Cubicle wisdom

The half hour of my workday with the least obvious benefit to me, or anyone else, is the final half hour of the day, a period granted the simultaneously sterile and cloying title of "Supervisor Interaction Time." The idea seems to be mostly to get us used to dealing with the people who will eventually be our immediate superiors, but while we're still in training, which is done by trainers, they have precious little to impart.

To wit, yesterday, the half hour was spent reading from a list of motivational quotations, attributed variously to Einstein, any number of self-help authors, and "anonymous," which I assume means "someone who wrote one of those chain e-mails."

They asked, after we discussed the page of treacly wisdom, if anyone had any quotes by which they tried to live, or at least to keep in mind in the workplace. I spent a period of my teens reading any number of collections of literary and philosophical quotations. In spite of that, it's probably for the best that the boss didn't call on me for mine, because after 8 hours of sitting in that chair, everything but Mencken escaped me completely.