CEO’s & Their McMansions

Do you live in a tiny one-room apartment while you sit at your desk imagining your boss in a huge house with several bathrooms and perhaps a sauna? Well, while your boss may live in a McMansion similar to this:

CEO’s of major food companies live in waterside castles like this: 

YOWZA.

This spread belongs to Pizza Hut chairman Richard Freeland.  It’s a 30,000-square-foot mansion in Indiana that reportedly cost $35 million.

Next time you eat at Pizza Hut, imagine that. 

I like sharing ridiculously eyeball popping stuff like this. It’s my duty.

Wanna see more? It’s all in Business Insider. 

Chipotle Strikes Again

Heading out for lunch today? Perhaps at Chipotle?

As a weird meat life person I’ve had issues with Chipotle for a while now.

In this area of Washington, D.C.  (and I’m assuming in other cities as well) the lines for Chipotle are always wrapped around the corners, up the street and into folks’ backyards. What is it about those beans and rice and wraps and meat?

It’s like crack to some people.

My first issue with them was their non-disclosure of using pork in their pinto beans. The horror. 

Now my issue is this. Apparently they’ve been tacking extra pennies onto (millions?) of customer’s bills. The nitty gritty from a Huffington Post article:

A few confused New Jersey customers were caught off-guard recently when they noticed their checks were rounded up to the nearest even amount.

The Star-Ledger’s Karen Price Mueller investigated and found that in Chipotle’s busiest markets — such as New York City and New Jersey — its registers round down or up depending where the coin falls nearest to a nickel.

A spokesperson for Chipotle told the Star-Ledger that the company employs the practice to curb long lines and create greater efficiency in these high-volume locations.

“The idea is simply to limit the possible combinations of change on cash transactions to keep the lines moving quickly in high volume areas,” spokesman Chris Arnold tells the newspaper.  “It was never our intention to have a policy that was confusing or misleading,” he told NJ.com.

Chipotle claims they haven’t seen any kind of profit from the practice.

You may say what’s the big deal? A few extra pennies to my bill? Whoopty-doo.

Well, first of all, I’ll keep my “few extra pennies,” thank you. They add up just like everything else. I need my pennies for lavender soap, dish detergent, cough drops, deodorant and veggie burgers, thank you very much.

They have thousands of customers each day. That’s a lot of pennies steadily adding up that supposedly aren’t creating a profit for Chipotle.

Pork hiders and penny keepers.

What will be their next secret?

I’m annoyed. Very.

McDonalds, Inc.

Hey, did you know that McDonalds serves 68 million customers per day?!

Yowza!

That’s, like, a katrillion dollars in profit a day. Especially when most of their workers merely make minimum wage.

Me, I rarely eat at McDonalds. I’m a fast food snob, even when poverty ridden. I generally don’t eat a lot of meat and mystery meat makes me phlklempt so as far as McDonalds goes I may get cookies or one of their pies if I’m hankering for something sweet and the restaurant is right there.  Otherwise I rarely patronize the cult-like institution place. But it seems everyone else does.

From BusinessInsider.com:

McDonalds sells more than 75 hamburgers per second.

It is believed that one in every eight American workers has been employed at McDonalds at some point in their life.

McDonalds’ golden arches are recognized by more people than the (holy) cross.

The Queen of England owns a McDonalds near Buckingham Palace as part of her vast real estate portfolio.

Also…

McDonalds is the largest purchaser of beef worldwide.

McDonalds calls people who eat their food more than once a week “Heavy Users.”  This disturbs me greatly.

 

McDonalds is built on childhood nostalgia and all that (check out the book  Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser); it reels us in with “family time” and calories and that creepy Ronald dude and the happy-go-lucky good times slurp-slurp McToy strategy and then we’re hooked for LIFE because there’s one on every corner and the food has programmed our tastebuds and…well, you get the picture…So that’s how they got to the point where they refer to customers who eat there a lot as “heavy users.”

From childhood  nostalgia to heavy user.

Sounds like a lifelong experiment on loyalty–err–big bucks.

