Priceless inquiry overheard in the workplace: do coffee, chocolate, and cocaine all come from the same bean? How appropriate that it was a Central America native in an adjacent cubicle who set the sorely misinformed employee straight.

Being put on hold after dialing a military base building phone number, the soundtrack is a cross between a brass marching band and the orchestral backing of a 1930s Disney cartoon. This differs from the music of choice for private sector phone holds: the same soul-less jazz and lobotomized pop that is favored by airplanes waiting on the tarmac.

To the productivity-minded question “what are you working on?” one of the most underrated answers that satisfyingly conveys the semblance of work being done is “I’m on hold.”

Instead of completing in bulk all of the day’s tasks that require walking, skilled desk jockeys spread these out over the eight hours to promote blood flow, the same way you’re encouraged to periodically get out of your seat on a trans-atlantic flight.

Chunky peanut butter exists so that after you finish a jar of smooth peanut butter you are afforded marginal excitement when purchasing a replacement jar of the other variety, and vice-versa.

Remove from the processing line all of the peanut pieces that would normally have been destined for a jar of chunky peanut butter. Crush them into a smooth paste and add this instead to the jar, such that a purchaser would be perplexed at the discrepancy between the labeling and what was inside. Is the resultant level of peanut butter in the jar higher or lower than the level in a jar of identical dimension filled with smooth peanut butter? In other words, does a jar of one variety require more peanuts than a jar of the other? I’d guess that smooth pb requires more peanuts, but any difference is evidently insignificant enough to allow the same nutrition facts to apply to both varieties. Or, possibly more accurately, the difference in nutrition information isn’t great enough to warrant the investment required to print a second set of labels. That’s a weak argument, though, since most labels are single wrap-around sheets which have already undergone significant redesign to differentiate them from the other variety. Relative to a color scheme change and the replacement of the large script word ‘smooth’ for ‘crunchy’, a new number for milligrams of sodium costs pennies. Of course, none of this shite matters, and I’ve written about it more as a cautionary example of why food should only ever be eaten in places where you’re afforded clear views of the outdoors.