Originally published by drfaustroll under Literary Terrorism, Pataphysics, Phlakes, Workplace Lunacy February 11, 2009

I often receive questions from first time patients who are unfamiliar with the role of pataphysicians in the 21st century. This is understandable because so many people in our nation of miserable fucks (NOMF™) have either been born without imaginations or trained to suppress their imaginations for the sake of finding jobs or mates or waiting in line to obtain a cavity search before boarding an over-crowded plane whose air circulation system is contaminated with hundreds of potentially lethal hemorrhagic viruses.

Many of these patients suffer from debilitating diseases of the imagination that render them susceptible to the most outrageous horse exhaust and use it as the basis for irrational decision-making which often results in a syllogistic reality wherein someone who attempts suicide is revived at great public expense to stand trial, be convicted, and terminated under a three-strikes statute that only benefits the advertisers of the broadcast execution.

Others succumb to profit-taking imaginary diseases contracted by exposure to television advertising, conservative talk radio bloviators, and sanctimonious liberals who are so lame that even their embryos often spontaneously abort in protest. I have heard from victims of restless leg syndrome who don’t realize that shaking your penis at a men’s room urinal is not a disorder, unless, of course, you happen to be a woman, in which case your penis is not there, but even that isn’t anything to get worried about. There are two other legs to the pataphysical black stool of life.

What all these people have in common, of course, is their having achieved a level of ineptitude and self-doubt that places them beyond salvation, which is what makes my job so satisfying. Any minor success I have in treating a continent of mundane binary boobs provides a rush not unlike irrigating my sinuses with a 40 ounce bottle of Ballantine’s followed with a pint of Everclear.

Today I received this e-mail from a first-time patient in Culpepper, Virginia.

Dear Dr. Faustroll,

I was referred to you by Timmy McVeigh, a cousin of one of my co-workers currently deployed to Saudi Arabia. He said you would recognize his name in a minute, something to do with a Flag Day celebration you wrote about.

I work for a humongous multinational corporation whose name I can’t remember. I think I’ve been with them for several years, but I can’t be certain because I telecommute, and I’ve never seen any of the people I work with because my Internet connection is so slow that I can’t video conference. Even worse, the PRAM battery in my computer went dead a couple of years ago, and the internal clock resets to January 1, 1960, every time I have to reboot, which is several years before I was born.

Many of the people I work with are in Asia and the Middle East, and I have no problem using e-mail and teleconferencing over SharePoint to meet with them at odd hours, but I am having a difficult time figuring out when to contact my coworkers in Antarica, Australia, and Tiera del Fuego, where they are either half a year ahead or behind of local time, because it is summer there, although it is still winter here.

I have not received a cost of living increase for quite some time, and I suspect I have missed several deadlines because of my confusion over mileposts in the project plan. I can never be sure which spring I should be aiming for or which fall to expect feedback from my reviewers. Can you help?

Sincerely,
Sir William Pilgrim, esq.

I told Billy I would ask my helpful readers for advice on how they coordinate with coworkers who live elsewhere in the space time continuum. Please join in the discussion so that Billy will finally get a focal increase for all his hard work.