 

 

I, too, was “raised” on McDonalds food. The trio was a weekly regular when I was growing up: a hamburger, small fries and a milkshake. The sheer smell of McDonalds made us kids claw at the windows of my father’s burgundy station wagon as he pulled into McDonalds. We couldn’t get out of the car fast enough. Little did we know we were being bred at, say, eight years old to love it so much that when we grew older we’d be “heavy users” at, say, 48 years old.

 

This is one of the reasons I’m glad to be a flitterer. I buck systems and march to the beat of my own drum. Even when that drum sounds all loud and annoying and offbeat. I refuse to be anyone’s decades-long “heavy user.”

 

 

Have a safe lunch today. Wink.

Top 10 Reasons I Run From Cubicle Life

1.  There are no couches there. There should be couches there. Nap time is underestimated.

2.  Lunchtime is too short. Even an hour-long lunch break, you figure you spend 15 minutes fetching lunch (corner deli, microwave blues, etc.) and 15 minutes returning to your cubicle walls. While I certainly don’t expect an employer to increase a lunch HOUR, I’m just sayin’.

3.  Paper cuts.

4.  Loud talkers in nearby cubicles.

5.  There’s no grass under my feet.

6.  I have to get up from my swivel chair and FIND a window to even see daylight.

7.  I feel trapped, tethered, stuck. I dunno, I just like freedom five days a week.

8.  There are other people there. Annoying people.

9.  I can’t read my favorite book on company time without getting written up. Have you ever been caught with an open novel tucked inconspicuously under company files? I HAVE.

10. Low pay. Need I say more?

Ok, 11 reasons:

11.  Protocol attire.  I really like jeans and comfy clothing, something with an elastic waist so I can let out my spill-over after gluttonously woofing down lunch. This is the part where the aforementioned couch would come in handy, too.

The least boring job I’ve ever had was when I worked at a closed captions house.  There were televisions everywhere and Breaking News! at every turn. And we got to wear jeans and shorts and t-shirts and tennis shoes and flip-flops and…well, you get the picture. The pay was low but the entertainment was high.

I watched Oprah and corny soap operas all day long while editing television scripts for on-air captions. I had a cool boss, too.

What was your favorite (office) job?

World’s Most Expensive Burger?

For lunch today are you having/did you have a burger? Perhaps from McDonalds or Burger King or the dive around the corner from your cubicle? Probably cost you two or three bucks, right? Well, did you know the world’s most expensive burger contains caviar–just a dollop–on top of it?

Well, the month of May (I know. I know it’s JUNE) is National Hamburger Month and people with too much time on their hands had to invent something asinine in its honor.

From a HuffingtonPost blurb:

The burger, invented in honor of National Hamburger Month,  features a patty of Japanese Waygu beef infused with 10-herb white truffle butter and seasoned with Salish Alderwood smoked Pacific sea salt. It’s topped with cheddar cheese, hand-made and cave-aged for 18 months by famed cheesemaker James Montgomery of Somerset, England. There are also shaved black truffles, a fried quail egg, a blini, creme fraiche, Kaluga caviar and a white truffle-buttered Campagna roll.

Notice how many adjectives and attempts at price justification are used in the very description. “Salish Alderwood smoked Pacific sea salt”? Oh, gosh. “Hand-made and cave-aged.” Whippty-doo! “Famed cheesemaker…” Whoo-hoo; not an ORDINARY cheesemaker? Does he give autographs?

The final touch is a solid gold “Fleur de Lis” toothpick, encrusted with diamonds, designed by world-renowned jeweler Euphoria New York.

I can’t take anymore. Do you think one could cash in the toothpick at one of those CASH FOR GOLD! places?

New York’s Serendipity 3 restaurant invented this atrocity burger according to the Guinness Book of World Records, clocking in at a shocking $295.

The burger joins the ranks of other expensive fare at Serendipity which to date has included an opulent $1,000 sundae and a $69 hot dog.

Ok, ok…I have to include this part, too:

Serendipity isn’t trying to cash out; they’re donating all profits to the Bowery Mission, which serves homeless and hungry New Yorkers.

Ain’t no way in the WORLD I would cough up $295 for a burger. In the end it’s still just cow meat.  I’d rather give the $295 directly to “homeless and hungry New Yorkers.”

