Slowing Your Office to a More Enjoyable Pace

If your boss is like most, s/he wants the office run in a fast-paced, cost-efficient manner. And if you are like most Secretaries, all you want is for that jerk to leave you alone so you can have a minute to yourself for a change! While that may never happen, you can at least get some satisfaction from frustrating your boss’ goals. Below are some simple, fun suggestions for wasting company money and decreasing efficiency which we’ve gathered from Secretaries across America. These methods are carefully designed to shift the blame away from the Secretary. Remember, it’s really your boss’ job which is on the line. Screwing up his or her office’s productivity may result in amusing bouts of panic, worry, or ulcers; if you really work at it, you could even get him or her fired! The names in this article have been changed to protect the Secretaries involved.

Though still illegal in most places, theft is perhaps the most time-honored anti-boss activity. Pens, pencils, paper, petty cash, staplers, computers, furniture--everything is stealable! Just make sure you don’t get caught. If you’re noble-minded, you can also hand you loot over to a better cause.

“Brenda,” who works for a mean pig at an advertising firm in Dallas, says “I save hundreds of dollars a year on my kids’ school supplies by ‘shopping’ at work. There are so many pens and notebooks in our office, no one notices if a few are missing.”

After stealing something, a Secretary can waste the company’s time by ordering a replacement. And, if you’re the person who receives deliveries to the office, you can always order a little something for yourself, on the house! You work hard and you deserve a gift now an then!

“Lola,” Secretary to the racist chief of a prominent Midwestern design firm, takes advantage of her colleagues’ blind faith to monkey-wrench her office. “I noticed that whenever an ‘out of order’ sign was on a copier, no one even tried to use it,” she relates. Now, Lola hangs an out of order sign whenever she feels things need to get slowed down a bit--even when the copier is running perfectly!

If you unplug your boss’ computer, he or she will probably wander about for an hour or so, complaining that it “just doesn’t seem to be working.” Offer to help, then quickly ‘find’ the problem and shrug “it must have got knocked out.” Combining waste with humiliation--now that’s the kind of efficient Secretary we all should be!