All your knick-knacks with deep personal meaning and your special desk and your crazy exercise habits and your office location in gentrifying urban wasteland? Fine, fine. Until it gets cataloged in a newspaper, which kills its magic and makes you look like a twee, stereotypically unbearable Brooklyn Literary Person.

A treadmill is jammed up against [Lethem's 'talismanic' desk]. He explains the jerry-rigged system: a wireless keyboard and a giant computer-font setting allow him to walk and work simultaneously.

Apparently that's just what it takes to maintain his "youthful nerd-chic vibe belying his age (45)" in his "communal artists' workspace by the Gowanus Canal" while wearing his brown glasses and matching brown corduroys. It all just looks bad in print. Keep your door locked, Lethem. Then treadmill to your heart's content!

Try Super Squats too.

Page Six quotes a new Andrew Kirtzman book about Madoff as saying, hey, the SEC, they just sent young kids to try to regulate the master! And furthermore:

"The youthful SEC staffers were so dazzled to be at Madoff headquarters that they occasionally inquired about job openings at the company," Kirtzman writes.

Well, sure. I mean, the walls curved. Understandable.

What Will Happen?

We got some fascinating insight into the McKinsey corporate bulldozer process, from people who have experienced it firsthand. First, look for your chance to put your thumb on the consulting scale: "The McKinsey team and the management team will usually form a joint working group. That working group will often have several lower level people from the client working on it to gather facts, run analyses, and so forth. Get on that team. At least you'll see what's coming, and at best you might influence it."

But don't expect to feel too important: "The big firms don't bother interviewing individual employees (a la the Bobs in Office Space) - they'll gut entire departments that they deem strategically insignificant or issue edicts like 'cut out 50% of management at this level.' The actual firing is all done by the client firm's management (McK would never get their hands dirty that way)." Another vet confirms: "McKinsey doesn't give a shit, they are not interested in you. They want to get rid of entire divisions, not individuals."

What Can You Do?

Be Nice to the Consultants—It does not pay to be an asshole, unfortunately. One tipster advises you to "cooperate with the consultants (they always report back to senior management)." Another survivor says, " If interviewed by a McKenzie, answer everything question nicely. If you hold back, or are snotty, they fire your ass. Threee of my former collegues tried the stonewall approach and got canned."

Suck Up—Kiss ass, Kiss ass, Kiss ass. "Suck up to your own superiors, and their superiors, and theirs." It's just that simple. A brown nose could give you a minute edge on your fellow layoff-eligibles.

Practice Subtle Backstabbing—You don't want to be seen as a desperate bastard ready to sell out any and all of your colleagues to save your own job (even though you are). You just want to plant the seed. Take it from someone who's been there: " Don't talk shit about individuals, talk shit about DIVISIONS in a passive-aggressive way. Saying things like: 'Those fellows that work in [blank] division are really nice guys, but I've worked here for five years and I still don't know what they do' is a winner." Corporate espionage at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.

Watch Office Space—Several of you sent this tip. Har har. This will only have value if you can bribe a McKinseyite with, like, a hijacked truck full of Office Space DVDs.

Slut It Up—"If all else fails: Find out who the senior partner at McKinsey is, and fuck them." This is experience speaking, people.

Despair—You may find it strangely comforting to accept the fact that—even if you employ all of these countermeasures—you may still get fucked by McKinsey, and not just by the partner you fucked on purpose. "As a consultant for [firm] who's worked on several optimization cases, I wish the Conde Nasters luck. That being said, there's little they can do personally to avoid the axe," says one tipster. He should know! Need more proof? This comes from a former McKinsey consultant: "it's a good idea to release any sense of control you might have over your future. Being nice, being useful, and doing a great job all have nothing do with it - they will be deciding what the company should be doing, not making HR-type decisions about who's good at their job. If you work in a function that they decide doesn't need doing, it doesn't matter how nice/useful/great-at-your-job you are - that function will be eliminated."

Your job: Enjoy it while it lasts.

