The elevators in our building have black glass walls, sort of like mirrors. I do a quick booger-check every morning on my way up, assuming I have the elevator to myself, but it just dawned on me for the first time yesterday, What if it’s a camera? What if it’s two-way glass and there are actually security folks behind the glass, riding up and down on a tandem elevator of their own?

If you have any information on whether it’s a camera or not and if so, who’s watching the video feed, please comment below.

Speaking of our building, Otis, our beloved front door man is on strike. He’s not on strike from work, per se, rather, he’s on strike against all of us. Here’s the thing. Every single person who works in this building loves Otis. Seriously, if anybody mentions him, everybody standing around is like, “Otis! I love that guy!” Well, turns out we are all loving him to death. See, whenever any of the offices in this building have extra food, the first thing you hear is, “I’ll bring it down to Otis – he’s so great to us and we should thank him for all he does with these leftover breakfast burritos, all fourteen of them.” And being the accommodating guy Otis is, he graciously takes the burritos. Until now…

Otis’ doctor went bananas and told him he had to stop, or else he’d have to start taking all sorts of medications. Otis knew what he had to do, and that’s why I walked in one day last week and it hit me – Otis is shrinking. “Otis! You’ve lost weight!” I exclaimed.

“Ten pounds.” Seems Otis has begun turning down all the food the folks in this building deliver to him.

“We’ve got to get a picture of this!” I encouraged. Oh, well don’t you know Otis cannot stand to have his picture taken. You’d think he was a ghost or something, like we’ll find out he’s not real once the camera flash goes off. “Got a lot more to lose!” he claimed, patting his belly. I finally convinced him I’d make him famous (which is a total lie because, let’s face it, this is a mortgage blog, so…) and he allowed me one picture. Granted, he grumbled the whole time…”This won’t be good. Uh uh. I’m not gonna like it. Uh uh…” He was still mumbling through his teeth as I took this shot.

Below, the new, svelte Otis:

I told him y’all would love it though, so please leave Otis a bit of love in the comments section below because the guy is awesome. Once he loses ten more pounds we’ll get another shot. Then this will turn into a weight loss blog and we’ll fill it with all these before and after shots. Then, we’ll go viral together, dear readers.

Until then, I’ve got some scoop on Spanish-Speaking Richard. He won third place in some contest Envoy held. I still don’t understand the rules because Envoy took me off their email distributions due to my naughty tendencies to copy and paste the contents onto my blog, but it has something to do with going to lots of open houses and mingling with realtors, two things which Richard does a lot of. I tried to interview Richard about his big win, but interviewing Richard has proven to be one of the more difficult aspects of my job due to the fact that Richard is more polite than anyone else in this office and he won’t make fun of people, nor will he talk himself up. Nada. Here is an enthralling account of the interview:

Just The Assistant: So you went to a lot of networking events, huh? Did you meet anybody you didn’t like?

Spanish-Speaking Richard: No, they were all very nice.

JTA: No way, dude. If you met that many people, at least one of them had to be a jerk, right? Or did anybody get wasted and make a fool of themselves?

SSR: No, it was just very nice.

JTA: Can you give me anything here, Richard? Hey – did you let folks know you can speak Spanish? And did you wear your name tag?

[Dude loves his name tag.]

SSR: Of course I wore my name tag! And yes, I let people know I speak Spanish.

JTA: How do you let them know? Like, do you just drop it on ‘em, like start talking in Spanish? That’s what I’d do. I’d be all, “Hola! Hola! Casa! Biblioteca!”

SSR: No, I just let them know I’m bilingual and I can help their Spanish-speaking clients. I’d tell them while I was out drink- uh, meeting with them.

JTA: Now we’re onto something, Richard! You went out drinking with realtors? That’s great! Then what happened?

SSR: I made a lot of new contacts. Everyone was very nice.

JTA: I’m going to slap you, Richard. Congratulations on your big win.

Finally, V-Shaped Mortgage Banker Will found an app that tells him his wins and losses for this casino he frequents. He hasn’t pulled up the final results yet, but I’ve saved him some time: Will, you lose. Every single time, you lose. Casinos always win. Haven’t you ever watched Dateline? Now if you’d all please give me one million dollars for my “app” you can make checks payable to Just the Assistant.

Alright folks, while you all send your notes of congratulations to Otis and Richard and Will (not really because he doesn’t win), I’m off to confiscate the elevator feed so that images of me staring up my nose don’t end up splashed across the web.