Episode Report Card M. Giant: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Chinatown
By M. Giant | Season 7 | Episode 10 | Aired on 12.02.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Dwight's penny-pinching as the building's owner is driving the employees crazy, and dealing with the problem falls to the office administrator. Alas, since that's Pam, in a role she made up in the first place, she's a little overmatched. Attempting to extort better conditions from him by threatening to move to a different building looks like it's going to fail as miserably as her attempts to be an artist and a salesman did, until deliverance comes from an unlikely source: Dwight's assistant. Well, actually, an even unlikelier source, but we'll get to that in the weecap.
The latest random bug up Michael's ass is China, but when Oscar tries to correct him on some facts and turns out to be wrong, Michael's bigger problem is that Oscar wants a rematch for the title of the smartest guy in the office. Suddenly everyone's tired of Oscar's know-it-all-ism, and they help prop Michael up, which works until Michael blows it and then wins a TKO with a deluge of inspirational BS anyway.
Also, Andy keeps annoying Darryl with frivolous text messages, but that's such a minor plot with so little payoff that this paragraph feels even more frivolous.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Dwight is doing everything with his gross bare feet for twenty minutes a day. At his desk, of course. "Why?" Jim wonders. Dwight smugly explains that he'll soon have the pede-dexterity of a chimp, "and you'll be sitting there like an idiot." I'm just going to say that my wife has a freakish ability to pick stuff up with her feet, even with her socks on, and sitting there like an idiot suits me just fine. After Dwight knocks a bunch of shit onto Pam's desk trying to sharpen a pencil and starts toe-typing her an apology letter, Jim thoughtfully brings Dwight a nice full cup of coffee and a thinly veiled dare. Whereupon Dwight tries picking up the mug by looping his toe through the handle, only to dump the entire contents into his crotch. "A for effort, right?" Jim says, holding up a hand. Dwight slaps Jim's hand with his coffee-soaked bare foot. Way to snatch back the loss at the last minute there, Jim.
Cred--
Andy arrives at the building to find Hank shilling muffins at a coffee shop that Dwight's had set up in the entryway, and actually agrees to buy a blueberry muffin for eight bucks. Dwight talking-heads about how owning a building is a war between landlord and tenants: "I've surrounded the enemy and I'm slowly starving them." In addition to the thermostat being set at about Scrooge degrees Fahrenheit, here are also timers and motion sensors on the lights, meaning everyone has to flail around every few minutes when it goes dark. Dwight calls it part of his green initiative. "And by green, I mean money."
Michael comes into the office all out of sorts about how everything in sight was made in China. "Yeah, that's where they make stuff," Andy remarks offhandedly. But Michael's all worked up about a Newsweek he read in the dentist's waiting room. I think I like ignorant Michael better.
Darryl flags down Andy to ask him to stop texting him all the time. He THs that it used to be that you only got texts from people you wanted to get them from: "Girls. And they'd all say the same thing: 'I'm coming over, baby.'" And then Darryl would respond, "BTB," which stands for "Bring that booty." My wife and I exchange the same kind of texts when we're in different rooms of the house. Although I secretly suspect that she's typing hers with her toes.
Stanley complains to Dwight about the half-ply toilet paper in the bathroom, and when Dwight blows him off, Stanley turns to the "office administrator" for backup. Pam asks to talk to Dwight about it, but he blows her off as well, advising her to call his assistant Nate to schedule an appointment with his building owner self. When Pam reluctantly plays along, she sits on hold with Nate while she can clearly hear Dwight right in front of her telling Nate to blow her off. Now annoyed, Pam hangs up and tells Dwight he's screwing over his friends. Dwight sarcastically talks about how this is not just business but a home, "And I would much rather see a smile from Kevin than save hundreds on plumbing and electricity." Kevin obliges, which I guess means that Dwight gets to have it both ways.