Beatings will commence until morale improves

Every other Thursday is donut day in the pit of despair - my office where I change the words of letter to the editor writers and then deny anything was changed, instead blaming the new words on misfiring alzheimer's medicine; the seniors fall for it every time. Donuts are like prison currency at the Pit. If you're lucky enough to snag that butter cream-filled ass widener, you could write your own ticket. Don't have a buck for the Power Ball collection? No worries, trade it for the entry fee. Need someone to clean the monitor? Here's that donut you were eyeing, chump. Some dude just walked into your favorite bathroom stall? Give up the cream-filled for that prime commode. That's how it works at our Pit.

The donuts are really a bribe to get us inmates to turn our time cards in before noon. It starts on Wednesdays with the time card reminder e-mail: "Hello inmates, tomorrow is Thursday, so unwedge your ass cheeks from your chair and pick up an official time card (it's only official because it says Time Card in bold letters. If I wrote my times down on the back of a strip club receipt I'm sure the department's head boob would still accept it). Fill it out with the correct times you worked (key word is correct, however, it is a subjective term) and hand it back to me by noon or you will be sent through the insert machine. And if it comes to that, I don't know what will be inserted or where. Got it? Good. Maybe you'll get donuts you slack-ass, two-bit, keyboard humping journalists."

The Time Card Warden then wanders in at 8 a.m. Thursday lugging plain white boxes into the newsroom. Every time card day I worry about her safety. Parading food through our end of the office, especially in front of the reporter inmates, is a good way to lose your arms. And knowing the reporters, they're liable to rip her arms out and beat her into a pulp while hijacking the donuts and barracading themselves in the conference room. "Don't know the password? Then F-off, copy editor schmuck. Your headlines suck, by the way, you bastard!" And while we're laying seige to the conference room, the Time Card Warden is asking if any of the reporters turned in their cards before holing up with the goodies.

She makes it down to the copy editor quadrant and we pop our heads above our monitors like malnourished prairie dogs (if you saw the physiques on these inmates, though, malnourished wouldn't come to mind) before pouncing on the box. We're vultures on road kill, lions on weak gazelles, Ethiopians on a box of raisins. The reporters try to wedge into our steel curtain perimeter, but we repell them with little effort (talk about malnourished; on what the head boobs pay these inmates it's a wonder they don't camp out behind Einstein Bagels after closing hoping to score some stale jalapeno bagel leftovers) because they have no weight to bore through our line.

Food makes us inmates happy. However, I'm the only inmate not happy. Why? I've vowed to be good. After eating anything that resembled food on the cruise - including the towel crab our room steward left one night - I decided to curb chow that does more for the ass than the brain.

So there's a box of donuts in my line of vision. Every time I look at the head boob, there's the box sitting just over the boob's head smiling, winking, beckoning. I walk by and I hear laughing, and it's not from the fellow inmates - no - it's the apple fritter. "Will power," it says, "Ha! Your gut is mine. Your ass will be as gooey as my gaping maw. Muwahahahaha!"

I sift through the boxes searching for that one donut that will fool my body into thinking its a protein bar designed to shave off love handles.

"Are crullers healthy?" I ask a head boob.

"Yeah, you're better off eating that than those vegetables you pile on with dinner."

"You don't say." As convincing and authoritative as he sounds, I don't believe him and decide even the crullers, despite looking about as fattening as a bowl whipped cream, will pad my butt like any of the other options. So I opt for sniffing the air deeply. I pull out the sweetness with my monster nostrils and chew on imaginary maple bars.

I sulk to my pod, donutless, the mocking tones of the jelly fills haunting every thought.

"Did you get your donut?" The Time Card Warden asks me later. I tell her no. "Too bad. I still need your time card, you little piss ant word blower."

I drink an imaginary fifth of Jack Daniels, but I'm still sober, at the Pit, and now expecting a flogging for getting my time card in at 12:04 p.m., well late by the Time Card Warden's watch. My ass will hurt and I didn't even get a donut.