The Top 6 Things in my Field of Vision (office edition)

The average working stiff spends between 35 to 40 hours a week at work. Some people aren’t “lucky” enough to be able to work so many hours, and some fools decide they want to work even more than that. What I’m getting at here, is that folks spend a whole lotta time at work.

Now that can be a good and a bad thing. On the good side, you’ve gotta pay your bills, and working a lot will help you to do just that. On the other hand, it can be kind of boring to go to the same place and do the same thing every day. Especially if you’ve got one a them desk jobs.

I have one of those desk jobs, and the complete lack of scenery and variety doesn’t matter much to me in the long run, but it does get a little bit boring staring at the same old cubicle walls day in and day out. So I like to have things that entertain me at my desk. Now come with me, as we look at my six favourite things that I can see when sitting in front of my computer at work.

These aren’t in any particular order, other than maybe the order that the files copied onto my desktop when I moved the images off of my phone.

~ A Minion from Despicable Me 2 ~

You can tell that it’s from the sequel because it has two eyes. At least I think that’s how it works. I loved Despicable Me, but never actually bothered to go see the second one.

I think these guys are pretty cute, but then I like Ubisoft’s Rabbids too so maybe I’m just an idiot. I have no idea where this little fella came from. A movie give-away? Burger King? We may never know. I was at my parents’ house, and my mom offered it to me because nobody in my family wanted it. I took it gladly, knowing that my desk could use more random clutter.

A little-known fact is that if you shake this guy, he makes a weird noise. It’s not really similar to their voices in the movies, but it’s good for annoying people. Before I picked him up I thought he was squishy and the the noise came from squeezing him. But that is not the case; he is made of hard plastic and I am a total moron.

~ A Pile of Change ~

This is a pile of change that I’ve accrued over the last year and a half, mostly from buying coffees in the morning before work. It’s not really a big pile of change, but it used to be bigger. Very recently I used a bunch of it for a parking meter when my wife came downtown to meet me for lunch. It’s not like I’m actually going to out an buy anything with a pocket full of nickels.

You can plainly see that in the mess, there hide a couple quarters, and the goal is to collect enough quarters to buy yet another coffee, but that’s a long way off. I don’t often use cash, so the pile doesn’t grow very fast. Also it never sees loonies or toonies because generally it’s me breaking those bigger coins for these small, useless ones.

If you’re wondering where the pennies are, they’re being melted down or something. No point having a bunch of pennies lying about when the government is working on phasing them out completely.

Sometimes people ask if I have any change, to which I motion towards this pile and then they grumble and leave. Because our snack and drink machines only accept loonies, you see. Also there’s a change machine right by the vending machines, but it only changes loonies into silver. Wacky!

~ A Stress Ball ~

There isn’t a whole lot to say about this one. It’s a stress ball what looks like a baseball. I don’t know where it came from; it was already at the desk when I moved in. I don’t use the stress ball when I’m stressed, I pretty much just look at it and enjoy that it is something that stands out.

Sometimes people will walk by my desk and try to strike up a conversation about baseball, having seen this stress ball and assuming that since it exists on my desk that I’m into baseball. They usually end up feeling pretty embarassed when I tell that that the ball is only on my desk because it’s been around longer than me, and that I don’t know a damn thing about baseball.

~ A Monkey Sticker ~

I don’t remember where this sticker came from, but it’s pretty cute and I like it. I feel kind of bad for not having stuck it to something more permanent. That check sheet isn’t going to be around much longer, and I worry that the monkey sticker is not the restickable type.

It’s a pretty small sticker, and that makes the details hard to make out from the distance I usually look at it from. It’s fairly easy to tell from that humongous image that the monkey is holding a banana, but when I look at it from so far away, it looks to me like he’s holding a glass of iced tea. Honestly, I like iced tea monkey better. Bananas are just so cliché.

~ This Bunch of Elastic Bands ~

I’m able to keep my tendency to be a packrat fairly under control at work, but this is where I let it all out. My band income is far greater than my band expenditure, so they tend to pile up very quickly, and this is the pile after a purge. I’ll give you a moment to digest that thought.

I don’t have any particular attachment to the bands, but why should I throw them out when they’re still good? When they snap or are so old that they’ve lost their elasticity, I’ll pitch ’em, but I don’t see the point in throwing out bands that work just fine. It entertains me when people comment on the pile, though I haven’t really come up with a good retort to such comments.

It should be noted that right after I took that picture, I wrapped all of the pictured elastics into a ball. It wasn’t a week later that the pile looked the same (maybe even biger) as it does in the picture. Only now it’s a pile with a ball underneath it.

~ The Who Coffee Mug ~

Hey! What a sweet coffee mug you have there, Ryan! Yeah, I know.

The older fellas tend to comment on this coffee mug every time they see it, apparently having forgotten that they asked me if I’m a fan of The Who the last time they saw it. And then they think I’m cool because I like old music. Hooray.

My wife bought this for me, but I can’t remember for the life of me why. Doesn’t really matter. It’s a great gift, especially since I’m a huge fan of novelty coffee mugs. Seriously, if I had the money to spare and a bigger cupboard, I’d probably have a pretty extensive collection of coffee mugs.

Also there’s this coaster with an invisible bum freezing to death on a park bench. It’s kinda neat, and it was in my cubicle when I moved in.

~ Honorable Mention: Spider-Pig ~

I don’t really have anything to say about this one. It’s not actually Spider-Pig. If you’ll recall, he’s actually Amazing Spider-Fan Piggy.

Yeah, I’m pretty much out of steam for this one already. What a terrible article idea (but that’s the point).

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