Hurdles and Harmony

The Six Stages of Grief When Your Phone Falls Face-Down We all know that heart-stopping thunk . Your phone leaves your hand like it’s auditioning for a slow-motion scene in an action movie, and then—face-down impact. Congratulations, you’ve just triggered the six emotional stages of phone-drop grief. 1. Denial “Nope. Didn’t happen. Gravity is fake. Maybe my phone has cat-like reflexes and landed gently on a pillow made of unicorn hair.” Spoiler: it didn’t. 2. Anger Directed at everything: yourself, the slippery case, Apple for making phones made of glass, and Isaac Newton for inventing gravity. Thanks, Isaac. 3. Bargaining “Dear phone gods, if you let this screen be okay, I swear I’ll finally clean out my photo gallery of 8,000 blurry dog pics and memes from 2016.” Empty promises, but heartfelt. 4. Depression You flip it over. The screen looks like a spider web. You imagine the $200 repair bill, the lecture from the repair tech (“Were you juggling chainsaws with this?”), and the week y...

Workplace Laughter: The Secret to Surviving Meetings That Should’ve Been Emails Most workplace meetings could’ve been wrapped up in a two-sentence email… or better yet, a meme. Instead, we sit in conference rooms or on Zoom, pretending to care about PowerPoint slides that look like someone fell asleep on ClipArt. This is where humor swoops in, cape flapping, to save your sanity. Cracking a joke in a meeting isn’t just about making Karen from accounting snort-laugh into her latte. Humor breaks tension, keeps people awake (take that, 3 p.m. slump), and makes the endless jargon—“synergy,” “circle back,” “low-hanging fruit”—sound slightly less like corporate Mad Libs. Picture this: the boss drones on about Q4 projections, and you quip, “So basically, we’re aiming for ‘less broke’ next year?” Suddenly, people are smiling, shoulders loosen, and the meeting feels a little less like jury duty. Humor is like the free coffee of office culture—sometimes bitter, occasionally strong, but always nec...