I was at the bookstore today when I found that my book is shelved next to “Garfield Spills the Beans.” At first I was crestfallen, but after I browsed through the Garfield book for a few minutes, I had to admit that there were more than a few commonalities. Garfield’s book is about how lazy he is; so is mine. In his book, Garfield is plagued by overenthusiastic, uptight morons (Odie and Jon), and in my book, so am I (every coworker and boss I ever had). And finally, Garfield obsessively pursues a steaming, moist treat (lasagna), which he joylessly devours before moving onto the next pan. Always another pan! That’s my motto, too, Garfield. Always … another … pan. (Not talking about lasagna anymore, kiddos.)

If you’re one of the intentional visitors to this fine blog (as opposed to the people who merely stumbled upon it while searching for scat porn) (and there’s nothing wrong with that; true story – I actually started this blog while searching for scat porn!), I’ve got some good news for you. This week, the book version of this blog, “Canned,” is going to hit bookshelves everywhere. It’s basically going to be just like this blog, only printed on paper, which will be convenient. Because if you hate it, you can just burn it, no harm done, whereas if you hate this blog and you take a tire iron to your laptop, you’re out a laptop, aren’t you? And then what will you do, watch porn on television?! What if your girlfriend comes home for lunch unexpectedly?

So go shoplift it at a bookstore near you, or, if you’re a completely spineless coward, buy it. Just act fast, because shelf space is at a premium these days, and it could very well be remaindered in a matter of weeks to make room for something like “The Faith Hill and Tim McGraw Gluten-Free BBQ Cookbook,” which will not only have an initial print run of several million, but will have a huge display booth in every bookstore in the country, where if you buy the book, they’ll let you enter into a small blacked-out chamber and “do what you will” with an officially-licensed Faith Hill RealDoll (TM). Don’t worry ladies, you haven’t been forgotten, my sources tell me that they’ll be a booth with a Tim McGraw doll too, with a li’l Tim protruding from the front so you can “back up on it.” As the kids say. The black kids, mostly, but some white ones also say it.

Ha!  Is every single adult who read one or more “Harry Potter” books a secret pedophile?  (Answer: yes.)

Every few weeks I’ll come across another article like this, in which the author timidly posits the question of whether some people might possibly perhaps prefer sleeping until noon and cashing free checks to rising at dawn, packing ass-to-crotch onto the subway, and spending all day filing TPS reports down at the regional Pet Rock distribution center while breathing in your cubicle neighbors’ gaseous bodily emissions.  These articles always end on the same note:  “but of course this couldn’t be the case, since you could make marginally more money at a job, and nobody in their right mind would take less money just to have a higher quality of life.  After all, this is America.”  Which is sort of a good point.

Nevertheless, the fact is that any rational thinking human being is going to prefer free checks to indentured servitude, and for God’s sakes of course if you extend unemployment I’m going to take the money and, well, not run so much as sort of lay sideways on this here Laz-E-Boy I dragged in off the curb, and continue smoking pot out of this inexpertly gouged apple bong.  And the fact is, there’s no reason I should feel at all guilty about that.  After all, the checks are funded by taxes, and I paid taxes when I worked, and the politicians who chastise “unemployment milkers” are really only doing so at the urging of their campaign contributors, who as long as unemployment is continually extended, find it especially difficult to find people desperate enough to take a sub-living wage and no benefits to do horrible repetitive soulmurdering “work” down at, for example, their regional Pet Rock distribution centers.  Where profits were in fact down ten percent last quarter because fifteen percent of the population was unemployed, and once the fog of perpetual sleep deprivation and mind numbing commutes cleared, they all realized that buying more Pet Rocks would not, in fact, make them feel better.  See how it all fits together, folks?  (Takes bow.)

That flight attendant’s abrupt quitting of his job last week had me all misty-eyed, thinking of my own past walkouts.  My all time favorite is probably when I found out I was being replaced at the end of the week and preemptively used an electromagnetic VHS tape eraser to wipe a server containing years of important proposals and documents before going to lunch and never coming back.  (Knowing my moronic boss, he’s probably still sitting at his desk, years later, waiting to chew me out when I return.)

