I made it to the next ‘show’. Sitting in the hotel room watching American Idol. Got a lump in my throat when the little Sonic waitress made it to the next round. Laughed my butt off at some of the other people who think they can sing.

But I am also trying to get my head into work mode after a couple weeks off. Thinking of all the things I’ll need to do tomorrow. Trying to ‘think outside the box’ which is one of the favorite buzz phrases at Corporate. The more I think about it, the less I actually understand what that means…

So let’s think about ‘Thinking outside the box’…

If we are supposed to think outside the box to make things happen, then we must assume that most people ‘think inside the box’. So now I have a few questions;

Where is this box? And exactly how did we all get inside it? It must be a really big box. And what’s so wrong about doing our thinking while we are in it? Maybe there are a bunch of boxes and I misunderstood. That would make a lot more sense. Since most offices are filled with cubicles, is this the box they are talking about? How much trouble would most people get in if they never were in their cubicle and when the boss asked why they answered, “I have to think outside my box”?

Furthermore, when did we all start thinking inside the box? At some point, somebody had to tell us to get in the box to begin with. We should find that guy and ask him why he did that. For all these years we have been sitting in this box thinking away… now, all the sudden it’s wrong. Is that sort of like when I was a kid and they said that eggs were good for you so we all ate lots of eggs, now they say they are bad. In another 20 years will we find out that we would have been better off to have done all our musings in the box after all?

Shouldn’t one or two people stay in the box just in case? Or, better yet, let’s count off by twos. All the odd numbers think outside the box, the evens will continue to do their thinking the old-fashioned way. Then at least when they decide which way is actually the better way, half of us will have been right all along.

Of course, you know how people are… some would try to think ON the box so that they could say they were in the right group the whole time. And who knows what would happen if we thought on the box. That would screw up all the data anyway, so the results would be skewed.

Who decided on a box in the first place? Maybe we should just get rid of the box. Maybe we should try thinking in a Mason jar. Or in one of those Christmas metal container things. If that doesn’t work, then we can try thinking outside of those.

One last thing… Is it Ok to do other things in the box? I do a lot of things at work that do not require thought. Can I be in the box for those or is that wrong too?

My head hurts… Now all I can think about is how many times I’ll get googled because I used the word ‘box’ so many times…