Went on a road trip this weekend and got a few pictures I think you all might enjoy about one of our favorite characters.
Welcome to Dwight, Illinois!
Yes, we stopped in charming Dwight, Ill., where we ate at a 50s diner. Nice.
And take a closer look at this sign:
And that water tower!
And of course, no road trip would be complete without a few souvenirs!
I've been slaving all day over this meal!
Michael has started a new tradition where he has a couple members of his family over to his house one night a week and cooks dinner for them. He always makes a big deal about it and tells us what he’s cooking.
He also leaves at 4 so he “has time to cook dinner.” Must be nice.
Often he will just disappear without saying anything to anyone.
“Is Michael gone?” Creed asked as he walked past his office at 4:10 yesterday.
“Yes,” Dwight said. “Tonight is Michael’s dinner night.”
“I cook dinner every night,” I said. “Can I go home at 4, too?”
“Uhhh no,” Dwight said sheepishly.
Somehow I knew that would be the answer.
Interrupt me again, and there will be consequences to pay. I am a deputy sheriff, you know.
Dwight HATES it when people interrupt him.
What others view as little verbal cues to indicate interest and understanding, Dwight interprets as personal affronts.
A snippet from a conversation last week:
“So how are we going to contact clients we don’t have yet?” I asked.
“That’s why we’re calling the hotel where this entrepreneurs conference is taking place…”
“Oh right,” I said.
” … to make contacts there.” Dwight finishes.
He smiles at me condescendingly. “You interrupted me!”
“No I didn’t. I said ‘Oh, right.'”
“Yes, that is what is known as an interruption. You cut me off.”
“No, I was affirming your statement.”
“Interrupting.”
He keeps staring at me.
“I’m sorry?” I say.
“Noted.”
… On a side note. I LOVE how much Scranton is coming up in this election! Thanks Joe Biden! …
Due to a few crises last week, Kelly worked several extra hours. So Friday, she left at noon to get back some of that time. We had a big project due by the end of the day, but because she is our customer service rep, she wasn’t involved.
After she left, I noticed an e-mail from her.
It was sent to me, Michael and Dwight asking one of use to “pretty please with sprinkles on top” post some of her weekly data to the company Web site.
Michael came out in a tizzy, but Kelly had already left.
“What is this?” he sputtered. “She can’t just leave us hanging like this when we have a deadline? This is outrageous. Dwight, send her an e-mail saying I don’t approve of her doing this at all. At this company we don’t leave until our work is done. Period.”
Since when? I seemed to have noticed Michael had spent most of the morning having a rather colorful political conversation with one of his buddies on the phone. And left early last week despite this impending deadline.
Do as I say, not as I do, I guess.
What paperwork? And why do you have that look on your face?
Michael cannot keep track of anything to save himself. So if it’s important, he’ll often give it to me to look after.
“I need you to keep track of this paperwork for me,” he told me last week. He told me he’d need to fill it out later in the week, so to keep it in a safe place.
“Will do,” I said. Tucking it safely in my filing cabinet.
He talked to me about what he had to do with them and how he was going to do it. I remember thinking he probably could have just done it in the time it took to tell me that story.
Cut to four days later.
Dwight approaches my desk.
“Do you have that paperwork done yet?” he asks.
“What paperwork?”
“That paperwork that Michael gave you a few days ago.”
“What this?!” I ask pulling the “safe-keeping” papers out. “He never told me I had to fill them out. He just told me to keep track of them for him.”
“Well I need them,” Dwight said.
“I don’t even know how Michael wants them done,” I said scanning them over.
Dwight started explaining to me how Michael normally does them.
“No no, I’ll just talk to Michael about it,” I said, waving him away.
Dwight kept explaining.
“No I’ll talk to Michael. He told me he was going to do this.”
“Well someone has to do it,” Dwight said shooting me an annoyed look.
*sigh*
I walk into Michael’s office waving the papers.
“Michael did you need these papers back so you could fill them out for Dwight?”
Michael looks at me with disappointed eyes and says with a sad voice, “Oh, you don’t want to do them.”
“Don’t want to do them?!” I said exasperated. “You never told me to do them!”
“Okay, Okay,” Michael says. “I’ll take care of them for you then.”
For me?!?!?! FOR ME?!?!
“All you said was I had to keep them safe! I would have done them earlier in the week when I had time if I had known.”
But the more flustered I got, the more Michael stared at me with concerned eyes.
“Don’t worry about it, Pam. I’ll take care of it,” he said with a valiant expression. As if he’d just rescued my cat out of a tree.
How HOW did Michael become the hero of that story?
Hmm what about Jim? No, too cool. How about Creed? Nah he'd lead a rebellion.
An over heard conversation from Michael’s office.
