In Which Brenda Recognizes That She is Nothing but a Clothed Primate Writing “Channel Sales Incentives” Over and Over in a Never-Ending Battle for Search Rankings

See, Marv, part of me just doesn’t care about channel sales incentives anymore. Why? Because I know a guy who slept inside a dead moose for three days, that’s why. That’s brutal. Spending three days forging a comprehensive deep-linking strategy so that our name appears one step higher on an ethereal list of small business incentive programs is not brutal. It’s not even brutal enough to be a nightmare. It’s a dreamless void, Marv. Purgatory—without the mythical nuance. Besting ChannelWorks in a never-ending, all-encompassing, sunrise-to-sunset search engine optimization prizefight is a drunken vacuum of emotion, is what it is—a dreamless sleep worth less than the fever hallucination I had of Michigan J. Frog herding mattresses through a TSA checkpoint.

Speaking of purgatory, did you know that Phil From Accounting ducks into the bathroom at exactly 10:15 every morning to snack on hazelnut coffee creamers? And you wonder where they go. He also forgets to throw away his K-cups and thinks I don’t notice when he squishes my salad into the corner of the fridge to make room for his cheeseburger club. My brother once pulled a dude from a flaming Humvee. A fucking flaming Humvee! And I’m getting upset about misplaced Cobb salads.

What’s gotten into me? I’ll tell you what’s gotten into me. Last night, as I lay in bed, my eyes flickering off into the first waves of REM sleep, I began to descend upon the most luscious and splendid state of feeling and caring about stuff. I was one with sleep, the gulf of consciousness merged into a single, heavenly hodgepodge of knowing, not knowing, and not caring why. I was a little atom named Tipper, and I was as eternal as the irrelevance of time. And then a tiny ragbag of words—at first only brief inklings of secured credit loans and direct mail marketing strategies—snowballed into an avalanche of insurmountable loyalty programs, Google analytics, Blimpie franchises and the phrase—that godless, eternal phrase—“channel sales incentives,” spinning like a ball of yarn that extends into the horizon, rearranging the order but always and eternally ravaging my skull with the weight of a dying poet, growing larger as it consumes all my imagination and all my childhood illusions of possibility and hope.

Channel sales incentives. That shit blows, Marv. It blows.

I am an animal. You, Marv, are an animal. We should eat and hunt and fuck and pick lice from our daughters’ scalps, not send office-wide emails warning all would-be sandwich thieves to be chaste with our lust for Nancy’s Chipotle Turkey Sunrise. We should revel in our instinctual urge to bludgeon would-be sandwich thieves, asserting our office-land dominance through brute force and bona fide sway, not our ability to arrange symbols on a series of bright lights.

I mean, don’t you realize this, Marv? Don’t you feel this? Would it not be brutal and beastly and just plain real if I just flattened Phil with a breezy haymaker to the temple the next time he squishes my Cobb salad into Dana’s BLT? Not only would it be funny, it’d be totally undeserved, which is why it’d be funny! Right? I mean, don’t you fantasize about these things, Marv? Wouldn’t you love to see Phil pinned against the shared refrigerator, a rotund colleague daintily slapping him with his own hand, laughing and crying and yelling but everyone feeling—everyone feeling something?

No? Well, wouldn’t you love it if we looped the sound of a lion mauling an antelope and—no wait—a lion mauling an antelope, playing on loop throughout the office, just to remind us, just to remind us that—oh, this is great—that there are places in the world where we could be savagely torn to shreds and consumed—alive? Isn’t that hilarious? Isn’t that real?

Where are you going? Hold on, Marv.

You know what this office needs? A pit of eternal despair. Yeah. Every time someone microwaves something with garlic in it, they should be seized and thrown into a black abyss of pain and darkness and infinite sorrow—until the lunch cart arrives. But even then they must have tuna, because nobody likes Pilar’s tuna. There will be drums and face paint, too.

Why do we need this? Because we’ve lost touch, Marv. We’ve lost touch. Haven’t you had enough of Phil’s blatant disregard for coffee creamer protocol? Aren’t you tired of pretend time? Can’t you envision a Channel Solutions where office politics are replaced by office savagery?

Here, breathe this. It’s Yopo—a hallucinogenic plant used in rituals by the Amazon Yanomami. Never mind how I found it. It’s going up your nose. Ready? You are about to become one with the Hekura spirits of Channel Solutions’ human resources department. Be still, Marv! Observe how Ursula’s “Boys are Stupid” mug becomes the office spirit of Insufferable Feminism, how Phil’s cheeseburger platter elicits the ravenous bark of Mixcoatl, Aztec god of the hunt. Become one with the SEO, the Googlian hieroglyphs, the shamans of silicon. Watch as keywords deep-link into an infinite chain of animistic immortality. Smell the K-cups, rife with ancient brews of peyote and frankincense, Phil’s rambling stemmed by trephination, Dana’s BLT pulled from the heart of victims in a lunar sacrifice of refrigerator cleaning. And experience all that is being through our holy Rosetta Stone: PageRank. Breathe it. Live it. You are alive, Marv. We are alive.