I open the front door and walk toward the bathroom because I made the horrible mistake of not taking a leak before I left work and then getting caught in some serious traffic because a frickin’ guy dressed as a clown broke down on the side of the freeway and everyone on the frickin’ 405 South had to slow down to look at him.

So my bladder’s at full boil when I walk into the bathroom and see something that my eyes are still burning from. My roommate, Carl, is naked, squatting over the toilet with a can of Lubexxx Mr. Ease Anal Spray, 0.5 Fluid Ounces pointed into his butthole, and he’s spraying away.

I’m like, “Hi.”

He doesn’t even stop spraying the Lubexxx Mr. Ease Anal Spray, 0.5 Fluid Ounces. He just goes, “Hey, what’s up?”

So I’m like, “What are you doing?”

He goes, “I’m lubing my ass.”

I’m like, “Carl, I don’t care if you’re gay, but I’m not cool with you lubing up your ass with the bathroom door open.”

He goes, “I’m not gay, dude. I have an anal fissure.”

I go, “What?”

He’s like, “I was pushing out a rock hard log last night and I felt something tear. It turns out the turd was way bigger than my butthole and I tore it a little bit. So I went to the doctor this morning and he gave me some suppositories. But then when I tried to put one in, it tore the fissure open even wider. So the doctor recommended that I use some anal lube before trying to put in another one. So here I am.”

I’m like, “Jesus Christ.”

He goes, “I know.”

He leaves the bathroom a few minutes later and I go in to take the piss I’ve been holding in for the last hour. As I’m watching my pee go into the toilet, all I can think is that Carl’s greasy butthole was hovering in the same air molecules that my unit is now occupying. Life is frickin’ crap.

I go, “What?”

He’s like, “Congrats, seriously. Pretty impressive to have written an entire book.”

So I look down at this book - The Average American Male: A Novel (Paperback) by Chad Kultgen. WTF? The dude who wrote this thing has my exact same name. I figure this warrants a fifteen minute break to check out some crap on the internet, which is a long an involved process that, since the big downsizing and new management implementation, requires you to get clearance from a special Internet User Manager named Gina Greene.

So I take the book with me as evidence of how frickin’ bizarre this is and I’m like, “Gina, check this out. Some guy wrote a book who has the exact same frickin’ name as me. I have to get on the internet and see what in the hell is going on right now.”

I’ve known Gina for a long time and even though she’s not really hot, she is a pretty cool chick. So I know she’ll help me out. She types some crap into her computer and prints out a little piece of paper with a username and a password on it, then she goes, “That’ll give you fifteen minutes on the computer at your desk.”

So I go back to my desk and start googling this guy. Holy frickin’ crank. Not only do I find out there’s some guy with my name who writes crap like books and tv shows and movies and crap like that. There’s also a dude with the same name who does like illustrations or something. And there’s some other dude with the same last name who is like a professor or some crap and there’s a car dealership in Waco, Texas owned by some dude with my last name. Kultgen is a pretty uncommon last name to say the least and there’s a whole frickin’ clan of them out there in the world doing crap.

My fifteen minutes of internet access expires but I don’t go back to scanning crap. Instead I crack open this guy’s book. I figure I owe him that much at least for having my exact same name. Holy frickin’ crank – this book is frickin’ badass on the highest order. It’s all about skanks and skanks with fat asses and all kinds of frickin’ seriously cool crap.

I will probably have to have a few half-hour crapper sessions later today to buy myself some more time to read it. I was seriously afraid the book would suck and this dude with my same exact name would bring shame to our name, but instead he has elevated it.

I, Chad Kultgen – office file scanner and menial cog in the corporate machine, salute you Chad Kultgen – author of the skank filled book The Average American Male. Your work gives our name greater glory.

“Fellow recently unemployed friends and fellow friends who still work for the worst f**king place on the planet, join us for a celebration on Friday night at Applebee’s in Woodland Hills. Some of us will be celebrating our newfound freedom while others will be lamenting their continued slavery but celebrating their resultant paychecks.”

I know for a fact there are at least three smoking hot skanks who got canned last week that will almost definitely be there and if they are there, they’re going to be drinking so heavily that I might have a shot. I get so frickin’ pumped up about it that I don’t even take off my frickin’ tie when the whistle blows on Friday. I just get in the old Honda CRV (blue) and race my ass over there, ready to slam back some Bud Lights and see what path the combination of jobless desperation and booze can lead a skank down.

