1. The stalls of the women�s bathroom have clear plastic magazine holders on them that are filled with Avon catalogs and the periodicals that the gals bring in from home � Ladies� Home Journal, Victoria, Good Housekeeping, Oppressed Farm Wife (OK, I made that one up). One day I sneaked in several issues of The Economist and distributed them among the magazine holders in the four stalls. Within two hours someone had collected them and thrown them away. Incidentally, Avon puts out a new catalog, I swear, every week. Do not get me started on a semiotic analysis of the aesthetics and rhetoric of the Avon catalog.
2. Since this building was constructed post-ADA, all of the doors to the different wings and office suites, and also to the bathrooms, have those big hand-sized buttons that someone in a wheelchair can push to gain entry. Although the doors have handles and are not notably heavy, pushing buttons is the mode of access preferred by approximately 90% of the women and 50% of the men who work here. Why? I do not know. They push the button and then just stand there, waiting for the door to swing slowly open. Once I was heading to the Ladies� just as a woman was pushing the button and I said excuse me, walked past her, and pushed the door open. She waited until I was in there and the door had closed behind me, and then she pushed the button again.
3. I walk faster than anyone else in the building, period. At least once a week I�ll be crossing the main lobby to go to the bathroom, get something from my car, or hit the roach coach for coffee, and someone ahead of me will turn around quickly with a terrified look on his or her face, Oh no, someone is coming to get me. Like it's 4 a.m. in Harlem or something. This person will then scuttle � or whatever is the slow version of scuttling � out of my path as if I am a robot gone haywire, mowing down bureaucrats on my murderous rampage. And I don't even walk abnormally fast.
4. Donuts. Donuts donuts donuts donuts donuts.
5. There�s a union here. This means that even though everyone in the office hates the woman from whose desk I am currently briefing you, they hate her from her lousy attitude to her inaccurate typing to her rudeness on the phone to her excessive time-taking-off to her reputedly bogus medical claims to her b.o., they are stuck with her. And she hates them, too, and has told them so, but since she�s too much of an incomp to get a job anywhere else, she�s grudgingly coming back. Won�t this be a fun office when that comes to pass?
6. I am doing actual job stuff for maybe three hours a day max and usually more like one and half to two, and they�re practically weeping in gratitude for my work ethic and ability to crank it out, for the fact that I never complain about how stressed I am.
7. The male-female thing is getting a little bit creepy for me around here. Nothing ugly, just occasionally uncomfortable. I think I am going to stop wearing skirts to work.
8. The temp agency is submitting my resume for consideration to fill a temp-to-hire position that starts soon in Bellevue, word processing and documentation for some kind of firm that has an entire department devoted to word processing. I had thought that except for Mary Gaitskill short stories, such a thing was an anachronism. They want typing speed and proofreading and godlike Excel skills, which might let me out, oh well, and the low end of the full-time starting salary is just over what a new schoolteacher with an advanced degree would get, just less than twice what I was making in the fattest of the fat high-tech days.

Thank you, that is all.

(Was this list the first in a series? It might be � it was fun and took me only a few minutes to write.)