I have a coffee mug here at the office that’s very special to me. I know I’m a loser for being attached to a mug, but there it is. The sad thing is that I don’t even have a reason for being so attached to this mug, it’s not like someone special gave it to me or it signifies the time I got the Big Promotion or anything like that. No, I just like it. I like it so much that this is actually Mug2, because Mug1 ended up shattered all over the lunchroom floor about 2 years ago in a horrible mugwashing acccident and I went on eBay and bid like a madman to win the identical Mug2. I can’t remember the details but I’m sure I paid far too much for it. Plus shipping.

It’s not just your standard white ceramic coffee mug, this one is cooler than that. It’s just like your standard white ceramic coffee mug, but with a Far Side cartoon on it: In a cavelike setting surrounded by flames, two guys are sitting up in separate beds and one is saying to the other, “Relax, Chuck, you’re just having a nightmare. Of course, we are still in Hell.” Appropriate for work, don’t you think? And it even has my name on it.

That’s the thing, right there: It has MY NAME on it. It’s not a generic mug that someone could “accidentally” pick up and start using. It may not jump right out at you saying “This is Chuck’s mug!” but still, it has my name on it. You’d think that would clue people in that, hey, this isn’t your mug, nipplehead. But apparently not, since it’s gone. It’s not in the cupboard by the coffee machine, it’s not at my desk, it’s not in the dishwasher, it’s not in the kitchen on the other side of the building.

No, my mug is just MIA — and I use the IA advisedly, because I’m sure it’s in action somewhere in this office. Some asshole is drinking coffee out of MY MUG even as I write this. And even though many of my co-workers are complete and utter morons, I don’t think any of them are so stupid that they can’t read where it says “Relax, CHUCK…” Whoever it is that has it doesn’t think it’s their mug; they know they’re a mugnapper.

You know what the very worst thing about this is? I just know they’re drinking coffee with cream and sugar. My mug has been raised on a pure diet of black coffee, because anything else is just wrong. Like the old truck-stop saying goes, “If you wanted a cup of cream and sugar, why’d you order coffee?”

But as bad as that is, it could be even worse. It could be exposed to :::shudder::: flavored coffee.

Hazelnut.

I’m in a small, very quiet conference room, just me and one of the supervisors from my company’s Customer Support department who came out on the road with me to “observe” this conversion. Very quiet, very look busy-ish… And I’m reading The Sneeze and trying desperately not to laugh out loud. I think she thinks I’m having convulsions.

I was just over in the hotel business center printing out all the Mapquest directions for my route. Their computer was having a few problems, so I cleared the cache and did some other minor tweaks to it so it would stop crashing on me. As I was leaving, I performed an “upgrade” — I set one of the moose pictures as the desktop.

Yes, I know: dead silence from you people. I don’t care, I think that moose stuff is some funny shit. At least I’m cracking me up.

In the server room, where the on-air computers are feeding the broadcast signals, Todd the Moose tries to take Bozeman off the air.

Scott heroically risks his life to keep Bozeman on the air and attacks the marauding moose, ripping its head off!

I’ve come to realize that the dearth of lol-type comments on the “Self Amoosement” entry isn’t because you didn’t think it was funny, it’s because you were laughing so hard you couldn’t type straight. So here’s some more mooseness:

Scott models next Spring’s fashion for the Moose On The Go

Iiiiiiit’s Action Moose!

Are you people made of stone? Those moose pictures were fucking HILARIOUS! They were comedy gold! Not one of you could post a comment saying, at the very least, “Ha”?

Fine. See if I ever wear goofy costumes for you again.

We found moose costumes today. And we had a little too much time on our hands. And a digital camera.

“What do you mean, you don’t know how to convert a radio station to new traffic and billing software???”

“…and then you tell the Account Executive, ‘No, you missed the order deadline, your spots aren’t going to air.’ They hate when you do that, but they’re AEs — who cares?”

Traveling for work as much as I do sucks, but it does have its silver lining — comp days. While it sucks to be stuck in a hotel room with nothing to do over a weekend, it’s nice to know I’m earning two comp days for being on the road Sat and Sun that I can use when I get home. Next weekend, over Labor Day, I’ll be earning three. Woo.

So I’m taking a comp day today. Stayed up late last night, slept in a little bit this morning, didn’t have to lanesplit through 65 miles of LA traffic… Life is good. And later this morning there’s a chair with my name on it in the No Limit Hold ‘Em tournament over at Hollywood Park. Shuffle up and deal!

All employees at my office have been through mandatory sexual harrassment training, whether we were pretty good at it already or not. I didn’t get much out of it personally even though I know there’s always room for improvement. The trainer used a goofy little gender-neutral stuffed toy — a smiley face with arms and legs — as his model employee, named it “Henrietta,” and in every scenario presented asked us “How would Henrietta feel about this?” Henrietta would be horrified by my desk.

Not by the picture of Richard Simmons someone pinned up next to my computer, and not by the other picture of Richard Simmons someone taped to the handset of my phone. No, it’s my toys. I have various toys and action figures standing on the wall all around the perimeter of my cubicle: The Tick, Mucus Tick, Space Ghost, the Alien, etc. I also have scattered throughout them all small rubber bunny rabbits about half an inch tall in various “action poses.” The bunnies don’t really do anything but I thought they made a nice counterpoint to the machismo of Space Ghost and the others. Plus, they’re cute.

Well, someone keeps fucking with my bunnies: they keep making the bunnies fuck with each other. Every morning when I come in, I find a bunny orgy going on — bunnies are going at it doggie-style, missionary position, 69ing, etc. Oral sex is a prominent theme. Right now looking to my left I see a stack of three bunnies, two going at it 69 style with the third on top buggering the middle one. I’ve got bunny porn going on over here.

Henrietta would be appalled, I think.

My commute to work on the 5 Freeway takes me through the heart of Anaheim, right past Disneyland. And I do mean right past Disneyland. You can see it from the freeway — Space Mountain, the ferris wheel, the Matterhorn… It’s all right there, barely 100 yards from the freeway. It’s a little more than a stone’s throw away, but you could definitely nail the Matterhorn with a stone using one of those wrist rocket slingshots.

That just seems wrong to me somehow. The Happiest Place on Earth is supposed to be an escape, a different reality, separate from the rest of the world. Bored commuters stuck in gridlock shouldn’t be able to peer in from their cars.