I am avoiding work by doing other, less exciting, work.

I feel I should pass on Hec's words of wisdom: Pastels and a touch of bronzer.

He's so ... helpful? No, that's not the right word.

I am avoiding work by doing other, less exciting, work.

Man, you suck at this game.

I am not avoiding work, because I rashly promised my boss my professional plan for 2006 by the end of work today. I've broken it down into

• Business knowledge
• Industry knowledge
• Project management

but I can't think of the right bucket in which to toss my desire to improve my written and oral presentational skills. Needs to be something as big as the other three categories. And obviously should include "buy thesaurus" or something.

Would it be rude to spill a bucket full of water over the head of the be-perfumed chick one cube over?

Speed TV scroll for a change in programming:

Sorry, but Nextel Cup qualifying from Bristol has been rained out. Be calm, the first step in anger management is to recognize there's a problem. In your case, we're obviously well past that. Just chill out and watch these cool shows instead. Speed ... better than therapy.

Reminds of a time when the techs in our corporate office were doing a late night upgrade on all the PCs down there and discovered one of the executives had a bunch of porn sites bookmarked.

I've seen so much porn on company equipment, man. People would send us laptops to be repaired with porn .avi files on the desktop.

Never found anything good, though.

I've seen so much porn on company equipment, man.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

I've seen so much porn on company equipment, man

WHAT IS WITH PEOPLE [eta: ha! to the xpost]? (the site that lists internal course is slow to load) I got nothing against the desire to see porn, but I'm skeeved by people that need it so bad they not only can't keep it off of work hardware, but are also so dumb they don't try and hide the facts. Though you're probably more relaxed than the folks here. I'm pretty sure you get reported stat for that sort of stuff here. Against which I have no objection. The fewer stupid people in the workplace the better.

User calls help desk to report a gold message that says "thank you" in the lower left corner of her screen. "Believing it to be a virus, I advised her to not touch anything and transferred her to our software support team," says pilot fish who got the call. "The tech took over the call and shadowed the user's desktop but didn't see the message. After asking the user about it, she understood. Once the yellow Post-it note that someone had taped on her monitor was removed, she was able to view her desktop normally."

Wow. Just wow.

but I can't think of the right bucket in which to toss my desire to improve my written and oral presentational skills.

It's referred to professional skills development here. Which seems redundant in a professional plan. Sorry if that isn't more helpful.

Sorry if that isn't more helpful.

Dude, it's magical, and I'm going to use it.