I have a calendar pinned up in front of me on my cubicle wall, though it’s from my company, so instead of pictures of say…bikini models or puppy dogs or whatever else usually adorns pin-up calendars, I look at pictures of fake families smiling about how awesome their mortgage rates are and how they can afford that kitchen renovation with that extra breakfast nook or whatever the fuck that old people with nothing left to live for anymore want in the twilight of their slow and meaningless lives.

For whatever reason – either the actual calender itself is too heavy or the penetrable cushiony section of the cubicle wall is too thin for a tack to dig in and find enough leverage or whatever – but a single push-pin tack is not sufficient to hold the calendar up by itself. You need to use two tacks to keep it up, you need to poke two tacks into the same hole because one is not enough. But for some reason I don’t see anyone else having this problem (I’ve stayed behind late before and went around to people’s desks to check) so it’s either something with my calendar, like maybe the hole has eroded a bit, or my cubicle wall is thinner than others, or if I’m just fucking retarded and I have some fundamental lack of understanding about how to poke a pin into a wall properly.

It’s weird too, because I’ll use just one single tack sometimes, and it’ll hold. And then it sits there, right in front of my face the entire day, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, like a half hour later it’ll just fall down on its own. Completely silent office, I haven’t even moved out of my chair in that half hour, no one’s walking by, no discernible change in air pressure and whatnot…eventually, the tack just can’t hold out, and it suddenly decides to go “Ah, you know what? Fuck it.” and it pulls itself out of the wall. Sometimes it’ll be half an hour, sometimes it’ll be two hours, sometimes it’ll be like two days. So I guess if I wanted to constantly repin this fucking thing up over and over again at completely infrequent, random intervals, then I could stick with one pin. But I can’t handle that amount of mental and emotional pressure, so I go with two.

Anyway…regardless, the situation with MY calendar is that I need to use two tacks. (Pins? Tacks? It’s the standard type you poke through posters to keep up on walls, with the plastic bit on top that comes in all sorts of colourful flavours. I’m just going to use them interchangeably here, follow if you can.) But there’s only space for one tack, I guess, because the calendar manufacturers assume that you’re not a fucking idiot and that a single tack is sufficient to hold up a damn calendar and thus they only manufactured one single pin hole. So I have to come at it from an angle; I push one pin in a bit at one angle, and I poke the other pin through the tiny window to the cubicle wall that’s still exposed. This ultimately solves the problem, but it creates another issue entirely – neither pin is really that deep into the cubicle wall. Let’s say there’s like a tack factor of 1.0 that you need to meet before all the external forces acting on the closed system with this calendar balance out and it stays up. For some reason one pin on my wall only goes up to 0.9, so a single one isn’t enough. If I use two it’s okay, but neither one is at full strength – it’s like each one is at 0.5, so together they total 1.0 and I’m okay. But since both individually have less strength than a normal, single pin pushed in normally, the whole system is much more fragile – it’s almost exactly at 1.0, so like a 1.000,000 – throw in some more sig digs there.

Meaning that the calendar stays up forever as long as I don’t touch it, but if as soon as I exert even the tiniest amount of force, it throws off the entire system altogether, and both pins fall out and it’s a horrible mess (…one calender and two pins) and my entire day is ruined.

That very thing happened this morning, while I was reaching over for something else or whatever and I just brushed the thing with my sleeve, bringing the whole goddamn thing down, making all sorts of noise and causing people to look over, wondering to themselves “What is this fucking douchebag doing that’s so noisy?” Another problem with the two tack approach is that if the pins fall out, you have double the amount of tacks to look for. So I found one of them, but I couldn’t find the other one, even after looking for what seemed to be like an hour (but in reality was probably closer to like ten seconds). So I concluded that it’d be impossible to find ever again, and I just gave up the search and went with the single pin approach, figuring I’d just deal with it again when the time came. And you know, as any other rational human being would do when they lose track of sharp metal objects around them, I ignored it and put it out of my mind. How’s that old Latin phrase go again? “Out of sight, out of mind?” That’s Latin, right?

Life carries on. Fast forward five minutes later, when I take a swig from my coffee mug. And I discover where the missing tack fell.

…it wasn’t in my coffee, in case you were wondering. That would be a pretty ridiculous story. But it turned out the pin had ended up just rolling behind my mug, and when I picked up my mug, lo and behold, the missing pin was found.

And that is the anatomy of a Friday morning.

Now here is Craig Robinson in a commercial for The Foot Fist Way.

You want your orange belt?