Lately, my life has become a crazy madhouse at work. Last week, I stepped out of my domestic quietude into a place where the welcome-back committee showers you with piles of to-do lists and wonderfully generated enthusiasm for whatever it is they imagined you were doing while not being at work. In this case, they imagined I was in wedded bliss. They imagined correctly. Of course there are those who make coming back from a life event a little awkward. They are the people who don’t want to look like the humdrum colleague and so they manage to smile and pretend for just a moment that they might genuinely care about your experience. My favorite way to display this is by shooting a glance from the copier with a smile that says, “Hey, if we had any kind of relationship at all other than the occasional time where I speak to you as if you were partially deaf and mostly retarded, I might say something that would render a distant cousin of something kind.” At this point, Humdrum steals the glance back and rushes off to the place where she leads people to believe her genius brews at every moment she is within the walls of this working institution.
Part of me gets it, though. It’s always strange when a major occurrence surfaces in the personal life of a colleague that cannot be swept under the carpet. I like to believe that some people don’t exist outside of their cube. For them to have an emotion other than anger (viewed frequently in meetings, the hallway, the toilet) can be hard to fathom. To know that Scooter might not be annoyed by every living thing around him, would be strange. Then, who is Scooter? Sometimes, in long meetings when Scooter starts to get red in the face because someone asked a question during his presentation, my imagination starts to wander. Why does he have a scratch on his chin? Does he have cats? Does he have several? I bet one is a calico and he calls it Percy. He gets her mouse toys and lets her sit on his dinner plate. Percy probably is cold to him but it keeps Scooter coming back to Percy for her attention. It reminds Scooter of his childhood. Occasionally he slips and calls Percy “ mother”.
Meetings are so much more fun in other people’s heads. And coming back to work is so much more fun when you can make bets on what weird things will be generated by the humdrum copy genius.