I get there and Don Marquis is already blasted. P.S. It’s literally like 5:15pm. He’s like, “Nice tie working man. We’ve been here since 4 and we ain’t leavin’ until 2, so get a f**king seat and start drinking.”

I have no problem following his instructions because this skank who used to work in marketing named Elisa Duvaine is working on her third mojito and there’s a seat open next to her. I sit down, get a Bud Light and go, “Elisa, how’ve you been?”

She’s like, “Pretty good I guess. You?”

I’m like, “They have me working on a special project so pretty good.”

She goes, “Sounds great. Good for you.”

I’m like, “Yeah.”

Then I end up just staring at her cones for like the next minute or two while she looks around the bar and we don’t say anything to each other. Then she gets up and goes across the room to sit down with some douches I’ve never seen before.

I talk up some other skanks throughout the course of the night with pretty much the same results. Frickin’ skanks.

As the night winds on the I’m easing down my tenth Bud Light or so, I start to notice it’s pretty much just me, Don Marquis and a few hardcore drinkers left in the place. We’ve all somehow wound up in this big booth and Don Marquis is talking about what a badass he was in college. He’s like, “When I got drunk my thing was I’d do anything for twenty bucks. Anything. This one time I left this chick kick me square in the balls for twenty bucks.”

Most people at the table aren’t buying it. There’s a lot of “Bullshit,” and “Whatever,” flying around the booth. That’s when I look down and see some frickin’ Cayenne Pepper, Red, Ground 90,000 HU, 1.6 oz. and I get an idea.

So I pour out a pretty generous pile of pepper from the Cayenne Pepper, Red, Ground 90,000 HU, 1.6 oz., use an edge of the plastic menu to line it up nice and I’m like, “Marquis, I’ll drop you a twenty spot right now to snort this.”

I was pretty sure he would outright refuse or there would at least be some back and forth where I had to convince him to relive some of his glory days to prove his wasn’t a complete pussy. Instead, the frickin’ guy just goes, “You got the twenty?”

I toss a twenty out on the table, he rolls it up into a little tube and uses it to frickin’ snort the entire line of Cayenne Pepper. WTF?

Everybody at the table is pretty much in shock, wondering if we need to be calling an ambulance or anything, just basically waiting for his nose to start bleeding or for him to start screaming or something. Instead he’s just like, “Holy shit. That burns like a bitch.”

Don Marquis, I salute you. You are truly a badass.

In our meeting the first thing he asked me was where I got my tie. I was like, “I don’t know, the mall probably.” Then he goes, “Was it a homeless mall?”

That’s literally the first thing my new boss said to me, then he chucked me in the shoulder and was like, “Just kidding, just kidding. I wore ties like that too before I became management.”

I seriously almost jumped out the frickin’ window and took him with me. But everybody, myself included is still pretty shaken up from this whole layoff thing so we’re all pretty much going to have take as much dick in the butt as they can cram in.

So after that he opens up this file that has one piece of paper in it and he goes, “Okay so I have here, the details of a special project that you’ve been assigned to. It’s not a difficult project, but it is one that requires a great deal of concentration and attention paid to detail.”

I’m sitting there thinking he’s going to have me washing his car in the parking lot or some crap, but it’s even worse than that. He tells me this, “This company has an entire half a floor devoted to storing paper versions of client files that started being accumulated in 1982. In an effort to make this company more Carbon friendly, the decision has been made to eliminate these hard copy files.”

This has been something that I’ve been trying to get this company to do for years. We have all of the files we still deal with on a giant database. Nobody even looks at the paper files anymore. So I’m sitting there thinking I’m just going to have to make a phone call to a paper shredding service or some crap. Not so bad right, wrong.

Les goes, “Now we know we don’t want these hard copies around anymore, but we also can’t completely get rid of them. So what you’re going to be doing is scanning them into a brand new server. Pretty cool, huh?”

Pretty cool? Am I in the third grade or something, douche? So I’m like, “What do you mean scanning them in?”

He goes, “Well, we found it in the budget to get you a brand new scanner. Top of the line Brother MFC-8870dw 30ppm Wireless Network Multifunction Laser Printer with Duplex Printing, Copying, Scanning and Faxing it says here, and you’ll be taking the old paper files a page at a time and scanning them in so we have a graphic representation of the old hard copies.”

