Are you being inappropriate?

Sometimes I forget that our job isn't normal. We get paid to tell jokes all day, which is awesome, but we also have entire conversations in our heads, talk in weird voices, and have lighthearted discussions about crime and death. And when you're stuck in a writers room for hours at a time with someone, the already-fuzzy lines of normality become even fuzzier as you get very comfortable with each other. The phrases "overshare," "too far," and "TMI" hold no weight. Sometimes when I'm amongst non-writers (I'll call them "normal people" for now) and I find myself wondering whether or not what I'm about to say is suitable for normal people ears. So I've come up with a chart that will tell me if I'm being inappropriate:

Conversations with Lilly

Hi Everyone, this is me and my daughter Lilly. I've collected some of my favorite exchanges for you all to read. These are the kind of discussions you can look forward to when you have a two year old of your own.  Sometimes she says the most outrageous things.  Sometimes I do.  Together, we have a good time.

Context: Lilly running at me with her stuffed alligator. (but in fairness she watches a lot of Jake and the Neverland pirates - so I believe she’s paying homage to the tick-tock crock.)

Lilly: Run, mommy, here comes a cock-gator.

Me: Yep. Ok.

Thought it inspired:  What would a cock-gator look like?  A penis with a ton of teeth? Or with scales and a tail? All three? I don’t know.

Context: Leaving Lilly’s school.

Me: “Lilly do you like your friends at school?”

Lilly:”No I like chocolate.”

(this kid knows what’s up. Chocolate doesn’t take your shit or bean your head with a toy car.)

Context: After doing my best impression of Louis Armstrong singing “You are so beautiful to me”.

Lilly: “Mommy stop. You are not funny.”

Context: Long day at work, I was tired and I was  wearing a cardigan over a dress on a hot day.

Lilly: “Mommy, it’s hot. Sweater?”

Me: ‘Yeah mommy doesn’t want to look slutty at work.”

Lilly: “Ok.”

Me: “OMG what did I just say to you?”

Context: Watching Disney Junior, with a bowl of dinosaur chicken nuggets.

Lilly: Mommy, I want a fuck.

Me: What did you just say?!

Lilly: A fuck for my dinosaur chickens.

After laughing for five minutes

Me: Are you saying “fork”?

Lilly: “Yeah. Sorry.”

Context: Lilly runs into the room,  naked.  She was wearing clothes five minutes earlier.

Me: “Lillyanna Grace, where are your clothes.”

Lilly: “Sorry, Mommy, they’re off.”

Context: After running out into a parking lot, Lilly got yelled at -pretty loudly- by me.

Lilly: Mommy don’t yell at Lilly. You’re breaking my heart.

Me: Well I’m sorry. But if anything happened to you, it would break mommy’s heart.

Lilly: Ok. You fixed it.

Me: Fixed what?

Lilly: My Lilly heart.

A Tour of Our Office

In order to promote the utmost standard of hard work and productivity, an office should be clean, organized, and functional.

Our office isn’t any of those things.

Our office has been described as a spectacle, a college dorm room, and something out of a CW sitcom. It has never been described as “a professional workplace environment” or a “good reflection upon the company”. Usually people see it and say “wowww...” in that long, trailing off way that says they’re both impressed and judging you. And we’re okay with that so long as people know we actually do work. Really. We do.

When you walk into our office, the first thing you’ll notice is probably the snacks.

We keep our office stocked with snacks. So much so that we might have to throw a small party to get rid of them before we leave. I don’t know how the whole snack thing started - probably with a bag of Pirate Booty and some Oreos to fill our emergency chocolate needs. But as you can see, it has since spiraled out of control. We have everything from popcorn to dry cereal to Girl Scout cookies. People come by looking for snacks and we’re like “YES! PLEASE TAKE SOME.” And then they hang out for a while and chat because they’ve been taken in by our magnetic personalities. Either that, or they feel obligated to be friendly with us because they just ate our food.

The next thing you’ll notice is that Joanna and I don’t have desks. We both work on laptops and if we’re writing we project it on the wall, so we didn’t feel the need to have desks. Instead we have couches and super messy coffee tables.

How many caffeinated beverages does it take to keep a writer going, you ask? Answer: an unholy amount.

You’ll also notice our decorations.

I like to describe our aesthetic as: orange. We have a wall o’ stuff that mostly consists of Chris’s artwork, pictures of my dog Ponzu, and random ads I ripped out of a Teen Vogue. Also on display: 2 one dollar bills (we won them from a lottery ticket, so they serve as a constant reminder that we’re winners), Joanna’s certificate of completion for a mandatory sexual harassment test (naturally we laminated that), an empty box of coconut popsicles (that’s a weird one. I’ll give you that).

Another thing we have in our office is a Whitney!

Whitney is our amazing script coordinator whom we love and cherish and yell at a lot. She’s in charge of keeping us in line, typing down (and making sense of) the word vomit we call “jokes”, and bringing sunshine into our hearts just by being there. We could go on and on about the wonder that is Whitney, but we won’t. Because we plan on having a dedicated post on her later.

We have a projector that projects onto the wall so we can all see the genius that Whitney is typing. Unfortunately we project onto the same wall as the door so when people walk by it looks like we’re just talking to each other. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to convince someone that we’re actually doing work. And how many times we’ve had to close the SNL video we were watching to do just that.

Other things we have in our office:

A popcorn machine

An air hockey table

A dartboard (okay, I see the college dorm room correlation now)

An ample supply of vitamins and drugs

A mini fridge full of salad dressing and juice

A balance ball

A 5lb weight

A mysterious stain

A quote wall full of inappropriate quotes we shouldn’t post about

That pretty much sums up our office. We like to think it’s become a bit of a Nickelodeon staple in the time we’ve been here. Someone once told us they heard an exec talking about how they liked Nick’s laid back atmosphere and said “there’s an office full of ladies who work from couches!” Yep, that’s us. We love our office and the time we’ve spent in it. We will miss it to pieces when we’re gone but at least we have this documentation of it. We shall sear these images into our minds like seared albacore tuna.