Vote Pedro: The Pizza and Politics Edition
Every year the company I work for, has its own general election and gives out an Employee Of The Year Award.
Basically it is a plastic trophy with a little bit of kudos attached (if you are thinking money, imagine the change that you have in your pocket right now, being removed from your pocket, lest your pants also be part of the award, and superglued on to the trophy, and you would be no where near close). It's meaningless to the outside world, but to those within the company, it gives an indication as to how well liked that person is where they work.
In the run up to the actual presenting of the award, everyone in the company has the chance to nominate one individual who they think has done a great job that year to the Office Manager. After all the nominations have been received, the long list is then distributed and everyone in the company can then vote for one from the finalists. At the end of vting, a winner is crowned.
So why am I writing about this now? Well, it may be a shock to you, given how popular and likeable I am, but I wasn't nominated for this award last year. So this year, I decided to be more proactive in getting a nomination.
For Plan A, I decided to do the decent thing, and nominate myself with the following:
I will stand for Employee of the Month myself this year, as due to what can only described as a gigantic oversight, I lacked a nomination last year.
I should be nominated Employee of the Year as I’m a triple threat: I know the front door code, the alarm code and I know how to work the dishwasher. There is no one who is more beloved by me in this company than the person that I have nominated.
Apparently, this isn't the done thing and my nomination was not accepted by the Office Manager. I had an inkling that this plan would run into problems, so I decided to move to plan B. Plan B was a little more crafty, and didn't necessarily involve me being nominated. Its better if you just read the reasons that I sent:
Despite my canvassing I am unsure if I will be nominated for employee of the year, since it is apparently “not the done thing” to nominate oneself.
In that case it is time for plan B. To nominate someone else who will promise me a 1% cut if they win. And 1% is better than nothing at this point.
To that end, I would like to nominate Parisa, as her formidable marketing skills have me believing that she will honour this agreement.
Now surprisingly, this wasn't an acceptable reason, even though the Parisa reneged on the verbal contract shortly after the email was submitted.
So after my two quite brilliant schemes to get the prize money or at least a percentage of the prize money, I was all out of ideas until my campaign manager helped me draft a heatfelt plea:
I believe I should be employee of the year because of my unique problem solving skills, as demonstrated by my previous nomination (for myself).
Many people would like to be nominated for employee of the year but no one, until now, has had the initiative or been brave enough to nominate themselves. I believe that by offering myself for nomination I am providing evidence of the creative thinking that makes me such an asset to the team. It also shows I am proactive at finding solutions to problems and driven towards success.
While everybody else is taking the long and hard traditional route to this esteemed prize by working diligently I have shown that I do not simply follow the herd by composing this email instead. This approach is far more time economical than the traditional approach, showing that my fresh take on problem solving saves the company both time and money.
A vote for Matt Fishwick is a vote for the future!
Now all I had to do was wait. But that night I got hungry (and not just for results) so I decided to order a pizza. The pizza was good and once I had slaked my thirst for doughy goodness I was in possession of several uneaten slices.
In an act of pure altruism, well as altruistic as I am capable, I decided to leave the remaining slices for the denizens of the office. Now in order dissuade them from the existence of pizza faeries, I decided to let them know how had supplied this cold feast.
Thus my first campaign poster was born.
Click here to see the Poster in PDF format.
So if that quality bit of electioneering doesn't work, I don't know what will.
But we shall have to wait until May 4th before the shortlist is revealed, and then I can put that pizza on expenses.
Marcel Marceau And The Charity Car Wash
In the past few weeks the people in the office where I work has decided to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Charity here in the UK. In addition to the the Bake-Off that happens each week on a Friday (see earlier blog post), Now we have the addition of a Charity Car Wash to drum up extra cash.
Now, I know what you are thinking: "But Matt, even though I love you and would without question cut out your lungs and leave you in a seedy motel in a bathtub full of ice, not only because I think you'd look cute turned blue (like a less talented and much more bloated Blue Man group with only one member) and to help those less fortunate, the fact of the matter is that a charity car wash is no good to me, as I don't own a car on top of that I can't drive."
