These are not my people

My office is weird. The people are weird, the set-up is weird, the neighborhood is, yes, weird. Structurally, my company of three people shares office space with our sister company of about ten people. The room I share with my boss, luckily, is one of the only two rooms that has actual windows; the rest of the offices are along a corridor and are tiny and windowless.

This sister company is mainly women, all under thirty-five, and mostly around my age (twenty-five). The only one I am even remotely close to is the adminny girl. She is going to night school for graphics, so we talk about that a lot and we have gone to one art opening and out for one night of drinks together. In almost a year here, this is my closest friend. Which is sad.

In my defense, the other girls are super-girly. Whenever one of them has a birthday, they order in food and invite us, the redheaded step-children of the office, to come and join them in the conference room. But these people are all on Atkins or South Beach diets even though they are built like gardening rakes. So the food sort of sits in the middle of the table, and they will, like, cut a pizza slice in half to share with each other, or pick just the veggies out of the Chinese food cartons, or they will just order salads with Dressing on the Side. Always accompanied by diet cokes (which I am not knocking, but teamed with the non-eating thing, it's a little over the top).

Meanwhile my boss are I are like frat boys. "Pizza! Free pizza? Right on, we are THERE!" And we go tearing down the hall and shovel pizza into our mouths with two hands. Sexy!

(Also, right now there are a ton of chocolates and cookies in the office, and I am the only one who is willing to take one for the team and eat them. Help me, please! They are so good! We have a whole TRAY of those fancy European chocolates with the gold foil wrappers. You know the ones, with the commercial where the attractive European person eats one, accompanied by a deep-throated voiceover, and promptly orgasms. (European people are so easy!))

As another example of the weirdness around here, the sister company's Big Boss Lady brings her two dogs in to work sometimes. I am a dog person, but I cannot condone or approve of these specific dogs. They look like wingless bats. I have no idea what the breed is, but...bats. They are squat, like little bulldogs, and are dark and have squat faces with small triangular ears. And their tongues hang out. They run freely up and down the halls and hang out in peoples' offices.

Now, my boss hates these dogs. I am not sure whether it's because he hates all dogs, or because he has an aversion to bats, but whenever they come in here he hustles them out and shuts our door. They both wear tags, so you can hear them jingling down the corridor towards us, and my boss will say, "Ohhhhh noooo, here they come. They are not coming in here."

Just now one of them came in, stood in the center of the room, and just stared at the boss, panting. He picked up a hackysack he keeps on his desk (I don't know why either) and lightly beaned the dog with it. Seriously, he looked dead into the dog's eyes, tossed the hackysack at it, it bounced off the dog's forehead, and then there was no reaction. Dog just kept staring and panting. We looked at each other and burst out laughing, and then he got up and shooed it out the door in his normal manner.

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On another note, I was reading a recap of the Apprentice earlier, and the sidebar of one page has the quote "Personal Grooming Fever -- Catch It!" Is that a shoutout to the title of my blog? I think it is...