It would take one guy like 30 years to do all of that. So I’m like, “Is anyone helping me?”

He goes, “Of course. I will. We don’t expect you to do this all by yourself. When you get a file all scanned in, I’ll log into the new server and make sure it looks okay, make sure all of the pages are there. That type of thing.”

I don’t even know what he said next. This is seriously the equivalent of being sentenced to hard labor. They told me to take an early lunch and then when I get back, they’re going to have some douche from IT show me how to operate the Brother MFC-8870dw 30ppm Wireless Network Multifunction Laser Printer with Duplex Printing, Copying, Scanning and Faxing.

Over the course of these past 6 weeks, pretty much everyone from the division heads all the way down to frickin’ Ernesto, our facilities guy, has been brought in for performance evaluations, productivity suggestion sessions, general psyche evaluations, etc. It’s been really frickin’ nerve racking.

So yesterday they (the restructuring specialists) called everyone into a huge company wide meeting at about 3 o’clock. They thanked us for being patient with them and told us all that their job was done. They had turned in their recommendations to the mega-conglomerate and by tomorrow (this morning) everyone would know exactly what was going on. Then when we got back to our desks, we all had an inter-office e-mail from the mega-conglomerate letting us know we had the rest of the day off. We were all pretty much expecting to not have jobs this morning.

So we walk in and we notice that some desks have presents, literal frickin’ presents wrapped up with bows on them and some just have plain mega-conglomerate letterhead envelopes. Holy frickin’ crank.

I’m about to frickin’ drop a load in my pants trying to figure out what in the hell is going on. So before I get to my desk I go up to this dude in marketing named Jens Buerger. He’s got a present.

I’m like, “Jens, what’s in there.”

He goes, “Dunno.”

Then he opens it. It a little card that says, “Welcome to the team,” and a frickin’ book called Takeovers, Restructuring, and Corporate Governance, Fourth Edition (Hardcover). WTF? The card goes on to say that the mega-conglomerate received a strong recommendation they keep Jens on as an employee and they’re following that recommendation. The “strong” is the only part of the card that isn’t pre-printed like a normal card. It’s like it was printed in later. So at this point I’m assuming if you didn’t get a “strong” recommendation you’re pretty much frickin’ history.

So on my way back to my desk I pass this marketing skank named Justine Forney who just has an envelope. She’s reading it and crying, clearly crap-canned. I peek over her shoulder and see a basic form letter with the same variable type as the “strong” on the card except hers says “poor.”

So that’s how it’s going down. Present: you’re in, envelope, you’re out.

So I get to my frickin’ desk, pull my nuts out of my throat and don’t’ see a frickin’ present. Nuts back in throat.

So I go over and start rummaging around the files on my desk looking for the envelope, at this point just kind of wondering where on the scale between “poor” and “strong” I ranked, but I can’t find it.

No frickin’ Takeovers, Restructuring, and Corporate Governance, Fourth Edition (Hardcover) and no frickin’ envelope either. So I go into my boss Lonnie’s office to see what in the hell is going on and he’s packing his crap into a little box. Holy frickin’ crank.

I’m like, “Lonnie, what in the hell is going on.”

He’s like, “The specialists gave me a “sub-par” evaluation. I have to be out of my office in an hour.”

I know the guy’s a major league douchebag, but this is not cool or fun to watch in any way. So I’m like, “Holy crap, man, I’m sorry.”

He’s like, “Don’t worry about it. I already had a job lined up with Harring & Herman because I figured this would happen. I’ll be making roughly twice was I was making here.”

Frickin’ douche ‘till the end.

Then he’s like, “You staying?”

I go, “I don’t know.”

He’s like, “Did you get the book or the envelope?”

I go, “Neither. There wasn’t anything on my frickin’ desk. That’s why I cam in here – to see if you knew anything.”

He’s like, “Nope. Nothin’ here.” Then he packs up the last of crap, chucks me on the shoulder, says, “It was nice working with you. If you do stick around keep that head low. These new guys are some serious assholes,” then he walks out.

Holy frickin’ crank, I will never see frickin’ Lonnie again for the rest of my life. Then I start thinking about the possibility of me getting fired and then I start to realize at this point if I do get fired, my best bet for a new job would probably actually be Harring & Herman and then I’d be working for Lonnie again.

