As I may have mentioned, CCL thinks she’s humorous…very, very humorous, in fact. The problem lies in that 1) she’s not funny, 2) she uses the same “witty” comment for years on end and 3) she’s very loud & wants everyone to know when something happens in her life. So, she goes from person to person in the office telling the same story over & over loud enough for everyone to hear; by the time she reaches me, I have heard it so much that any humor it may have once held (which would be minimal, at best) is completely gone because of the repetition of it all.
Having worked with her for almost five years, I can tell you what CCL will say in a given situation. If someone calls her with a question, she’s being “stalked”. If she gets mad at her boss, she either a) tells me she needs a voodoo doll that looks like her boss, b) asks if I’ll vouch for her character in a murder trial (that’s always a tough one to answer…), c) inquires as to what I think justifiable homicide is or d) threatens to quit because she just can’t take it anymore (one can dream…). If someone from our corporate office calls her for a work-related question, “Corporate is harassing me”. If a coworker gets frustrated, that person is “ready to snap like a twig” (she always tells me this with great urgency & concern, as if she is just sure the person is going to lose it at any minute). And any time I wear a striped shirt, CCL tells me I look like I’m ready for prison. I would like to tell her that based upon her outfits, she looks like she’s ready for the psych ward & is due for one massive makeover…but I bite my tongue, because I’m kind like that.
This is what annoys me about her prison shirt comments: 1) it wasn’t that funny when she first used the line five years ago & after dozens of times of her saying it, it’s completely obnoxious. I have a lot of striped shirts & I actually find myself not wearing them sometimes simply because I don’t want to give her one more reason to come talk to me in a given day; 2) there’s no good comeback I can come up with, aside from my desire to say, “Yes, as working with you is like serving a life sentence. What did I do to deserve this? Why does God hate me?”; 3) she is NOT one to EVER judge attire on someone else.
This is the same woman who, four years after first buying brown polyester pants that were too long, still has safety pins in them to hem the legs short enough that they don’t hit the ground. She is also the same woman who told me she has exactly enough underwear & outfits to get her through one week (you can imagine the multi-level trauma there was the one time her oldest cat climbed in her laundry basket & peed all over her clean bras, which she didn’t discover until she went to wear one on a Monday morning. Not only was there the obvious trauma for her, but the even bigger trauma for me, who had visualized her attempting to put on a cat pee-stained bra.) She thinks that brown pocket t-shirts are fashionable to wear with safety-pinned brown polyester pants, that flood jeans are good to wear with white athletic socks and that long-sleeved shirts sewn into sweater vests are the latest high style fashion. Needless to say, it is beyond an insult when CCL negatively comments on anything you wear. It’s like Bernie Madoff giving Alan Greenspan investment advice. It just shouldn’t happen. Ever.
Unfortunately for me, I did not realize that CCL had today off. (I knew she was taking off some days soon so she could take the cats to the vet—because somehow that’s a whole day event—and because her dad has two Groupons to use up, so she was taking two days off to go have lunch with him each day. But, I didn’t know today was one such day.) Had I known, I could’ve worn stripes today & not thought twice about it. However, I am willing to give up a day in which I could wear stripes without CCL comment if it means I am CCL-free the entire day! It is a blessed day…here in prison.
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