this morning i learned that "i'm pretty okay with Excel, why?" means "i would be HONORED to be your new accountant"

I have made my position re: corporate America abundantly clear.  And yet, I continue to return to her arms, hoping this time will be different.  Maybe this time things will have changed.

And each time, the romance blossoms.  Each time we start slow, building a relationship based on trust and mutual understanding.  Each time, I wonder if this is it, if this is the time we respect each other's differences and love each other more for our quirks.  And each time, she kicks me in the face with the force of her soul-crushing lies.

My crisis with corporate America is that I love a paycheck.  I am willing to answer phones and perform data-entry for a paycheck, and that, firends, is the cornerstone of corporate America.  Sometimes I'm willing to give CorpAm credit: even the best nonprofits have to have soul-sucking cubicles and accountants and grueling 9-5s.  I get it.

This time, corporate America fronted like a small-business owner who founded her own gym and healthy-eating cafe.  I thought "I can get behind this.  Community. Health.  Small-business."

Right?

Bosslady offered me a front desk position with a firm handshake in December.  I was thrilled: zero commute, freedom to read all day, a paycheck with which to buy things.  I trained with Bossminion, met a bunch of great people, and settled down with a stack of books and a pot of coffee.

It was great for like three whole days.

I think my first mistake was agreeing to cover a three-hour shift before New Years, when I inadvertently revealed "OH HAI WALK ALL OVER ME PLZ I LOVE BUSTING IT FOR MINIMUM WAGE"

Maybe that first mistake was assuming that the five staff members I joining forces with would stick around.  Meaning as of Janurary it is Bosslady, Bossminion, and little ole me running the show.  It is awkward at lunch time.

Maybe it was sharing with Bossminion (who's around my age, which makes it worse) that I'm in winter break.  Suddenly, in the middle of LOLZing over the latest "SNL," she slaps me with a "Hey, we need you to come in three hours early every day this week because if you don't, the small business will implode because we have no staff.   See you at 6am KTHXBYE!!"

And suddenly, I am the life force of small-business America in the grip of a crushing recession.

Probably, though, the first real mistake was revealing that I'm at least moderately intelligent.  Bosslady did not expect me to finish an Excel tracking project so quickly, which turned into another tracking project, and now completely revamping their inventory files from the past three years.  You guys.  It was boxes of loose paper, rubber bands, and post-its, and it took me four days to file it all into five large binders with dividers and labels.  I must have impressed someone, because I now cannot escape massive projects.

As in, it turns out the abovementioned inventory needs to be [wait for it] ... COMPUTERIZED.

So I painstakingly pieced together a master fileset and set up a few examples from the past year.  That day, I learned that autosum commands saved my bosses a good three days with a calculator.

The next day, the rest of 2009's inventory appeared on my desk.

Oh, corporate America.  You sweet-talking, coldhearted, irresistible demonlady.