Workplace Hazards

I’ve gotten dangerously used to the rhythm at work, and sometimes that doesn’t translate well to the slightly less technical and efficient world outside the Silicon Valley. It’s the little things that trip me up, both in the über-high-tech and low-tech realms of my life.

Every day, I eat organic, locally grown, unrefined foods, three meals a day. I go to the gym at work and then eat stuff like buckwheat-teff porridge and grilled eggplant for breakfast, steamed veggie pot stickers for lunch, and take home a Chinese tofu chicken salad for dinner in a completely biodegradable package made from corn. It’s awesome having healthy, delicious food that I don’t have to pay for, but it sure makes weekends tricky. I used to cook all the time. Now I haven’t been to a grocery store in weeks. Saturday morning I put off having breakfast as long as possible. But by 11 a.m. or so I take a look at the handful of Odwalla bars in the otherwise empty cupboards and call up a friend to see if they want to go to a restaurant.

I have dozens of gorgeous fluffy towels which I don’t hardly ever use, because I usually shower at the gym and so use the shower at home only about once a week. For a while I considered bringing my own towel with me to the gym, because theirs were kind of scratchy. But I didn’t feel like packing my bag with a giant wet towel after workouts, and I think enough of the girls must have complained, because they started adding fabric softener recently. So now I have soft towels I don’t ever have to wash, but it’s made me completely lazy about doing the laundry at home. I now have four sets of bed sheets and pillowcases so I only have to wash linens once a month.

The toilet seats in the larger buildings freak me out. They have warmers. Yes, but warmers built into toilet seats. First time I sat on one of them I damn near jumped right out of the stall. It just felt wrong. On closer examination, I noticed that these toilets also had streams of water that could spray upwards, pointed at your nether parts from several directions. Why anybody would want water from a toilet bowl sprayed up there is beyond me. No, I don’t care if in theory it’s sanitary. I don’t trust water in a toilet bowl. Yuck.

I have gotten overly used to the automatic flushers and automatic sinks at work, and the other night my brain was a bit foggy from a fever of 103 degrees. That’s the preface, although it will not prove a good excuse. I spent a full three minutes staring at my toilet Saturday evening, wondering why the automatic flusher was broken. Then, it suddenly occurred to me that I needed to lean over and manually flush the toilet, because I was at home in the land of stone age dinosaur toilets.

Technology is awesome. But it’s also an incredible crutch for laziness, and if some catastrophe ever strikes around here, it will be nothing but wandering zombified engineers as far as the eye can see. I can see them now — once brilliant masters of cyberspace, they sit helplessly on the sidewalk, unable to go anywhere because they’re too dependent on public transportation. They’ll be helplessly tapping their laptop keyboards while convulsing from Internet withdrawal, slowly starving to death after they’ve drank the last of the Red Bull in the kitchen. If the world ever came to an end, I think the only people who would actually survive would be the Amish, since they’re the only ones who still know how to do anything useful. The rest of us have jobs so removed from basic survival that we’d just curl up and die, hugging our battery-drained iPods.