Once again I’m annoyed. Very annoyed.

Want a Finger In That Sandwich?

A restaurant employee cut off her finger with a meat slicer while preparing a roast beef sandwich at Arby’s. She left her station to deal with the emergency, and other employees, who were unaware of the injury, continued to complete the order.

That’s when a 14 year old boy bit in and his teeth hit a finger.

Well, read all about it here.

Gosh, first battered chicken heads and now this.

Yet another reason to hate fast food. Not that one can’t slice off a finger at The Salad Hut, but still.

Dear Cafeteria Lady

Dear Cafeteria Lady,

First of all I would like to thank you for performing your thankless job of preparing food and then presenting it to us ornery office workers as we buzz through the line during lunch asking various asinine questions such as, “Is that CORN?” when clearly it’s corn.  Or when one of us inevitably spills gravy all over the OTHER foods when we clearly or not so clearly aimed the ladle at our pile of mashed potatoes. I also would like to apologize on behalf of all of the coworkers who text while going through the food line, who fail to notice that they’re holding up the line or that their yakking is so loud that every single person within hearing distance is glaring at their very moving mouth shooting firey darts their way.

The thing that really makes such people annoying is that they don’t even feel the firey darts.

I know. I know us office workers are testy for someone who works so hard to prepare delectable grub for us to devour and then have the AUDACITY to leave our sloppy trays and food messes right there on the cafeteria tables for you to clean up.

The nerve of us.

We’re horrible, yes. But I have an itty-bitty complaint about you, Dear Cafeteria Lady.

Um, could you…Could you…Is it possible when you’re doling food onto my plate that you keep your, um, THUMB out of my food? I mean, I’m sure you’re required by law to wash your hands while handling public food and all that but sometimes just the very sight of your thumb embedded in my mashed potatoes gives me the sheer willies. Thank you for understanding.

Signed,

Cubicle Dweller #382

 

Office Professional: A Day in the Life (Sort Of)

6:45 a.m.   Your alarm clock beeps.

6:47 a.m.   You contemplate your very life’s purpose.

6:50 a.m.   Your alarm clock beeps again.

6:59 a.m.   You’re standing in the shower preparing your skin to sit in an office for an eight+ hour stretch. There will be typing and filing and comingling with others you’d never in a trillion years comingle with in your leisure time. There may or may not be free muffins and danishes involved.

7:15 a.m.    You’re idling on a road behind a car that has 48 bumper stickers. You’re not even sure what color the car is. Apparently the owner has A LOT to say. Perhaps he/she was a middle child. Or the last of six.

7:28 a.m.   You turn the station on your radio for the 18th time. Too much yakking from the chipper morning DJ’s who seem to have had caffeine pills for breakfast.

7:54 a.m.   You pull into the garage at your workplace. You cut off your car. You have approximately six minutes before you’re expected at your desk. You realize you didn’t grab your lunch on the way out, the lunch you spent 45 minutes preparing last night. Great. Now you’ll have to spend money on lunch. Either that or eat six bags of pretzels from the vending machine.

8:15 a.m.    You’re at your desk. Your boss is hovering over you.  You can tell he’s trying out a new underarm deodorant.

9:00 a.m.  You’re busy typing a report you could give a rat’s heiny about. It’s long and drawn out. There are charts involved, cells and equations and squiggly lines. You feel dizzy.

10:48 a.m.    You’re done with the report. You put it on your boss’s desk and hope he doesn’t eyeball it til after lunch.

10:49 a.m.    Your boss is at your desk bathing your nostrils in his new deodorant. Apparently the report needs to be tweaked. You’re the Tweaker. You get to tweaking.

11:58 a.m.     You’re still tweaking.

12:19 p.m.     Your boss has left for lunch, a tiny lunch dive around the corner. Before he left he poked his head into your cubicle to tell you he hopes you finish the report by the time he returns.

12:20 p.m.      Your stomach is growling so loud you wonder if you’ve ever eaten anything since you were born.

1:28 p.m.       Your boss returns and is now hovering over you as you fiddle with Excel charts while simultaneously pretending you’re not agitated by his hovering. When he leans over to smear his fingerprints on your computer screen you smell fajitas, Sprite and sugar cookies on his breath.

