Zip's Mighty Blog

Reality TV and a Story

Now that I have seen 1 1/2 episodes of The Apprentice, I can honestly confess that I am hooked. This is probably the best reality show I've ever seen. Donald Trump is so intimidating that even I cringe in fear when he walks into the room...and I'm watching him on TV! If you haven't seen it yet, read the synopsis on the show's site and tune in on Wednesdays. It is the true 'must see TV'.

The only thing not intimidating about The Donald is that hair. You would think that a man who is worth as much as he is would be able to get a decent hairpiece. The combover technique is a bit lacking, and the color is completely unnatural. According to my manager, the only time that color has been seen in nature is when a mountain lion fell in a puddle of urine.

Speaking of work, let me tell you a little story...

The day after New Year's Day (Jan. 2, for those of you too lazy to do the math), a few of my coworkers and I were in the office. The room in which my team is located used to be the training room. The room is still fitted with training materials, complete with digital projector, VCR and DVD players. Work was very light that day, so we decided to take a break and watch a DVD. We had only been watching for a few moments when, out of nowhere, our manager's boss walks in the room.

Now, let me give you a little background - this woman never comes into our room. Never. I would say that in the past year, she has been in that room 3 times total...and that's only been times when her presence was required. Needless to say, we were all a little bit taken back by her sudden presence at this particular moment. Of course, she was not happy with our little screening and yelled at us for a while. She finally left, and we all got back to work. By the end of the day, we had pretty much laughed the whole thing off and not thought any more about it.

The following Sunday, however, I got a call from our manager. He told me that the big boss (our manager's manager's manager) had found out and referred the incident to HR for an investigation. Basically, they wanted to find out how long we had been watching it, who had given us the authorization to watch it, and what it was rated.

First thing Monday morning, I rounded up my teammates, we got our stories straight, and went in to face the HR manager. We assured him that we had only watched no more than 10 minutes, we were all on our lunch break, we had all decided to do it as a group, and the movie was only rated PG-13. Our manager confirmed our story and gave us a full vote of confidence.

There was apparently much deliberation over the issue (at one point, they had considered firing all of us), but at the end of the next day we found out that they were going to write us up and leave it at that. Needless to say, we were all relieved that we still had jobs. The most satisfying part for me was how we stuck together as a team, and our manager stood up for us in our time of need.

It's a good thing, too, because I'm sure that we would definately have lost our jobs if we had told them that we had actually been watching the movie for over an hour, that we were not on our lunch break, and that the movie we were watching was R-rated. Maybe they'll figure it out when they realize that the movie we told them we were watching doesn't come out on DVD until next month. HUZZAH!

Posted by Zip at January 16, 2004 10:42 AM