Vern Thurman: You’ll make a good chief one day.
Molly Solverson: Me? What about Bill? He’s got seniority.
Vern Thurman: Bill cleans his gun with bubble bath. No, it’ll be you.
Categories
Tag: work
Rainbow: Breaking down barriers: equally important to money. But just so that I’m clear, there is a salary increase, right?
I began my work as a film critic in 1967. I had not thought to be a film critic, and indeed had few firm career plans apart from vague notions that I might someday be a political columnist or a professor of English.
Robert Zonka, who was named the paper’s feature editor the same day I was hired at the Chicago Sun-Times, became one of the best friends of a lifetime. One day in March 1967, he called me into a conference room, told me that Eleanor Keen, the paper’s movie critic, was retiring, and that I was the new critic. I walked away in elation and disbelief, yet hardly suspected that this day would set the course for the rest of my life.
I had applied for a job in 1948 and was called for a personal interview. However I failed to get selected. Many years later, I succeeded in finding out why I had been rejected. The remarks written by the selectors on my application were: “This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated!”
Careers are not often as chosen as people think they are. People talk to me about my choices. I don’t make choices, hardly. Things happen, and you say yes or no – usually ‘yes’, because it’s always better to do something. What’s the choice? Somebody will say, ‘Don’t do that part, you don’t need to do that part.’ And I’ll say, ‘Why not? What am I going to do? Sit around the house?’ I’d much rather go to work, and see actors, and have fun.
If you have to dry the dishes
(Such an awful boring chore)
If you have to dry the dishes
(‘Stead of going to the store)
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor
Maybe they won’t let you
Dry the dishes anymore
I’m a better actor now than I ever was, I wish I could have hurried that up, but there’s no way. Anyway, I always wanted to be around for a long time. Like a European actor, I hope I live a long time and that I’m acting until I finish.
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
I won’t retire. When you’re an actor, you’re forced to retire every few months. John Gielgud was 96 when he died, and he was working. It’s good to work, whatever it is that keeps you interested. I would like to do that, I would like to keep going. I don’t have kids, and I don’t have hobbies. I don’t particularly like to travel. If you’re an actor, you have to travel anyway.
Meyer is an auteur whose every frame reflects his own obsessions. Like all serious artists, he doesn’t allow any space between his work and his dream.
I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one.
I’m very nervous when I work in a film and very relaxed before a live audience. I like theater because it’s more of an actor’s medium. You can control your performance. In film you depend on the director to watch out for your ass, but in the theater you can take care of yourself.
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month.
For many years, and I can say it truthfully, I never rested. I neither thought nor reflected. I had no pleasure, even though I pursued it fiercely during the brief respite of vacations. Through many feverish years I did not work: I merely produced.
Pennies don’t fall from heaven, they have to be earned here on earth.
The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.
Jan: Do you always shut down the entire office when you leave for an hour?
Michael: No. No, that would not be efficient… Actually, they just don’t get a lot of work done when I’m not here… That’s not true. I know how to delegate. And they do more work when I’m not here… Not more… the same amount of work is done whether I am here or not.
Dwight: Actually, I do own property. My grandfather left me a 60-acre working beet farm. I run it with my cousin Mose. We sell beets to the local stores and restaurants. It’s a nice little farm… sometimes teenagers use it for sex.
Aaron: They told me they’d keep me because they could plug me into any story and my salary was in line.
Ernie: The cost-efficient reporter.
Aaron: So I quit.
Dwight: OK, first let’s go over some parameters. How many people can I fire?
Michael: Uh, none. You’re picking a healthcare plan.
Michael: Abraham Lincoln once said that “If you’re a racist, I will attack you with the North,” and those are the principles that I carry with me in the workplace.
Pam: You know what they say about a car wreck, where it’s so awful you can’t look away? The Dundies are like a car wreck that you want to look away from but you have to stare at it because your boss is making you.
My name’s Ralph, and I’m a bad guy. Uh, let’s see…I’m nine feet tall, I weigh six hundred and forty three pounds, got a bit of a temper on me. My passion level’s very near the surface, I guess, not gonna lie. Anyhoo, what else, uh… I’m a wrecker. I wreck things, professionally. I mean, I’m very good at what I do. Probably the best I know. Thing is, fixing’s the name of the game. Literally. Fix-It Felix Jr. So yeah, naturally, the guy with the name Fix-It Felix is the good guy. He’s nice enough as good guys go. Definitely fixes stuff really well. But, uh, if you got a magic hammer from your father, how hard can it be? If he was a regular contractor, carpenter guy, I guarantee you, you will not be able to fix the damage that I do as quickly. When Felix does a good job, he gets a medal. But, are there medals for wrecking stuff really well? To that, I say, ha! And no, there aren’t. For thirty years I have been doing this, and I have seen a lot of other games come and go, how sad. Think about those guys at Asteroids? Boom, gone. Centipede? Who knows where that guy is, you know? Look, a steady arcade gig is nothing to sneeze at, I’m very lucky. It’s just, I gotta say, it becomes kinda hard to love your job…when no one else seems to like you for doing it.
I decided that I would do my best in future not to write books just for the money. If you didn’t get the money, then you didn’t have anything. If I did work I was proud of, and I didn’t get the money, at least I’d have the work.