A game about a boring desk job will not help me mentally escape my boring desk job

Most of the time I like my job OK. But you know, sometimes I have really had it up to “here” & on those days, it’s fun to escape reality with mindless online games!

Dunder Mifflin Infinity made sure to e-mail me about their online game’s upcoming 2.0 version, which I decided I definitely do not care about. Being 1 of 900 billion Office fans, I signed up last year, thinking it’d be fun to play Plinko on the internet with Dwight Schrute or whatever. But then once I got going & set up “my online office,” I realized one thing:

Setting up a fake online office does not provide a very good escape from a bad day at my real office.



I’m OK with job-based logic games, though. Friends of my ex-roommate Joanna may recall “the Cake Mania incident of 2006” in which I downloaded this adorable yet challenging game & promptly crashed her brand new laptop. (I still apologize from time to time for this incident, especially because I was the one who picked out “the most reliable laptop” for her.)

Oh actually, hold on. Maybe the 2006 incident was with Lemonade Tycoon, which I eventually got sick of because I could never get the lemon/ice/sugar recipe right, and I thought, “Hold on. I am too smart to get angry at this inconsequential game which is clearly flawed.”

Or was it actually Roller Rush (where you’re a 1950’s sock hop girl on skates who brings food to everybody in the diner parking lot) that crashed the laptop? I never did beat that game, and that failure still pains me. See, I got stuck at level 27 where all cars were the same shape & the old men took too long to order & I couldn’t figure out how to upgrade my rollerskates to the ones with wings on them. I had to call it quits then— because my “escape” was not really an escape & was only replacing my stress with more embarrassing stress.

Basically, my lesson for today boils down to this: Make sure your games are fun, or else why are you playing them? If your objective is to escape reality, then you gotta ensure this wacky alternative reality is not the same as your regular reality. Like, if I’m actually a 1950’s diner waitress on roller skates, I’m not gonna choose Roller Rush to escape my daily grind. But I maaaaay choose Lemonade Tycoon! See?

So that’s why I’m not gonna play Dunder Mifflin Infinity 2.0. Because if I want to “play a game about a desk job,” I’ll just make up a snappy theme song for whenever I staple papers, or invent a fun signature so that when I sign approval on a document I get to draw a butterfly, etc.


Previous Joanna posts, since I am still sorry for crashing her laptop that one time in 2006:
— Acai wins, Lemon-Lime Lite loses — in Joanna and I’s Emergen-C taste test challenge!
— “Wheel’s on!” — Guest blog by JOANNA
— What my roommate said when I asked her if we could get a robot baby dinosaur