2:16 p.m.       The report is finally done. You place it in your boss’s inbox and head to the vending machine with your found coins. You wonder if there are muffins left over from an earlier meeting in the conference room so you head in that direction. When you get to the door of the conference room you spot a tray with one muffin left on it. Just one.

2:16:29 p.m.     “Hi Jane!” It’s Madge from Acquisitions. She’s always buzzing up the hallway with files in her hands. She seems to eat her job. She loves it. No, she adores it. She probably sleeps in her business suits, you muse. You watch Madge head on up the hallway until she’s out of sight.

2:17 p.m.       Just as you turn to head towards the lone muffin your boss slips past you and into the conference room, picks up the muffin and starts eating it.  “I’m still eyeballing the report, Jane. But so far, so good.”  He has muffin crumbs on his lips as he speaks.

2:25 p.m.      You’re on your second bag of pretzels. I mean, half the bag is air anyway.

4:45 p.m.     Your boss is back at your desk. He’s hovering again, pointing out “discrepancies” in the report you’ve spent the better part of a day on. When he leans in close you can smell muffin on his breath. Muffin mixed with new deodorant.

5:38 p.m.       There’s an SUV in front of you. Apparently the owner doesn’t know the meaning of a turn signal.

6:29 p.m.      You’re home and now face-deep in leftovers. You don’t even bother chewing. You never want to see another pretzel again.

8:14 p.m.     You’re getting sleepy. You set your alarm clock.  You drift off to sleep by 9:32 p.m.

9:56 p.m.      You dream about a pretzel. A huge, knotted pretzel. It’s stomping up a hill. You’re at the top of the hill. Strangely it has a face and it appears angry. You run but you’re adorned in protocol attire so you don’t get very far. You trip and fall down as so many women do in pretzel monster movies. Oh dear, you’ve lost a high heel. You glance back and see there’s something in the pretzel’s hand. It’s the report you’ve been working on all day.

11:32 p.m.      It was all just a dream. You’re sitting on the edge of your bed. You have seven hours and 13 minutes before your alarm clock beeps. You drift off to sleep and dream of muffins.

Side Story: Meat Therapy

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on this blog before but–ahem–I have serious issues with—with–meat. There. I said it in cyberspace. I mean, just look at this:

I don’t care how well you cook it, how many pickle slices, mustard, mayo (another disgusting thing) or ketchup and onions or garnish you put on it, THIS IS WHAT IT REALLY IS. Right there.

It’s really strange, too, my meat hang-up. I mean, it’s not a love-hate relationship with meat. Rather, it’s a don’t like-hate relationship with all things fleshy. I remember being a kid and being told to finish my dinner or lunch or whatever and whenever it involved certain kinds of meat, I was in big trouble. I could sit at the kitchen table for hours after everyone else had long left the kitchen and were burping up after dinner essence in front of the TV. They had eaten their dessert already, too. I would miss the tail end of  Sonny & Cher on account of those icky veins clinging to a chicken drumstick.

Not to mention it’s a foot-leg. A foot-leg. I mean, for crying out loud, you can see where the foot was cut off. Where the animal WALKED AROUND.

And don’t even mention salami.

All those awful, horrid, unsightly beads of fat and gristle–too much to bear.

I loathed sausage as a kid. Still do. (Hey, you know what they say: Two things you never want to see being made are laws and sausages.)

Oy infinity.

My grandfather would go fishing and return home with a bucket of fish to my horror. Of the other two kids in the house, for some reason I remember ME having to scale them in the kitchen sink. Of course I could only do it if I put on my grandmother’s near elbow-length yellow rubber gloves first. Just looking down into that smelly bucket and seeing those dead fish and their eyes all unblinking staring at me made my eyes water. And get this: ole Daddy expected me to cut the heads off. Child abuse for sure. Oh, how I wept at that kitchen sink. 

It was all too much.

Fish eyes and chopped off fish heads (which I never could bring myself to do anyway; I refused to chop the head off of anything) and scales flying everywhere and the stench that filled the kitchen and hearing the TV in the living room that I couldn’t watch because I was on fish duty.

