i stopped drinking caffeine a few days ago ... again.

yesterday morning i wrote an email to my boss and a few peers disparaging the choices being made by a fellow development group. on this not flattering correspondence, i inadvertently included the manager of the department in question on the sending.

my phone started ringing within 30 seconds.

i'm back on the caffeine ... again.

At last! Today these signs mysteriously popped up beneath the elevator buttons in my building. What I like most about the message is the duplicitous inference that can be made by the wording. Does "For your health..." imply that the exercise will serve you well physically or that if you don't take heed we will kick the living hell out of you for being such a lazy waste of mass.

And truly, the funniest thing about this landmark event is that I've been at the company long enough to know that an entire think-tank and approval process was put in place to craft and post these few words.

today i used the term "taking opium rectally" in a business setting. i know some of you are thinking big deal, that's just another one of those overused corporate catchphrases like 'best of breed' or 'incentify'. others may be saying 'so what, opium, rectally. i don't see the conflict'. but, few of you were thinking what the people i made the comment to were thinking..."that guy just said his boss was taking opium rectally."

Last week my mother worked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, tomorrow she begins working in downtown St. Louis. It turns out that I am not the only one bella has wrapped snugly around a finger. Personally, I'm surprised she was able to hold out till now, this being her first grandchild and all. But, while this is great news for us, it is only mediocre news for those who frequent dearmitt.com's franchise page, Rockefeller Center. In that the page was initially designed for my out of town mother, now that she is in town, its continued propagation does not carry the same import. And given this, updates will not happen every Monday, but instead on a monthly basis.

I've also set a pretty high stick for when kid number two comes around. I've often heard that people do not photographically deluge the second child with the same vigor as the first. I hope to not deal that card to my children so want to slow down and meter my enthusiasm because I'm certain there is something to this syndrome so many people talk about. So, perhaps it's a smart move, perhaps it's nothing greater than a cop out but that is the decision coming out of this camp and I hope that all who have made Rockefeller Center part of their Monday routine will continue to do so and share in the latest antics of our little one in the new monthly format.

I have been seeing how many foul things I can put into my wastebasket at work before they give me a new plastic liner. To date my month old liner has housed the likes of:

1. A half eaten custard filled long john
2. A cupful of sunflower seed husks
3. 7 pieces of spent bazooka joe gum
4. 1 full helping of left over mashed potatoes
5. 1 broken and leaking bic pen
6. A half empty thai iced coffee, which busted open when thrown in there
7. One sock from the gym that had a hole in it, post work-out.
8. And, 1 chewed up cud of a snickers bar that made a funny noise while chewing on it.

Another week and I'm going to take a black light to the container and see how many different organisms and funks have set up shop in the space. My company doesn't occupy a slot in the fortune 500 because they distribute trash bags all hurly burly for no apparent reason. No sir-ree-bob.

The New York Times magazine has this section called "What were they thinking" and it is comprised of a picture and below there are brief statements from the people shown in the photo telling about what was going through their mind when the photo was taken. This is always one of my first stops every Sunday after cracking the seal on the blue wrapped paper. Given this and the number of photos I take in a month, week and day, I realized that I could craft a similar feature. There will be three differences between the times' journalistic practice and mine though. First, I will not interview the other people in the photos because I intuit that I will not always be greatly interested in what they were thinking. Secondly, I will interview myself because another facilitator may not ask the question I want to answer. And lastly, my photos will be of a higher caliber, technically and compositionally, than those of the paper. With that said, I offer the first installment which I simply term "Conference Call".

if you detest the successories phenomenom even a fraction as much as myself, you should enjoy the effort of despair.com. they took the very necessary dilbert/far side/doonesberry approach to this laughable exercise.

featuring corporate favorites such as Agony,  Defeat,  Failure,  Ineptitude,  Losing,  Mediocrity,  Mistakes,  Pessimism,  Procrastination,  and of course Stupidity, despair.com has taken the motivational art-form to new levels.