Dwight: You know Michael, I was thinking with me being out of town yesterday and you taking some time off soon, we need to decide who is our number 3 if we’re ever gone at the same time.
Michael: Our what?
Dwight: Who will be in charge is something happens while both of us are out of the office?!
They dropped into hushed whispers so I missed the rest of this gem of a conversation. But I quickly relayed what I had heard to Jim and Stanley.
“Oh no! What would we do?!” I asked.
We all agreed. Nothing would change if they both missed a day except that the chance of something going wrong would decrease exponentially and we’d get out of work on time. Oh the horror.
Also: THE OFFICE SEASON FIVE STARTS TOMORROW!!!!! I’M SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!
The sales people were on deadline, putting together a booklet of stats and sales figures for the year. Dwight was heading up the project and had decided he needed to have the final OK on all information submitted to the report.
“Do we have something we can replace these charts with?” Dwight demanded in the final hour before the deadline.
“No,” Michael said, annoyed.
“Well then we have a problem because I refuse to run these charts without a source for the numbers.”
“Well who put together the charts?” Michael asked.
“The intern did before he left,” Dwight said, butchering the intern’s name when he tried to pronounce it.
“Well he didn’t make the numbers up. It’s fine. He had documentation.”
“Well Oscar misplaced the original numbers, and we really need to find something to replace the information with.”
Dwight began his quest turning over every rock searching for either the original documents or new statistics he could add to the report. These charts had been part of the report for two weeks and Dwight decides that now, as we’re gearing up to go home, is the appropriate time to bring up his concerns.
And things were looking so good. Looks like another late night at Dunder Mifflin.
As soon as he heard the news, Dwight rushed into Michael’s office.
“How could you let Karen take a week of vacation next month?” Dwight demanded.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Michael asked motioning for Dwight to calm down.
“Because that’s the same week as our annual paper convention in Michigan!”
“But we don’t need Karen to go. We already decided we’d be sending you, Creed and Jim.”
“Which meeeeans we will be short-staffed here at the office.”
“Dwight, it will be fine. She doesn’t work with any of your clients and there will be plenty of other people here if a problems arises.”
“I don’t know about this Michael. It doesn’t seem right.”
“It’s fine.”
Dwight glared at Michael, feeling defeated. “Fine. But for the record, I don’t like this.”
He marched to Karen’s desk.
“OK Filipelli, I’ll allow it … but I don’t like it.”
“Uhhh thanks?” Karen said looking confused.
Well Dwight Week is coming to an end. But fear not. More Dwight stories will appear more regularly mixed in with the Michael Scott misadventures … so stay tuned!
And to continue to get your Rainn Wilson fix … go see The Rocker this weekend and FREE JENNA!
Oh so you think you have a vacation day? Well let me just check my chart here. ... FALSE. You have no vacation days! The chart knows all because I created the chart, and I know all. Like Ghandi ... or Matlock.
Dwight has always heavily monitored how many days off people have taken and how many they are due.
Dwight took one of his rare days off at Christmas time. But even when he doesn’t come into the office, he insists on working from home.
He called that afternoon and asked Karen for a rundown of who was in the office.
Being that it was the day after Christmas, there were only a handful of people who had already used up their vacation days.
After she had named everyone who was there, Dwight asked “Where’s Kelly?”
“She had one day left, so she took the day off,” Karen said.
“No she did not have a day off. My notes indicate she used all of her vacation days.”
“Well she said she checked and she had one day left and she had to take it by the end of the year or she’d lose it.”
“She had no days left! My chart says so right here. I’m going to see that she gets her pay docked a day. This is ridiculous. She thinks no one will notice she was gone. I’m seeing to it first thing when I get back that her pay is docked!”
Way to embrace the Christmas spirit, Dwight.
When he came back he called corporate first thing and found out that indeed Kelly’s day off was legitimate.
Turns out Dwight’s chart was wrong. Dwight hates it when his chart is wrong. I think he ultimately decided his chart wasn’t wrong, that corporate was wrong, and that Kelly got lucky …
This time.
If they gave black belts for ability to use the Internet, I would have a double. I have visited and/or used nearly two dozen web sites.
Now and then Dwight will find an error in some of the paperwork I fill out.
Of course he never sees all of the things I fix when the salespeople initially give me the paperwork. He only sees the straggling items I missed along the way.
They’re never anything big that would affect the sale in any way. But he feels it necessary to check my work and to send me an e-mail outlining what I did wrong.
Here was my favorite:
“I know the sales staff often likes to use abbreviations for companies in their notes, but it is Dunder Mifflin policy that we use the full company name on all references. I looked up the full name for Miller Co. on its web site, if you’re wondering where you find such things. I have the Internet open all day.”
Oh! The Internet! Why didn’t I think of that!
I work at The Office 