Edelman memo.

Stalinist propaganda.

Edelman memo.

Military-industrial complex propaganda.

Edelman memo.

Hitler Youth propaganda.

The company, which was once upon a time a fashion retailing darling, is now staring down $170 million in debt. It's fair to say that company chief Marc Ecko has not always been the most frugal spender, for the company or himself:

• In 2007, he paid $750,000 for Barry Bonds' record-breaking home run ball, then branded it with an asterisk. Which was kinda cool, but still.
• He built himself a huge Italian villa-style mansion in Jersey and pimped it out—including, we hear from a pretty good source, buying hand-painted wallpaper and spending $180,000 on custom doorknobs.
• Company headquarters are just ridiculous: "Having slashed its bloated expenses in half, Marc Ecko is desperately trying to lease out chunks of its 280,000-square-foot headquarters on West 23rd Street — which includes a half-size basketball court." Decidedly not recession-era specs:

They're moving into the former offices of Domino, which folded last week. So in exchange for access to a grand cafeteria and the chance of spotting Anna Wintour in the elevators, they get to relocate to the jinxed Offices of Doom. Kind of like if you're on the front lines with the Russian army in WWII in the wintertime, and your buddy gets shot and killed, but hey, at least you can take his shoes.

Our tipster tells us this "Just in case you want to make a joke about how we'll probably be in and out of the space pretty quickly." Hey, Details might not be around that long itself anyhow, amirite? Hey-o!

Not only did she open her show with a discussion of this scandalous, gossipy office design blog post; she also linked to it on her own blog, and struck back:

I just want to say that this Gawker.com article is a misrepresentation of what actually was discussed within our offices. The list of pens is an assortment of what our company will provide our employees with at our expense. We never stated that other pens were not allowed to be used. In these tough economic times, harmony is essential within the working environment. I must also inform you that we use a great assortment of writing implements from the Martha Stewart crafts line available at Michael's Crafts and Walmart.

We would never doubt that you buy all your supplies at Wal-Mart, Martha! Does this mean we can say we're "Locked in a feud" with Martha Stewart now? Let's hope so! Thank you for the traffic, Martha, but really a few MC Escher posters on the walls would clear this right up. [Previously]

Kevin Sharkey and Martha have decided that their new design scheme will be marred by any of the following: ink colors other than red or black, desks that are not completely clear at the end of the day, except for one metal basket of approved office supplies, and anything that could be construed as being personal, such as photos or coffee mugs (I guess drinking fluids slows down the proletariat). Perhaps they are figuring the last part makes it that much easier to lay people off quickly, because they won't have to waste everyone's time by clearing out their desks.

Well you know Kevin Sharkey himself believes that "a truly beautiful room is one that hasn't been 'decorated' at all, but rather 'considered.'" So this would seem to fit. Consider this, employees: spill one drop of Diet Coke in here and you're fucking toast.

boomp3.com

In between filming scenes for Entourage, Jeremy Piven warned beloved character actor Gary Cole to keep his flirting with female extras to a minimum unless he enjoyed being talked about the Howard Stern show and morning zoo radio shows. Piven said, "There's nothing quite like waking up to a Blackberry full of messages from your buddies on the East Coast talking about how some girl dragged your good name in the mud before getting on the Sybian or letting Beetlejuice throw lunch meat at her ass on the Stern show." Cole thanked Piven for the advice and told him that it wouldn't be an issue, seeing as how he's married.

[Photo Credit: WENN]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

How's this for personalization: Shut up and get back to work.

[via Time Blog]

To be fair, we'd guess that erecting a colossal office building with nerd elevators would make the neighbors a smidge crabby, perhaps inclined to phone in a few trumped up grievances against the big bad media company who also makes them fork over $500 a year for home delivery. DOB inspectors found no reason to request the Times take any followup action on four of the 18 falling debris complaints they investigated. Among the total 33 complaints levied against the paper's building, inspectors found no evidence of violations on 11. Then again, the city has issued the Times seven official violations, including a partial stop work order earlier this month, which looks to be still in effect, at least according to the Dept. of Buildings website. Hey, maybe all you Times-ers should take a stab at expensing hard hats. Or body armor.

