Back in a Nice Shade of Green…Maybe Chartreuse

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Here comes another post that may confuse or enlighten you…or both. Hopefully both. That sounds like more fun.

The Outcasting office had to close for a while due to a series of unfortunate events.

We were going to summarize these events in “listicle” form, a tactic our intern Maura champions because “it breaks up long copy in snackable chunks and is perfect for drive-by skimmers.”

Which, of course, is one of the most offensive suggestions we’ve ever encountered. It implies a lack of interest and overall vapidity among our 1.5 million subscribers worldwide—plus Canada—and fuels the growing human condition known as “I only read social media posts that include a dog GIF or a picture of an attractive person.”

Fueling dog GIFs and vapidity is just not our thing. Plus Maura lives in the city of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, one of the most corrupt municipalities in America. Say, shouldn’t she be like heading back to school or something? Did anyone ever check her credentials? Oh well.

The End Begins

Anyway, our night cleaning crew initiated the travesties that led to our temporary-ish closure. The office had 96 table lamps. On Tuesday, April 5th, 2022, the cleaning service went to town and dusted everything—including the lamps. Then Wednesday morning our Comptroller—Davey—came in and had a mental breakdown because “the cleaning service moved the rotary switch on 34 of our lamps to the left side of the lamp.”

Granted, we knew Davey had a huge southpaw bias. Nonetheless we explained, “Dude, they just spun some of the lamps around while cleaning them, they can be spun back so the switch is on the right, etc., it’s no big deal.”

Which calmed Davey down, until he discovered the cleaning people also replaced 19 burned out lamp bulbs with Cool White bulbs—which is admittedly a rough transition from the preexisting Soft White bulbs—and “hung the toilet paper in an inappropriate, bottom-tug fashion,” at which point he called an Uber and never came back.

Admittedly, we also prefer our toilet paper hung in the more subtle, easily accessible, overhand fashion. But the point is, we can’t run our business without a Comptroller, nor can we run a business without the following key roles filled with bright and shiny human beings or key projects moving forward without a lot of rigmarole.

And yes, we gave in. Enjoy the drive-by skimming (sigh).

CFO Faked His Own Death

At 7pm on Tuesday, April 26th, 2022, our CFO Zeus had a Zoom meeting with a bunch of Burgamese industrialists/potential investors we didn’t want to really know too much about. The problem is, Zeus is super bro’d out despite being 55 and a CFO, thus he thought it would be funny to start the meeting as a corpse in his chair — as if he’d died of cholesterol or cocaine or too much fake tan spray or some such thing.

He really sold it, makeup, spittle, the whole shebang. Which unfortunately caused a great deal of panic over there in Bergamo to the point that one industrialist jumped up to call Italian 911 or something, tripped on his chair, and gashed his head open.

The aftermath included both a key loss of potential investment and Zeus’ extradition to Italy. Oh, and a review on an Italian, business-y version of Yelp that described working with us as “generating great discomfort.”

Then things really started to deteriorate.

Global Sales Director Joined an Anarchist Hippie Jam Band Cult…

…in Poughkeepsie, NY, which is an actual place. And explained Lindsey’s intense interest in the “adaptogenic mushroom” craze to “support overall wellness, including brain function, immunity, emotional calm, and well-being.” Which turned out to be code for “one day psilocybin will be legalized and I’m going to lose my mind.” We haven’t seen Lindsey since May 5th, 2022.

Receptionist Got Arrested (Again)…

..for the same fake passport business he got busted for in 1999. So on July 8, 2022, we replaced Mike with an all-knowing chatbot/giant iPad we found on Alibaba—for a pretty penny, we might add, but it only greets customers (in person, or one the phone) with, “Out of Office Reply: Hi, I’m not available to take your call for several quarters. Please fill out this contact form so a salesperson can call you.” At which point everyone hangs up and/or runs away.

Ted Sued Us…

…after we made him wear the custom banana costume that we hired that girl on Fivvr to make for the “Sheathes Of Plenty” product launch at Grocery Outlet Bargain Market. Ted was VP of Customer Success, and doubled as our promo guy at trade shows and stuff, despite the fact there is no mention of promo work in his job description (thus the lawsuit.) This one was okay, Ted was always kind of a whiner, so no one was sad to see him go…when was that? October something, 2022.

Cliff Bar Sued Us…

..because on September 1st, 2022, we started a Snack Log business, the idea being sports bars—when you think about it— are merely whey protein, brown rice syrup, and peanut butter, hydraulically-pressed into log-shaped globs. Granted we simply copied the Cliff Bar recipe and added banana flavor to be just different enough. But Cliff Bar Inc. didn’t think it was different enough despite the fact we also (a.) were in the completely different (and new) “Snack Log” category, and (b.) changed the name at their behest from “Glyph Bar” to “Sheathes Of Plenty” (despite focus group concerns). So they sued us, and their lawyers are super scary and seemingly not at all into hiking or the great outdoors but rather only seem to care about money and intellectual property to the degree that we had to shut down our Snack Log factory.

The Thing About That

So there you have it…amongst rumors, speculation, allegations, and wild accusations—none of which we can tell the difference between—comes more projects and thus the opening of our new office headquarters (the appliances are really shiny) at an abandoned Kohls in Burbank. Which really isn’t secretly our basement. There’s spiders down there.

Thanks for reading OUTCASTING! Tell someone smart to subscribe for free to receive new posts and only occassional requests for Patek Philippe watches.

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Engaging irreverence, occasional coherence, often pointed, mixed with enough indelicate humor as to create a want, a craving for more.