Firstly that's a terrible thing to say. I need my lungs, how else am I supposed to get my nicotene fix? And before you say anything, I have tried taping cigarettes to my arms. But when I try and light them I just end up with third degree burns and melted skin. (I could have studied and realised that by using less lighters I could have got first degree burns, but that is another story for another time.) I should point out at this juncture that when combined with toast, melted skin is not a low calorie subsitute to cheese on toast.
Secondly, it's rather selfish of you not to drive and have a car isn't it? Sure the earth might be a little less poluted by you not driving, but you would be denying a charity a donation of £3.50 that they could put to better use than you travelling on a bus.
Ah, but honestly dearest, I have a solution to your dilemma.
You don't need a car to take part in this latest round of fundraising thanks to my latest ingenious idea. You see the charity car wash takes place on a Friday and due to a scheduling conflict both I, and my car, couldn't be there. Now, I really wanted to be there, but the car said that it was going elsewhere, with or without me. And due a clause in my insurance, apparently the car is not covered if no one is driving. As, according to the small print, the car is not classed as a sentient being. So now you understand why it was obvious that I couldn't be there.
So rather than just give money, and have those volunteers standing around chatting and possibly enjoying their lunch break, I wanted something in return, because you all know that I enjoy causing other people misery. So here is what I suggested:
One of the merry band of car wash professionals, must do their best Marcel Marceau impression and mime actually washing my car. Now I should remind you that my car is a 3-door VW Golf and perhaps the most important thing for this mime exercise is that the car is blue. I mention the dimensions of the car because I don’t want you miming an estate car, that isn’t what I paid for.
If you know anything about me, dear reader, then you know that I like my mime artistes like I like my humour. Subtle. That’s why I allowed the volunteers to wash the car whilst they battled any number of mimed hazzards from walking against a hurricane or while being trapped in box.
It should also be pointed out that those of you reading this who do not have a car can project whatever vehicle you aspire to own when investing £3.50 for a mimed car wash. Those of you with a car who are thinking of a trade-in but are unsure of exavctly what car to get next, could use the mimed car wash to theorise how long it would take you to wash you new car. You could pay for a few washes and then note the pros and cons of each potential new vehicle, especially when trying to clean it whilst trapped in a box.
But there is more to this miming that just pretending to wash a car! I wanted someone to capture this amazing event, just so that I could be sure that it had been done. I was assured that it was to be captured and presented to me.
It seems that I should have been more concrete in my requirements (i.e. I shouldn't have mimed them, and just told the volunteers what I had wanted or at least written them down and attached them to a pigeon who had 'The Knowledge' of how to get back to the office) for the whole miming thing was taken a little too seriously.
For you see, the official photographer, feeling left out of the the whole process, decided to mime taking photos of the event. This means that we have been in a little bit of a (mimed) pickle, for you see that this means that we have no proof that it actually happened.
I'm sure that if we had some photographic evidence, and not some mimed actions or even mimed drawings (do you like my mimed drawings, I imagined the pencil all by myself) reading this would have been much more fun and less anti-climactic.
Ah well, you can't have everything.
So that was this week's adventure in charity fundraising. Join us next week where we do something elaborate with bunny ears and a Geman Shephard (not the dog).
If you enjoyed this post, please consider making a donation to the CF Trust.
Chapter 3 of That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More Published!
Hello kids, it's what you have been waiting for. Not only has Chapter 3 been written but it is now here at ilovemattfishwick.com!
Take a look at Chapter 3 with this link where you can download the latest chapter in pdf format or you can read it online.
You can also find the updated Chapter index of the story with links to all available chapters.
Have a fun week and be sure to check back soon for chapter 4!
In Search of a Robotic Typing Monkey.
On a forum that I frequent, someone asked how my search for a creature to do my bidding was going. Not like that, you pervert. Well at least until they had clocked off - Because I wouldn't be doing it for their enjoyment. At all. By bidding, I obviously mean the typing up of my novel from its current hand written form to something a little more binary.