We'd have told you sooner, however we didn't receive our subscription this month to McGraw-Hill-owned trade pub Engineer News-Record. We put a call in to the Times to see how it went with the city, but flack Abbe Serphos who "is handling all questions related to the windows," according to the guy who answered the phone, wasn't available at the time.

Earlier: Incident At Trump Tower Soho, One Dead
Previously: Breaking Glass

Ladies and Gentlemen:

In case you were staying up nights wondering what those white circular swiss-cheesy looking things in the corner of the 2d floor elevator lobby are, I offer this for your consideration and delectation. (Thanks to Leslie Wayne for bringing this to me.)

Osorom by Konstantin Grcic for Moroso
$1,673 / Available at moroso.it

From Dwell Magazine
Expert Opinion: It's a seating product and I cannot see how you'd use it as a table, because a glass would fall inside and a lamp would [wobble]; is wouldn't be stable. But I think the form is really beautiful; it's like a sculpture in the room. I like the transparency of it. If you don't need to use it, and you just put, say, a magazine on it, then it's nice. But it would not work as a table.

What We Think: Since we're likely to kick over a glass anyway, we can't help but throw caution to the wind with this seating/table element. Grcic was able to be both delicate and substantive at once, and this table would hold up well to a shod foot. If space and seating is an issue, it could double as a chair, which is useful in both small apartments and lounging areas.

Dear Colleagues,

Over the next few weeks we will be installing office and workstation identification signs at 620 Eighth Avenue.

Those of you seated at workstations will receive a metal plate that is the backing for your personal sign, which will be delivered to you separately. The plate is mounted by fastening it to the outside of the tambour door cabinet with screws.

If your sign doesn't have the correct name, possibly due to a late seating plan change, please alert the installers. Your name will be added after the initial installation is complete. If noise from the work is disturbing you please ask the installers to come back at a later time.

The Real Estate Development Team

All:

Welcome to the new home of New York Media at 75 Varick St!

I know that we are looking forward to settling into our new workspace and getting back to work. We have had numerous challenges in the last several days which may affect many of you. PLEASE READ THIS!

At this time, the TOP priority for the IT team is providing working phone, email and Internet access for every workstation. Help Desk personnel will be visiting every single employee and working quickly to make sure everyone is online. If you have a problem, please DO NOT call [redacted] (remember 8 for an internal extension). The Help Desk team will be walking the building throughout the day to address the problems at each desktop.

In additional to the Help Desk crew, we will have several people here from Consultedge who will provide support for our new Avaya phone system. We will also post a schedule for training (if you miss it, we will have another set of training the following week after Labor Day).

PLEASE BE PATIENT! We will get through this together.

Known issues:

* Fax to the desktop is not working (however faxes are queueing up). If there is a critical fax to retrieve, pleaes let one of the Consultedge representatives know and we will retrieve them for you.

* Fax lines are installed and fax machines have been placed where they belong; however, if you are missing your fax machine or have the wrong number assigned to it, Consultedge will take care of port reassignments.

* In some areas, the data ports have been blocked by furniture, making it impossible to connect/test your workstations. In other areas, your phone extension may not yet have been programmed into your phone. We will have someone come up with a temporary solution until your problem can be addressed.

* In some cases, computers have been damaged during the move. These are rare (we have only identified 2 so far). We will work to find a temporary solution for you.

* Some computers were not properly updated for our new network settings. We will have to adjust these computers in order for them to get on the Internet and online.

* Remote access to 75 Varick is NOT enabled. Bloggers must be on-site to get to web resources such as Movable Type.

The first day will no doubt we challenging for many of us, and we know you just want things to work. Your patience and cooperation will help us get through this faster.

Thanks again for your patience, and welcome to your new office!