A collection full of office disasters, ideal for readers who need a refresher course on the consequences of impropriety.
A debut collection offers bawdy true stories of workplace misbehavior.
Lawler draws from a 30-year career in corporate employee relations to share these fact-based vignettes chronicling red-faced embarrassments at work. He believes most “Americans are bound together by three common experiences: working, sex, and intermittently bad judgment.” The 32 tales he shares—some no longer than a page in length—reinforce this opinion and explore themes of the interpersonally inappropriate, the messy office affairs, and the self-sabotaged careers at the “intersection of Bad Choice Boulevard and Sex Drive.” The stories’ titles alone allude to what’s in store for readers (“Nipple Clamps in the Mailroom”; “You Gonna Eat That?”), and much of the subject matter ranges from the innocent office faux pas to the full humiliation of exposed employee fraternization. In the opening tale, a disgruntled, passive-aggressive, 50-something senior buyer is caught on camera licking the car doors of her office nemesis. The next story focuses on a long-standing mailroom supervisor’s alarm at the discovery of a box of sexual accessories sent to the office by a clueless employee. Elsewhere, calling the boss’s boss a dildo has repercussions for a human resources expert, and a wrongful termination lawsuit exposes details of covert polygamy. Lawler’s tenure in human resources for a commercial bakery provided fodder for more scandalous tales. A production worker on the layer cake line faints after relating the intimate details of two co-workers’ public fondling session; a female employee gets an uncomfortable reminder about proper hygiene; and a frisky couple become caught in a walk-in freezer. Sexual innuendos are misinterpreted; calls get recorded; company cellphones harbor compromising photographs; hickeys raise eyebrows; and tempers flare. But overall, the stories amount to good, clean fun even if they are at the expense of employees who sometimes forget they’re at their place of employment. The book’s second half is decidedly a bit racier, with episodes of narcotic misappropriation, porn surfing at work, and trouble with tricky company emails. Of course, the generally provocative nature of the tales as a collection ebbs and flows, with some pieces reading more like dirty jokes than actual events. Still, the entertainment factor is consistent and the laughs should come easily for readers who fancy the awkwardness of workplace weirdness.
A collection full of office disasters, ideal for readers who need a refresher course on the consequences of impropriety.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-7340799-0-6
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Rockhampton Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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