I used to have a real job in a real office. How? I'm not sure either. Mostly, I was able to stick around because my boss was too busy being obsessed with QVC to notice that no one really knew what my duties were. She was a great lady, but her Achilles Heel was that QVC. Familiar story, right ladies? Anyhow, she had a little TV in her office and she'd be ordering Quacker Factory sweaters and headbands and plastic snowflakes and oversized kitten figurines all day and they'd show up at the office -- towering stacks of weird shit in boxes. She loved that Jeanne Jeanne! Quack, quack, quack! There was another woman in our office, at the same executive level, who there also had the money to buy and the clout to receive god knows how much QVC merchandise at her office every day. And they were constantly locked in some kind of QVC arms race. They'd make excuses to go into each others' office to spy. "Do you have the latest such and such figures?" or "Looks like the stakeholders are together on that project?" would be the fake questions, providing cover while one eye quickly scanned the room, cataloging QVC merchandise or memorizing the shipping numbers on the boxes. I'm going to guess that in the time I was there, $250K was spent on QVC between them. One thing they did not buy, however, was:
First off: that's why swords should not be $44. Second: knowing the QVC audience like I do, I wonder how many ladies in puffy paint frosty the snowman sweaters do they think want to buy a cheap practice katana. Self-maiming aside, this seems like some misguided marketing. But it sure did get me thinking about how the magic of YouTube has made QVC bloopers available to us all, at our whim, and so I share with you, if you haven't already seen it, the "very safe to operate" horizontal ladder:
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