Well, I wouldn't say I've been missing it, Bob...

OK, quoting fight club yesterday got me thinking. About my job. About my life. About movies I like.

Movies can do a wonderful thing. They transport you into another world. For the brief time that you're watching a movie you can get the girl, beat the bad guy, and solve the mystery, all within a nice little time block. You can kill hookers, murder the president, or steal millions from Terry Benedict.

Movies can be that release of tension. If you're a cop who sits on the side of a road that's speed limit is 25MPH, just waiting for someone to drive 28MPH so you can pull them over, then go rent any Steven Segal movie. For 2 hours you get to take the law into your own hands and save the day. See what I'm getting at?

Well, I work in an office. All day I quote Office space in my head...and sometimes outloud. I stand next to a perfectly fine working fax machine and yell "Why does it say paper jam when THERE IS NO PAPER JAM!"

So today I thought I'd continue with movie lists. These are movies about people who work in an office and have dull lives but then fight back somehow. This is no particular order:

• Fight Club - "And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you"



• Office Space - "Well see, they wrote all this bank software, and, uh, to save space, they used two digits instead of four. So like 98 instead of 1998? Uh, so I go through these thousands of lines of code and, uh... it doesn't really matter. I uh, I don't like my job, and, uh, I don't think I'm gonna go anymore. "



• 9 to 5 - Yeah, it's a Dolly Parton movie. Some women work in an office with a boss who is a total jerk. So they kidnap him and keep him locked away, and then they run the place instead. Hilarity ensues.



• American Beauty - "Brad, for 14 years I've been a whore for the advertising industry. The only way I could save myself now is if I start firebombing. "



• ClockWatchers - It's a movie about women working at a temp job who find ways to break the monotany together. It escalates until there are some office thefts that are being pinned on them.



• Swimming with Sharks - I love this movie. Kevin Spacey plays the boss from Hell. He has a personal assistant that he treats like crap and eventually the assistant cracks. He ties Kevin Spacey up in a chair and tortures him throughout the movie. Very dark. - "You are nothing! If you were in my toilet I wouldn't bother flushing it. My bathmat means more to me than you!"



• Haiku Tunnel - It's a movie about a guy who's a terrific temp but a terrible permanent worker. He gets this task to mail out some really important letters but he doesn't do it...and things just get worse for him through the rest of the movie. It's really funny and neurotic.

So that's my list. You should see all of these movies. Now. Why are you still here? GO!