Boss level.

Getting ready for the holiday! I am of course referring to October 16, Boss's Day. I'm sure you love your boss and will want to get him or her something very thoughtful on the big day. Something that says "Thanks, boss" and "Thinking of you, boss" but "Not in a creepy way, boss." You have two days.

 Alison Green of US News & World Report explained the holiday thus:

Amusingly, it turns out that Boss's Day was created in 1958 by someone who was working for her father at the time, according to several websites. It might have been a kind (if daughterly) impulse at its start, but it's since grown into an unwelcome obligation that many workers feel bound to celebrate – not only with cards, but with actual gifts. In fact, I regularly hear from people who have been pressured to donate cash to workplace collections to purchase expensive gifts for their managers.

I have either eight bosses or one boss. As a freelancer, working from home, I currently report to eight different clients, so my contact at each of these companies is a kind of mini-boss. Or, I could say that I am self-employed, and thus have only one boss: me. Some of the companies I work for act as if they are totally my boss; because of the laws of the City of New York, or other locales in which they are based, they are not allowed to employ me as a stringer indefinitely, and so have found it advantageous to pretend I am an employee. It tends to be cheaper for them than paying me per job, even though they have to offer me benefits that they do not pay me enough for me to participate in. What this also means is that I have to do the stupid training that all office employees have to go through every year, and you probably know what I mean -- watching videos online to teach me how to not harass my fellow employees and not break confidentiality or security.

Security tips are always a good reminder, but whom am I supposed to harass around here? My wife? She'll kill me. The dogs? They'll report me to my wife. So those tips are less useful.

Fortunately I do not have to do employee self-reviews, one of the most evil things ever invented by companies. The one upside to those, though, is that they usually result in a small cost-of-living increase at least. If I want to raise I have to ask my client gently and hope they don't decide that some dimwit fresh out of college can screw things up just as well as Fred can for less money. I will often be told that Management must be consulted, and that's as far as we ever get.

For the purposes of Boss's Day I have decided that I am indeed my own boss, and intend to celebrate accordingly. I will be alternately cold and friendly to myself, I will hint around about a big project before dumping it on my desk, I will listen and believe all the bad gossip about myself that comes over the transom, and I will tell myself what a great job I'm doing while looking for some H-1B visa holder to take my job at a third of the salary. Then I will expect to get myself a card and a cupcake or some dumb tchotchke for the desk and wish myself a happy day. Yippee.

Same ol' story.

Great literature as limericks.

(Poet's Note: Spoilers!)

Grendel came out of the blue
To harass poor Hrothgar and crew
Then Beowulf got
To beat out his snot
And he took out his old lady too

Odysseus finally left Troy
For a voyage he couldn't enjoy
There was Cyclops and Circe
And Sirens (have merce!)
Then killing some creeps with his boy

In the Montague/Capulet game
Romeo must abandon his name
Juliet, she pretended
To die, so he ended
His life, and then she did the same

The Terror brought everyone dread
And Defarge watched the royals get dead
When Darnay got arrested
Good people protested
And Syd wound up losing his head

They said that Jay Gatsby was great
His parties were truly first-rate
And though he was the bomb
Daisy really loved Tom
And a slug in the pool was his fate

Good help.

"No foolin', Joe, that's the best sheep dog I've ever seen."

Outrage of the day?

An ad popped up for me from Chewy, fine Internet provider of pet stuff. We order from Chewy all the time, because I'd rather have the UPS man deal with 40-pound sacks of dog food than do it myself. And even being purchased by PetSmart last year has not ruined Chewy's outstanding customer service.

The ad featured doggie Halloween (sorry, Howl-oween) costumes, which PetSmart's stores have been pushing since July. As I've noted before, PetSmart gets the Halloween stuff out even before my notoriously early supermarket does. Here was the costume that caught my eye:

Yes, indeed, the Holy Hound Pope Dog Costume by California Costumes. Cute, huh? But shouldn't that be Howly Hound?

So. As a Catholic, I look at this and think: I should probably be offended. I'm not one of those dog owners who thinks Dogs = People, let alone Dogs > People. I do think dogs are great and useful and lots of fun, and if we weren't in charge of the joint then I'd hope the dogs would get a shot. I do not, however, think that a dog would make a good pope.

I feel like I should take offense, as if this were mocking the pope. Then again, I have to admit they did a really good job with the chasuble and miter, but I think the papal stole is not worn with the miter because the latter is used when celebrating Mass, and during Mass the pope wears the zucchetto (skullcap). I could be wrong; the pope wears about 8,782 articles of clothing with choir dress and it's hard for a non-cradle Catholic like me to remember it all. Anyway, it's a good likeness and you'd know what the dog was supposed to be immediately. And I am glad that, while some design elements were changed for paws, the Cross remains, albeit made of bones. (Also glad that that other universal symbol of doghood, the fire hydrant, was not used.)

My offense builds, though, when the auto-offense generators in my mind kick in: This is the kind of thing that is bought for the dogs of Catholic haters. It is not done out of respect. I'll bet you'll see some of these in the Greenwich Village parade. They'd never, EVER sell an imam costume. And so on.

