animals, and newspapers from 1983 they may not take our organization quite as seriously. Our dreary little office hole is not much to look at, in fact it is less than that, it is a downright eyesore. I have been asked on several occasions to dedicate hours of my work day to trudge into that office and clean it for her. This was not in the job description. There are file folders piled high, none of which are labeled. Stacks of yellow and white notepads with scribbled notes and sketches of displays, all pre dating my existence. Nothing can be thrown out, but everything needs to be condensed, it needs to maintain its order although it lacks organization, method and any form of reason. I am bad enough with doing my dishes, conquering this small room of dusty heaps of unrecognizable paperwork puts that burning sensation right back in my ears. They are white hot, and the metal hooks from my earrings are melting. I am on my hands and knees trying to decipher how they expect me to fix this. I am locked in that small room for hours, and as much as I do nothing looks any better, the chaos just seems to thicken around me like suffocating in an office flavored pea soup. I can smell fax in my garments when I get home and decompress on my couch, or curled in a corner of my king size bed. I can still feel numerical keys tingling in my fingertips, and stale staffroom coffee lingering in spaces I can’t get with my tongue between my gums. I am shaking from office withdrawal which is like a slipping back a deep glass of red wine. There are the things that keep me dragging my feet back to the building every week day morning, mostly furry otterish reasons, and free aquarium admission, salary and a consistent schedule also brighten my darkening apathy —- but if I could be in a minivan driving towards grizzly country with nothing but a ham sandwich I would take it. It would be nice to toss out my material things a la “INTO THE WILD” and disappear into the wilderness and meet kind leather workers in their makeshift garage workshops. I could go without high heels. I could go without ever seeing polyester pleated pants ever again. I just feel so snappy and bitter, I feel so jaded and unlike myself while my “big boss” taps away at me with a flustered glow. I can’t stand her CHANEL scarves and fur lined ponchos and oversized BMW SUV. I can feel my teeth grind away as she passes me by in the morning with her designer shades while I am asked to clean her travesty of an office, and have flashbacks of debating whether I could afford a $19 pair of sunglasses last weekend. It would be worth it to me just to see her scrub scrub scrubbing about in that office, and rifling through her own mess while I frolic about with business “lunches” my CHANEL silk scarf raging in the wind. Oh such is life. Just another office rant.