How to Win Friends and Influence People

My manager told me today that he has been reading a book about improving your prospects at work and in life. This apparently involves the identification of things that you are good at, followed by doing more of them. He is apparently good at "interacting with people" and "problem solving at the macro level." This prompted me to make a list of things that I am good at:

- Being a hermit
- Creating awkward scenarios
- Dating emotionally unavailable men
- depriving myself of things (i.e. wheat products, sex)
- Non Sequiturs

I did not submit this list to my manager, although I suppose I could have. Then he could have applied his problem solving skills to discovering a way for me to utilize these unique talents in the workplace. Maybe they can install a hermitage for me behind the line, where I will write sestinas for Ernesto the dishwasher. The emotionally unavailable men who come in for their high end dessert will be given the option of dating the resident pastry hermit, who will then refuse to put out and speak only in non sequiturs. This will be an awkward scenario. Problem solved.

Seriously though, most of my occupations thus far have involved overriding my natural skills and impulses to function in a repetitive and intellectually sub-stimulating environment. Isn't that why it's called "work?" The next step up the career ladder for me is tending bar at a place that allows me to show cleavage for tips. I believe it is soon after this point that women hit the glass ceiling in the workplace. Or, if you are in Boston, The Glass Slipper?

Whatev. I will stow my post-late-shift cynicism along with the wad of dollar bills that I will be judged at the bank for depositing in the morning... esp. if I do so in my old Candies heels and that spandex minidress.