My paean to our office manager caused a brief stir in the cube farm when it was posted. Over a week later, I’m still hearing some people mention it here and there. One of the engineers suggested that I take it a step further and solidify my position as the chief office suck-up by putting her image on t-shirts and other items.

I thought it was certainly amusing, but the source image of her that I had to work with was very small, pilfered out of Apple Directory. It didn’t scale well to t-shirt size, as one might imagine, so I abandoned the idea, regardless of its potential to generate mirth.

Since then, though, two other people have asked me about it, indicating there might be an untapped, if small, market in devotional fetish objects featuring our beloved office manager. Whether people will buy such products out of respect, fear, or adoration matters not; my greed and egotism ensures that I am happy to provide them. Here, then, is an item freshly minted in my cubicle-cum-atelier: The Office Manager Mug. No denizen of our labyrinth should be without one. Besides the powerful and moving iconography presented on its obverse, the other side lists five of the most important Commandments governing life here in our office. Learn them. Live them.

If that doesn’t sell you on it, I would like to point out that this item has many miraculous qualities, such as the innate ability to constrain potable liquids to an extremely handy cyndrilical shape, easily transported wherever your creative shirking takes you; it can also be used as an analog desktop accessory to store writing implements, paper clips, and other such detritus. This mug, of a reasonably heavy construction, can also be used as an impromptu bludgeon, such as is sometimes necessary to stir one’s colleagues into action through either its direct or threatened use. Drinking from it will cure insomnia, rickets, and the gout, and is said by some to transmute ordinary coffee into the very ambrosia of the gods.