TOO MUCH.

So I always had issues with meat. With flesh. With eating the body of something. The eyes. The tail. The guts. The veins. Hoofs. Feet. Snouts. Ears. The organs.

OHMYGOSH. The organs!

We had liver every so often, too. That stringy, tough, horribly strange looking meat that at eight years old I’m not sure I knew was an actual LIVER, as in an animal’s ORGAN that processes WASTE. (I think I need to find a post-meat therapist stat.) And my grandmother, bless her wondrousness, she used to order liverwurst from a catalogue and when it arrived us kids would taste it because, well, she’d made such a big deal about it. I think it came all the way from Germany (or Cincinnati) somewhere and see, we could go to school and tell our friends that we’d eaten liverwurst, dears.

Gristles and bone marrow and fat and odd strings inside of animal flesh. I ate it because I was a rent-free kid and, well, because others around me ate it. My fellow people would sit down to the dinner table and place their face into their food and chew and swallow. They seemed to enjoy this meat stuff so I did it too. But I did it hesitantly. I was often accused of wasting food. Of wasting “good food.” SO EAT UP NOW. I was threatened with no dessert far too often. (Light bulb moment: I think that’s why to this day I cannot NOT have dessert after dinner.)

At aged five through perhaps 15 I just couldn’t bring myself to easily put gristles and fat and strings and veins in my mouth. Flesh disturbed me. Spaghetti didn’t. Flesh disrupted me. Peanut butter & jelly didn’t. Flesh uprooted me. Cap’n Crunch cereal didn’t. Flesh horrified me. French fries didn’t.

I  remember when Wendy’s fast food restaurant rolled out their chicken sandwiches in 1987-88 and I ordered one on a lunch break from my temp job and I was driving and opening the wrapper simultaneously. I bit down into that chicken sandwich and–swear to gosh–a huge vein BOINGED from the flesh and bounced against my chin. I almost crashed my car. For a milli-second I thought the chicken sandwich was…ALIVE. Needless to say I threw the dang thing on the floor of my car and wiped my tongue with napkins I was so repulsed. I considered returning it to Wendy’s but between being on a short lunch break and not knowing how “Excuse me, Mr. Wendy’s Manager? This chicken sandwich is supernatural; I’d like my money back” would go over, I kept pressing on.

See? I’m meat rambling. This is really bad. I’ll stop here and go have a cheese sandwich. Zero gristles.

Fast Food Workers Most Likely To Say Their Job Makes The World A Worse Place

Once upon a time I worked in the fast food industry; haven’t we all? And no matter how bad it gets in Cubicle-Ville, regardless of the sheer groveling I’m experiencing to return to a desk job with benefits, I never want to return to the fast food industry for too many reasons to mention.  On that note, something interesting regarding the fast food industry I read a month ago from The Huffington Post:

They may feed millions of hungry consumers on a daily basis, but fast food workers say their job is hurting the world.

More than 40 percent of fast food workers say their jobs make the world a worse place, according to data analyzed by Payscale for The New York Times. Some of the other jobs where workers were likely to say their jobs are making the world a worse place? Bartenders, attorneys, fashion designers and investment bankers — though the share of workers in those industries expressing the same sentiment is only in the single digits.

Fast food employees may be concerned about the negative health impacts of their work, thanks to a wide variety of critics of the fast food industry that include nutrition experts and animal rights activists. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that being in close proximity to a fast food restaurant “significantly” increases the risk of obesity.

But some of the critics may be getting to the industry. McDonald’s officials said earlier this month that they’re going to require the eatery’s pork suppliers in the U.S. to phase out crates that tightly confine pregnant pigs, a move that the Humane Society claimed would have a “seismic impact” on the fast food sector, according to the Associated Press.

Still, the fast food industry may be doing its part to keep workers’ wages low. Bosses in the fast food industry are largely opposed to raising the minimum wage, according to Slate. That’s because they have to pay a large number of workers that wage, unlike full-service eateries that can pay their waitstaff less because they receive tips.

The industry is poised to shed jobs in the next 10 years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects there to be 19,000 fewer fast food cooks by 2020.