Another job so wrong that even the tableaus of individual desks seemed to bristle visibly with pure malignant wrongness, the post-it notes and desk lamps and ergo-stools on fire like a Dilbert cartoon rendered by late-period Van Gogh. Less than an hour into my employment I raised one finger during the office tour, freezing my guide in mid-sentence, and said, Wait one second, I’ll be right back. I walked calmly around the corner and then ducked into the stairwell, instantly sprinting mindlessly down the stairs, taking them four and five at a time, careening off walls and fire extinguishers and other stairwalkers who shrank against the wall hugging papers to their chests and cursed me as I passed, so frantic that I missed the ground floor entirely and somehow became shunted into the bowels of the building, left to whimper down winding gray subterranean corridors lit by enmeshed bulbs (did this really happen or was it a dream I had?) until I found myself rushing headlong towards a red door marked EMERGENCY ONLY ALARM WILL SOUND and I don’t even hesitate, fuck it, I bang right through at full speed to emerge into the massive loading bay where the sudden commencement of various klaxons and alarm bells have frozen the workmen where they stand in a schoolchild’s diorama of blue-collar industry, one man motionless with a cigarette raised halfway to his mouth, and I zigzag through them and out the freight entrance onto a street still congested with commuters going where I’ve just fled and I can’t decide if I should kiss the ground or dance a little jig or whoop in celebration so I try to do all three at once and the crowd shrinks back as a crowd does only in the presence of insanity.

I went back to my shitty unheated apartment to starve, and there was never any doubt, then or now, that I made the right choice, because like the original rebel said, its better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.  (And look how well things turned out for him!)

According to the New York Times, a shit ton of us may be fucked.  Long story short, the economy is barely growing and isn’t adding jobs fast enough to reabsorb all us unemployed losers into the workforce.   And by the time things finally get moving again, our skills will be too outdated and rusty for the modern workplace!  Which I totally disagree with – I may not have worked in almost four years, but I can still masturbate in a bathroom stall as silently as I ever could.

What are some possible solutions being floated around Washington?  Cutting unemployment, for one.  Makes sense – if we’re not going to contribute to the bottom line, might as well cut us off entirely and usher us off to early deaths.  Step two of this plan calls for sending a horse-drawn cart around the country so that as we unemployed expire one by one over the coming months, our gainfully employed betters can drag our corpses out to the curb when the cart comes by and throw them in the back.

After reading the above article, I went ahead and prepared for homelessness.  The pic above is my new entertainment center –  I found a really good steam vent just behind the sewage treatment center at the edge of town.  Come see me next week, I’ve got some oranges-and-cabbage moonshine fermenting in a garbage can and it should be ready by then.  We’ll get rip-roaring drunk and then stagger downtown at rush hour to “ask” squares for change.  Make sure you bring ID, the moonshine sometimes induces blindness and if you stagger into traffic, the paramedics may need to contact your next of kin to make sure they’ll pay for defibrillation.

Now that we’re all back on unemployment, thanks to yesterday’s extension, the challenge now is staying on unemployment.  This is harder than you might think, as the rules state that you have to apply to at least two jobs a week, and if, like me, you’re indiscriminately shotgunning your resume out there, odds are that eventually someone will offer you a job.

This, obviously, is not acceptable.  Now people might say, “but you only make $250 a week on unemployment; at a shitty office job, you could make three or four times that!  It doesn’t make financial sense to not take a job!”

Well, let’s go to the numbers.  Let’s say I make $1000 a week as some kind of midlevel office lackey.  Divide that by a 40 hour workweek, and I’m pulling in around $25 an hour.  Not horrible, I suppose.  BUT.  On unemployment I’m pulling in $250 a week, for a zero hour workweek.  Do the math and I’m averaging infinity dollars per hour.  My calculator literally crashed when I tried to work it out.  I had to take out the battery and then reinsert it.

So why would I take a huge decline in quality of life AND a massive (nigh infinite) pay cut just to re-enter the workaday world?  It just doesn’t make good financial sense … and good financial sense is what this blog is all about.

But how do you avoid the dreaded job offer when the rules clearly state (and you should never break rules – it’s against the rules!) that you have to apply to two jobs a week?  Well, I’m going to go into that in the next blog post.  Because frankly, this topic is far to important to try and cover in a single blog post.  Also, the shitty Photoshop job above really exhausted my last reserves of energy and I need a beer.

What’s that low buzzing sound falling in pitch, sort of like a huge machine powering down?  Oh right, it must be ten million job searches being abruptly terminated.

Paid vacation until December!  See you at the bar!