See back in 2007 I participated in something so extra-ordinary that it wasn't just ordinary and it needed an "extra-" to be concatenated at index 0. (If that makes little sense to you, then imagine how little sense it makes to me). It was NaNoWriMo, and it still is. (Linky to the opposite of lefty -> ) The objective is to write a 50,000 novel in 30 days. While I succeeded in finely handcrafting each sentence to get to the 50,000 word mark (in case you were wondering, the word in question wasn't "Mark", although now that I think of it, he would have been a fitting subject. Hello Mark), the novel wasn't finished. I didn't let that stop me though. I wanted the novel typed in all its error-scrawled first draft glory, so I set about finding someone to do it.
The search started quite well, I corresponded with several viable candidates, all of whom were eminently qualified (and were dutifully encouraged to tell me what the word eminently meant, because I had no idea, and to some extent I still don't). After what I thought was a rather productive on-line meeting with the pet of a Nigerian Prince I was encouraged to send $100,000 (that’s US Dollars, not the ill-fated Matt Bucks I tried to launch in late nineties to less than critic acclaim) as a show of faith. It was sent, but after several months I hadn’t heard anything, so I sent another hundred grand to show him just how faithful I was capable of being. It came to nothing though, as that monkey went on to invest that money with Bernie Madoff, so the joke’s on him I guess.
After that particular episode I, with my funds severely depleted, I altered my criteria so now I wasn't just looking for someone who had low standards, but for someone who wasn't just cheap and free, but could also provide their own transport too. Where-ever would I find someone like that? It was then it hit me. Well, the branch did and after a brief stint of tree surgery without any pain-relief (well, that’s not entirely true – I did have several hits of nitrous oxide beforehand), it was back to my quest to find that monkey. And I knew that I had to continue my search on the Internet, because putting that ad in the back of Razzle only firmed up my weekend social life.
And find him on the Internet I did, dear reader. We hit it off instantly, well as well as a man and a drug-addled robotic monkey could. Although, looking back I think we just got on well, because he copied my Facebook profile, but hey I was glad to have the friend that got me to the magic 2 friends.
So that brings us up to last Thursday when my friend posted this (and asked me for hundred grand in Matt Bucks)
Matt, I love you and will be yours forever, but what happened to you finding a robotic typing monkey?
This is the answer that I gave:
It was all downhill after he moved in. And we got on so well while chatting online. After a week or two he insisted on his "friend" crashing on the couch. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and they'd be flinging sh*t at one another. It didn't help that he would fling robotic faeces at me, either. I don't know what he had been eating, but lemme tell you, there were bolts in it. And those bolts hurt. On top of that his first act of typing my glorious magnum opus was to wipe his behind with it. Everyone is a critic. With his inner editor working overtime, he gave up after two pages and eloped with a writer who he claimed "at least had a shot" at literary aspirations and wasn't just some "genre hack", leaving me with his freeloading friend. The only upside was that his “friend” was delicious, if not a little stringy but the “friend” hasn't been listed as missing in any of the five boroughs, yet.
So at least I got a free meal out of it.
So the search continues. If you, or anyone you know is a robotic typing monkey, or even just a house-trained typing monkey without a hint of robot ancestry, then drop me a line. Although I'd prefer it if you didn't drop any lines as that just shows a lack of typing comprehension and will make what little sense there is in the story vanish.
Liked that? Then share the sausage links:
INT. Office – Script Frenzy – Day 1
MATT, a strangely disappointing excuse of a man, stares with glazed eyes, the sort of glaze that is usually reserved for doughnuts, at a computer screen containing a BLANK document .
The CURSOR taunts him.
His well is dry, fortunately he has indoor plumbing - even in the north of England, but that isn't helping him now.
MATT's fingers glide over the keyboard as he types.
It would seem Matt is shit at typing. He deletes, and starts again, SLOWLY.
Ideas = 0.
Pages = 0.
I'm already behind in the page count, and it's only just gone midnight.