Oh sweet frickin’ crap, please let me get the book. That’s all I could think as I made my way down to HR to see what in the hell was going on. By the way, this was the worst trip of my life through the office. I’d say easily 20 percent of the people I’ve worked with for years were getting canned and I had to look at them as I went down to see what my fate was. Frickin’ sucked ass.

So I get to HR and I’m like, “So, I don’t know if I got canned or not.”

Then this skank named Sandy Duran is like, “If you got the copy of Takeovers, Restructuring, and Corporate Governance, Fourth Edition (Hardcover) then you were not terminated. If you got a letter of termination then you are terminated. It’s not that hard.”

I have hated this skank for the entire time I’ve known her and I’m pretty sure I figure if Lonnie got the axe I probably will, too, so I’m like, “Listen you stupid skank, you think I’d be down here talking to your shriveled tits if I had gotten either one of those things?”

She goes, “You didn’t get Takeovers, Restructuring, and Corporate Governance, Fourth Edition (Hardcover) or a letter of termination?”

I’m like, “No.”

Now this skank has worked with me for around five years. She actually goes, “And what’s your name?”

I almost put my foot through her frickin’ butthole. Instead, I tell her my name and she looks me up in the system. She says, “Oh. I see.”

I’m like, “You see what?”

She goes, “You are still an employee and the specialists recommended you for a special project.”

I’m like, “What in the hell is that?”

She goes, “I don’t have the details here, but you should be getting a memo or an inter-office later today.”

I go, “So what in the hell do I do now?”

She goes, “I guess just go back to your desk and wait.”

So I get back to my desk, still no Takeovers, Restructuring, and Corporate Governance, Fourth Edition (Hardcover). So every other person that walks past my desk who got canned thinks I’m in their boat and starts telling me their story and all of this crap and I have to be like, “I didn’t get fired. I got assigned to some bullshit project or something. Good luck, though.”

Day one of the new company and already this crap frickin’ sucks.

At any rate, yesterday he had a job interview at this place that makes TV Commercials and does different kinds of advertising and what not. Sounded pretty cool. So when I got home from work yesterday the first thing I did was ask Carl how the interview went.

I’m like, “Carl how’d the interview go?”

He goes, “Um, not too good, dude.”

I go, “Why?”

He’s like, “The dude I met told me that they couldn’t hire somebody who ‘didn’t take the interview seriously.’”

I’m like, “What’d you do that you weren’t taking it seriously?”

He goes, “Nothing. The dude thought that I didn’t take it seriously because of my pants.”

At this point in the conversation I’m pretty confused. So I’m like, “What kind of pants were you wearing?”

He goes, “Just these,” then he points to the “pants” he’s still wearing. It’s a frickin’ pair of Speedo Grab Bag Jammers.

I’m like, “You wore those to a frickin’ interview, you douchebag?”

He goes, “My good pants had a big spaghetti stain on them.”

I didn’t’ even know how to respond, I just pounded some Bud Ices and forced myself to not care.

So that day at lunch I went out with a bunch of guys that I usually go out to lunch with and I was telling them about this frickin’ JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank. They almost crapped their pants.

I was telling them that it’s air-conditioned and it goes 40 miles an hour and it’s street legal as long as you don’t go on the highway and all of this other crap. Then this one guy from marketing, Ken Hughes, was like, “How much is it?”

And I was like, “Twenty grand.”

That put a damper on things until we all started talking a little more. Some back-story: This year our holiday bonus was smaller than it ever has been - $500. Basically a frickin’ slap in the ballbag after taxes. Why even bother giving a bonus at all? At any rate we all started talking and realized that if we could get a bunch of guys to pool their bonuses together, we could buy a frickin’ JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank, keep it in the office parking structure and take turns driving it to lunch.

For the rest of the day we hashed out all of the logistics and basically figured out that if we can get like 35 guys to commit financially this could totally be on.

Cut to this morning. I got an e-mail from George Patterson in legal saying that he’s in on the JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank. He was number 35. Now it’s just a matter of collecting the cash and buying it and then we will be riding in frickin’ badass style to lunch in our frickin’ JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank. There’s your frickin’ bonus douchebags.