With Congress about to extend the unemployment extensions (don’t listen to the drama queens bewailing what are basically minor procedural hurdles; it’s a done deal), I bet a lot of you poor working people would love to get on this 99-week gravy train.  I mean, a two year paid vacation?!  You’d have to be a goddamn fool not to.

Problem is, in order to get unemployment, you can’t quit – you have to be fired.  And it can’t technically be your fault.  It has to plausibly appear that it was due to circumstances out of your control.  So what’s a poor demoralized worker bee to do?  A few suggestions:

• If your company is struggling, sometimes you can simply ask to be laid off.  Your stupid boss may very well be under pressure to cut budget, and having your salary off the books could make the difference between him getting a promotion and having to blow a VP as he pinches a loaf in the executive bathroom.
• Don’t underestimate how stupid your “superiors” are.  I used to swagger around the office exuding “I don’t give a fuck” vibes, waiting to be axed.  This never ever worked; I eventually realized that my moronic bosses saw my indifference as confidence, and assumed that I had a reason for not being afraid of the axe.  For them, “not afraid of being fired” = “must be no reason to fire him.”  When I switched gears and started slinking around, fearful and perspiring, I immediately began hearing rumors that I was about to be fired, and I soon was.  For them, “scared of being fired” = “must be some reason to fire him.”  You’ll have to sell it.
• Sometimes, the simplest approach is the most effective.  I know a woman who drove a delivery truck, and was caught, on the clock, drinking a fifth of whiskey in the driver’s seat.  She was fired and her ex-boss tried to block her unemployment.  In the court hearing, the woman pointed out that her boss had never told her explicitly that drinking in the company truck wasn’t allowed.  The boss protested but the judge had to rule in favor of the woman; getting fired for something you weren’t explicitly forbidden to do means it wasn’t, legally, your fault.  This means you could literally – LITERALLY – drop your pants and take a shit on the conference table during a meeting and still qualify for unemployment, as long as there’s no “NO SHITTING ON CONFERENCE TABLES DURING MEETINGS” section in the employee handbook.

At some point during my 104-weeks-and-counting stint on unemployment (still waiting on that Tier 5 unemployment extension!), I had a revelation.  All these politicians are bitching about how I should get a job, get off unemployment, and help our economy recover.  Man an oar on the slaveship “America”! But at some point I realized that the economy would be far better served if I received unemployment for the rest of my life.

You see, all you capitalist free-marketeer cocktards probably think you’ve devised the perfect system, in which everyone has one choice: work or perish.  And yes, I’ll admit that it looks to a casual observer as if you’ve successfully harnessed the productive capacity of virtually the entire U.S. population (for the benefit, it must be said, of a tiny uberwealthy elite).

HOWEVER.  Adam Smith never predicted the phenomenon known as “Franklin Schneider.”  You see, when I’m broke, I will, yes, get a job.  This is not difficult at all; I’ve got a versatile college degree, I’m a well-spoken ambiguously ethnic tallish fellow with glasses, I clean up real good, and I know just what to say to the HR cretins who do the interviewing.  At least 90% of the job interviews I’ve had resulted in an offer.

But after a few weeks in office limbo, I start to get dissatisfied, and I start to spread that dissatisfaction (all it takes is a little truthtelling: “If our CEO is a semiautistic moron who can’t figure out how to use spellcheck, what chance does this company really have?”), and before you know it, everyone else in the office is going home early, muttering in meetings, demanding raises, and coming in at 11AM with hangovers and silently puking into wastebaskets at their desks.  All-out mutiny!  I’ve horribly disrupted every single place I’ve ever worked, and though they eventually fired me, the damage I did to their office culture before then was considerable and often permanent.   I once worked at a start-up where my morale-corroding antics were, in part, responsible for wasting $50 million in venture capital!  Had that company continued puttering along all the way to IPO, it would’ve generated hundreds of millions of dollars more.  Think about the taxes the government would’ve reaped on all that wealth – it dwarfs my $300-a-week unemployment check by a factor of what, a thousand?  A hundred thousand?  In the big picture, paying me to not work is a far better deal than forcing me to become a free radical/chaos agent in the Land of Mediocrity.

If you want the economy to recover, pay me to not work.  Hey Paul Krugman, write a white paper about this and get it to Obama’s desk, asap!

In other news, Congressional fucktards are still dragging their feet on extending unemployment.