On the other hand, I think it's cute. I wish the Holy Father could inspire as much love as people have for their dogs. I think Francis would probably find it amusing. He's not a Franciscan (he's a Jesuit), but by taking the name of St. Francis you have to think he is devoted to the great saint, famous for his love of all God's creatures.

And on the third hand -- or paw -- I can decide not to take offense, laugh at the humor of it, and not care. I don't think every damn thing has to result in a world war anymore. We need to laugh stuff off, and with a kindly laugh, not an irritated HA! or clapter or any of the other things that pass for a real laugh these days.

On the final paw: I wouldn't buy it for my dogs, because they are too huge and they hate hats. They'd make bad popes.

Alpha-ripoff!

A post mentioning Post Alpha-Bits cereal on the blog of the Great Lileks reminded me of my investigative reporting on  Alpha-Bits some years ago, on the old defunct Blog.com site. I wanted to repost it now as a public service, but the text was lost along with contents of the blog itself. However, I did save the pictures, and can reconstruct the series of horrible events. 

So: I'd gotten a box of Alpha-Bits, and immediately set to finding out whether it contained all the letters. If it failed to contain all 26 letters of the English alphabet, I thought there might be cause for a class-action lawsuit. 

First, like all kids who eat Alpha-Bits, I had to confirm the most important thing:

Yes!

Then I meticulously sought through the box to reconstruct the alphabet, and that's where the shocking truth was revealed:

Gasp!

That's right: no G, no M, no V, no W. This is an outrage! Or, as we'd have to spell it, an outra e! 

I did find a large number of pieces that could not be identified as belonging to any particular letter. I suspect some may be broken "bits" of G's, M's, V's, and yes, even W's -- but there's no way to tell. At best this is evidence of shoddy workmanship by Post.

All I can say is, Shame on you, Post! Failing to give American children the whole alphabet wrecks any possible educational benefit from your cereal. Further, think how this discriminates against children with affected names! Poor George, Marvin, Margaret, Wilma, and Velma -- or should I say, eor e, ar in, ar aret, il a, and el a. How they must cry themselves to sleep!

As I said, this is the basis for a class-action lawsuit. I'm calling my lawyers, Greef, Sorrel & Payne. And we're not just suing Post. We're also going after the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food & Drug Administration, which supposedly "oversee" America's food. Oversee indeed, sirs!

Next: We beat the crap out of Campbell's for its Chicken Alphabet Soup for its failure to provide all the letters -- that is, once we get these squishy pasta letters to hold still long enough to see what they all are. We're coming for you, can boys!

Columbus: Floater.

I don't really feel like writing about Columbus Day today. I've written before about that remarkable man and the history behind the day; also about how Italians need to fight back against the menace of "Indigenous Persons Day" (a day solely made to try to eclipse Columbus and the spirit of discovery). Today I'd just like to note my own history of Columbus Day, which hasn't been much of anything since high school.

What I mean by that is, I've had to work every Columbus Day I can remember since I started college. Sure, my college was closed for the holiday, but not the office where I was lucky to have a part-time job as a general flunky. (The stories of things I massively screwed up in that job would make Will Ferrell, Pauly Shore, and Jerry Lewis wince.) I don't even know what the business did. Something real-estatey. It was a small, family-owned firm, and all I know for sure was that they both generated and received a lot of mail.

That was how I found out that, in a large city, although the mail would not be delivered on Columbus Day, you could send a flunky (me) down to the local post office to get the mail. All you had to do was bring something on letterhead authorizing said flunky to pick it up, and I think call ahead to let them know the flunkster was on his way. Please note that this is all to the best of my memory; don't quote me. It was a long time ago and I was as new as a baby out of the womb, and knew about as much.

Anyway, all this meant that I wound up dragging a couple of sacks of mail about seven or eight blocks back to the building. But that was okay; every other job I'd had to that point had involved lifting heavy things. Much worse was a later, rainy day -- possibly Veterans Day -- when I had to deliver a dozen sacks of mail to the same post office on a wobbly cart with wonky wheels that was not large enough for the job. That's another story.

This was my first job with an actual paycheck, a check that had actual taxes taken out of it. It would not be the last. And I think that all those jobs in my future would have this in common: no Columbus Day off.

"You! Get to work!"

I'm not sure, though. My first job in publishing was a small outfit connected to a nonprofit, and those guys get every holiday. But in the deadline-driven places I subsequently worked, holidays were often a major inconvenience and fit to be ignored. One job involved coordinating with a lot of British people in London, who were not off on Columbus Day, of course. Magazines I worked for closed issues around the second week of the month, which meant that not only was Columbus Day not a holiday, but it was a late night. I don't say all of this to complain, just to note that I haven't often had the day off. In fact, I have a huge pile of work to do today.

Columbus Day is, sadly, like Veterans Day, a second-tier holiday that people seldom get as a paid day off. They may be given the days as floaters, to use on the holiday or some other time. Many of those who do get these days off have little respect for Columbus or veterans. I guess that can happen to national holidays in a nation where millions of people have strong but varied priorities.

I just want a day off with pay. But Columbus didn't get one; why should I?