It’s really not that big of a deal for me because on my floor the office manager’s desk is right by the bathroom and she just leaves the keys sitting out so you can grab them as you walk by.

So this morning I get ready for my morning deuce and walk down to her desk. She’s sitting there (this chick named Lori Pettingston, who isn’t that much of a skank and is actually kind of cool) but there are no keys.

So I’m like, “Lori, what’s the deal with the keys?”

And she goes, “HR just sent the office managers a memo this morning. We can’t leave the keys sitting out anymore because people have been taking them and not returning them.”

So I go, “Okay, well can I have one of the keys?”

She goes, “Yeah, hang on,” then she whips out a little sign out sheet and a frickin’ Honeywell 2074 Burglary Resistant Top Opening Digital Anti Theft Drawer Safe.

I’m like, “I have to sign the keys in and out?”

She kind of rolls her eyes and goes, “I know it’s ridiculous, but that’s what they want us to do.”

So as I’m looking at the sign out sheet it has columns for time taken and time returned. It’s pretty clear by the numbers who has taken a dump and who has just gone to take a piss. And it looks like my boss Lonnie is still in there and probably taking a crap. Great I’m going to be deucing next to my boss. Great way to start the day.

So I sign for the keys then Lori hefts the Honeywell 2074 Burglary Resistant Top Opening Digital Anti Theft Drawer Safe up onto her desk and punches in some numbers. She opens the frickin’ Honeywell 2074 Burglary Resistant Top Opening Digital Anti Theft Drawer Safe and the only thing in it is two pairs of keys. She hands me one and I head off to the crapper wondering which douchebag in HR came up with this plan.

Well today I started to care. I’m sitting there minding my own business, watching a frickin’ youtube clip of these douche bag celebrities getting tazered and Phelps walks up to me with this box in his hand.

He hands it to me and he goes, “Hey there, I’m Leonard Phelps then new Director of Records and I know you handle some of the invoices for certain clients. I thought you might be able to use this. Just a little gift from me in my first week.” Then he hands me a frickin’ copy of Professional Invoices: Get Paid Now!

Are you frickin’ kidding me?

I’ve been writing invoices since I frickin’ graduated from college. I actually wrote our invoicing program, the one that our company has used for the last five years. And now this asstooth wants me to use some frickin’ consumer grade, cut and paste, CompUSA aisle 5, $49.99 crapbox program that old ladies use to sell their cupcake recipes on Ebay? I’m seriously about to kick this douche in his ballbag when he goes, “You know, you can take it or leave it. I just thought it might be something you could use. We should get lunch sometime. I’d love to talk to you about your record storage system in the account department.” Then he walks off, never knowing he was about two seconds from being force fed his precious Professional Invoices: Get Paid Now!

So I roll into her office and notice pretty much immediately that sitting on her desk front and center is a frickin’ Baby Girl Bubble Gum Buddy - African American. Okay. So I’m like, “Hey here are those documents you guys needed and what in the hell is that thing?” And I point right at the frickin’ Baby Girl Bubble Gum Buddy - African American so she doesn’t think I’m talking about any one of the other 500 pieces of weird crap in her office.

She goes, “Oh that’s a Baby Girl Bubble Gum Buddy - African American. It was a gift at a baby shower that I went to this weekend. Cute isn’t it?”

I go, “Not really it’s actually kind of scary.”

She goes, “I think it’s rather ingenious. You know the entire thing’s edible. It’s candy.”

I’m like, “So why haven’t you eaten it yet?”

She goes, “Oh my god, that is so racist.”

At this point I know I’m on the verge of her sending me to some kind of sensitivity training. HR will toss those sensitivity classes at your ass like they’re going out of style. So I try my best use logic on this retarded skank’s mind.

I say, “It’s not racist. I’d eat a frickin’ Baby Girl Bubble Gum Buddy – Anglo American if I was hungry. I’d eat any race of Baby Girl Bubble Gum Buddy in fact. I have no preference.”

I can tell that throws her for a second. She just sits there looking at me, the gears in her little HR pea brain trying to turn as she weighs what I just said for its racist content. Then before she can formulate an opinion I’m like, “Well you guys have all the documents you need from me now. I’m gonna get back to work.”

HR loves to hear you say you’re getting to work. Then I roll out.

I swear to Christ if I have to take another frickin’ sensitivity training class I will eat a frickin’ bullet.