All in the Name of Corporate

Work has been so tiring.

It may be obvious by now that I write for a magazine. It's called MetroLife, and we target young, professional men and women living and working in London. I write a women's interest column in each monthly issue, which usually entails giving my opinions about dating, beauty, or fashion. I enjoy the things I get to write about, but I seriously think our subscription list is up to like 12 people. In all of London. Of coures it's quite plausible that people buy them on their way to work at the newstand in the train station, but who knows? I'd like to write something that would reach more people, but I can't complain. My coworkers are fun, and my boss isn't so bad.

When I say my coworkers are fun, I am specifically referring to the human interest column writers. The other writers are cows.

Sports Writers: Always stare when I walk through their office. I mean it's like they've never seen a woman before.

News Writers: Sit around all day and read newspapers. Then basically copy what they've read into their columns.

Finance Writers: Nerds. Always counting things. Weird.

Editors: Mean. I make it a personal rule to never even go into the editing room. Anything could happen, right? There could be a lockdown, and I'd be stuck in there with them. That would simply be unbearable, unendurable. I e-mail my columns each month to the human interest editor, Roman Billington. For the first couple of months of my employment at ML, I personally strutted up like the committed employee I was and handed my stories to him. Then I realized his clammy hands always lingered on mine, and I feared he'd start entertaining some sort of fetish fantasy about my hands. So now I e-mail them and pray he doesn't dream of my fingers manipulating the keyboard as I wrote that piece.

See, ML is owned by a larger company we've all heard of--Parker and Nicks, of energy bar fame. Stephen Parker and Jeremy Nicks were the front runners of the energy bar fad. Now they have a megacorporation that sells everything from sportswear to smoothies. And they also run MetroLife, so they are my bosses.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that Parker and Nicks inc. has been in talks about shutting down the magazine because of low subscription rates. So we've been under a lot of stress to make the magazine as good as possible. That's where Chad comes in. He works for P&N, too, in the Marketing and Advertising department. The future of the magazine lies in the hands of Chad and his coworkers. This stress has been really getting to him, and we haven't had any fun in the past week or so. Sometimes, he'll say he'll stay over, and he'll end up passing out in my bed, leaving Catherine and me watching tellie like we would if he weren't even there.

Hopefully, these things will work themselves out. I'm in a desperate need for an outing.