Co-Worker Chronicles

I haven’t had a chance to write in a scandalously long time, so I’ve come up with what I think is a creative solution to make more time for my hobbies. I quit my job. Some people might say the technical term for what I’ve done is “retirement,” but that’s something old people do, which clearly doesn’t apply to me, so let’s stick with “quitting.” I’ve heard people say this transition is an adjustment, but I have to say it’s coming quite naturally to me. I have no regrets, but I do miss my coworkers.

After my college roommate and I graduated and joined the workforce, she sent me a letter. Yes, a letter. People old enough to retire used to communicate in this way: on paper, through the mail. In it, she wrote something along the lines of “Why were we, or anyone, allowed to graduate college without having to take a mandatory class called ‘Surviving Office Politics: Co-Workers and Cruelty’?!” I’ll always wonder what, exactly, her coworkers did to inspire that level of despair, but I was fortunate. I only occasionally had instances at work that made me sorry I hadn’t taken such a class. For the most part, I worked with the most wonderful cast of characters anyone could ever hope for. Allow me to introduce you to a few of them, anonymously, of course, and in no particular order:

• Long before the days of satellite radio, I had a coworker who excitedly told us he’d discovered a local station that played nothing but Beatles songs and never aired commercials. This seemed unlikely, but I didn’t think about it much. Weeks, possibly months later, he gave another coworker a ride to a job site. That passenger cracked the case. The car was recently purchased, used, and the “radio station” was actually a cassette left in the tape deck by the previous owner, playing on an endless loop. Somehow, my coworker never noticed that the station played the same few songs, in the same order, forever.

• I was lucky enough to overhear a coworker on the phone with an auto shop. He’d taken his car in multiple times because something was wrong with the sound system. It didn’t seem like they could diagnose or fix the issue, so instead, they tried to tell him that car stereos are very sensitive pieces of equipment. Without missing a beat, he replied, “Well, so is my penis, but that still works.”

• There was a project that had us driving to the client, several hours away, every other week. On one of those trips, the project manager sped, got pulled over by a cop, and was issued a speeding ticket. Two weeks later, on the way to the same meeting, he sped again, in more or less the same spot, and was pulled over, incredibly, by the same cop. He got a second speeding ticket to go with the first one. Perhaps wisely, on the next trip, he asked me to drive. I was able to get us there and back incident-free. It was quite late when we returned to the office, and it had snowed while we were gone. In a hurry to get home, he only scraped off a porthole-like opening on his windshield before heading out. Yup, he got pulled over and ticketed for that. At least it was a new police officer.

On another trip returning from a day with that same out-of-town client, there was a whole carload of us, and the project manager was still afraid to drive, so he was a passenger, but maybe back-seat driver is a better description. It was again quite late at night, so he suggested a shortcut to get us back faster. It turned out to be a seasonal road, and since it was wintertime, it was more like driving in a creek bed than on a road. I didn’t actually scream out loud like some of the others, but I did think, “Oh, this is where they’ll find our bodies in the spring.”

• Speaking of wintertime driving, I discovered one of the principals of the firm had a theory that if it was snowing or flurrying out, you should drive with the heat turned off in the car, so that nothing would stick to the windshield. I couldn’t feel my feet when we arrived. I can’t decide if that was better than the time he insisted on driving because he’d just purchased a new car the day before. When we got in, he looked at me and said, “This could be interesting. I haven’t driven a stick shift since World War II!”

• I had a coworker who was sometimes prone to wardrobe malfunctions. Picture a shoulder pad slowly migrating down her sleeve over the course of a meeting. But once, as she was walking to her car while carrying a large display board, the elastic in the waistband of her slip gave way, and it fell around her ankles. With her hands full, she just hopped the rest of the way across the parking lot.

• There was a group of protesters that happened to march past our office. They were chanting “Free Tibet!” over and over. My coworker, hearing them but not seeing their signs, completely misunderstood and dismissively said, “If they want to bet, why don’t they just go to Atlantic City?”

• While driving on Long Island, a colleague was tailgating another car so aggressively that when they got to a stoplight, the other driver got out, opened his trunk, and yelled, “Do you wanna get in, lady?!”

If we were up against a deadline and working weekends, coworkers would sometimes bring their kids into the office with them, opening up a whole new world of personalities and entertainment.

When the copier wasn’t working very well on a Monday, the repairman made a trip out and discovered several Cheez-Its inside. Honestly, what could be more reasonable or logical than thinking you could make more of your favorite snack by running it through a copier?

Most kids did typical kid hijinks – finding a rubber stamp and stamping EVERYTHING, or jamming product samples into computer openings - but one little girl stole the show. I have to say, she seemed extremely well-behaved, playing quietly and contentedly by herself. Then we heard a terrible thud. Her mom went running and found her a little dazed. It became apparent she had walked smack into a wall at a pretty good clip. You’re probably wondering, as we were, how that happened. Her explanation, offered without shame, was that she’d been “playing Helen Keller.” As one does. This meant walking around with her eyes closed, hence slamming into a wall headfirst.

The next time the girl was in the office was incident-free, or so her mother thought. The office had a pond in the atrium with two koi, named, not for nothing, Lucy and Ethel. Days after the girl had been in the office, she asked her mom if it would hurt the fish if she took some of their water. The mom explained that taking all of their water would kill them, but taking just a little wouldn’t be a problem. Being a good mom though, alarm bells started ringing, and she asked some follow-up questions, unearthing the fact that the girl had gone into the freezer, emptied the ice cube trays, scooped them into the pond, and made new ice out of that. It was well into the workweek when this was discovered, and the few of us in the know kept a close eye on the gentleman we knew made an iced coffee for himself every afternoon.

Those are the stories fit for print. If you want juicier ones, you’ll have to talk to me in person. I try to avoid libel, but under the right circumstances, I can be persuaded to flirt with a little slander.