Tuesday – What Comes Around
Apr. 20th, 2010 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
.
.
“Son of a bitch!”
I yell this at least three times a day while at the office. It’s Dave’s fault. He’s trying to kill me. Well, maybe not kill me exactly, but that may well be the end result one day. What’s he’s trying to do is give himself a fit of the giggles, because I am one of those people who startles very easy and it amuses him to no end, which is why he likes to walk up behind my chair and give it a “twack!” Without fail I will jump out of my skin and scream. Then I utter a few choice words in his direction.
The startle thing is nothing new with me. I’ve been like this since I was a kid. I have a tendency to hyper focus on whatever I am doing, and the outside world becomes white noise until someone walks up and says my name or hits the back of my chair just to see my reaction, which never fails to be hilarious. Some people take this as a sign that I am guilty of something and up to no good, but that’s not true. If I am at home doing the dishes and my husband walks in the room when I think he’s asleep or outside, I’ll still jump and give a little scream. After 20 years, he still hasn’t gotten used to this. He scares me, and then I scream and scare him right back. Just a special little bonding moment between husband and wife that leaves us both standing there wide eyed with our hearts pounding like a pair of drums.
“Stop doing that!” Jeff will exclaim, as if I do it on purpose.
There are three kinds of people I come across: those who take this as a sign of guilt and so react with suspicion and hostility toward me the way Dixie at Big Death did, people like my husband for whom it causes distress, and those just get a kick out of it like Dave in my office does now.
Dave doesn’t even work on this side of the building, and if he weren’t going out of his way to mess with me I probably wouldn’t even see him but once or twice a day. Whenever he goes to the copier/printer/fax/scanner (it looks like a copy machine, but it’s all four of those things), he makes a point to take the long way back to his office so he can scare the hell out of me. Yesterday, he decided to smoke behind the building, instead of in front of it, so he could go out the back door and make me scream as he passed by. Of course I leaped from my chair after that and followed him to the door and locked it behind him so he could not get back inside.
“I should stop doing that. I’m going to give you a heart attack,” he said earlier today, after enjoying my second scream followed by a string of expletives in a single morning. He was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. I could barely hear him because my heart was beating so loud.
“You think?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll stop.”
“That’d be really nice, Dave. I’m not taking back what I said about you being a son of a bitch, though. I meant that.”
“You don’t have to. I’d’ve said the same thing if I were you.”
He’s not going to stop. He can’t help himself. He hates his job and scaring the bejeezus out of me is one of the few things he does every day that makes him happy. I’m not even going to complain too much because I suspect that Dave is just fulfilling the role that Karma has laid out for him.
You see, when Dave and I first met 10 years ago, I was working for the Toll Road Authority, where the assistant to the Public Relations officer was a woman named Jonnie B. Jonnie had a rodent phobia, and seeing what even looked like a rodent made her scream and jump out of her skin, much like I do when Dave hits the back of my chair.
I, on the other hand, had a plastic bag full of little rubber mice that I bought one Halloween to use as decorations.
These little rubber mice made their way into Jonnie’s desk drawers, her chair, and occasionally, her purse. They weren’t very realistic looking, but Jonnie reacted to them as if they were. She wouldn’t even touch them and had to use a piece of paper to pick up their little rubber bodies and deliver them back to me, along with a death threat. I loved that she kept bringing them back instead of throwing them away, because it meant my little bag of mice never got any emptier.
I liked Jonnie, and Jonnie like me in spite of the rubber mouse thing. Dave and I get along pretty well, too, when he isn’t giving me a heart attack. But the universe has decreed that Dave be the weight that balances my Karmic scales. I think that everything I call Dave a son of a bitch, a woman in the Public Relations office of the Harris County Toll Road Authority gets a warm fuzzy feeling of well-being deep inside of her and her face lights up in a smile. I’m happy for her. One of these days when Dave is getting his own payback at some future time down the road, maybe the same thing will happen to me. If it does, I plan to smile and say to myself, "Serves you right, you son of a bitch."
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
.
.
“Son of a bitch!”
I yell this at least three times a day while at the office. It’s Dave’s fault. He’s trying to kill me. Well, maybe not kill me exactly, but that may well be the end result one day. What’s he’s trying to do is give himself a fit of the giggles, because I am one of those people who startles very easy and it amuses him to no end, which is why he likes to walk up behind my chair and give it a “twack!” Without fail I will jump out of my skin and scream. Then I utter a few choice words in his direction.
The startle thing is nothing new with me. I’ve been like this since I was a kid. I have a tendency to hyper focus on whatever I am doing, and the outside world becomes white noise until someone walks up and says my name or hits the back of my chair just to see my reaction, which never fails to be hilarious. Some people take this as a sign that I am guilty of something and up to no good, but that’s not true. If I am at home doing the dishes and my husband walks in the room when I think he’s asleep or outside, I’ll still jump and give a little scream. After 20 years, he still hasn’t gotten used to this. He scares me, and then I scream and scare him right back. Just a special little bonding moment between husband and wife that leaves us both standing there wide eyed with our hearts pounding like a pair of drums.
“Stop doing that!” Jeff will exclaim, as if I do it on purpose.
There are three kinds of people I come across: those who take this as a sign of guilt and so react with suspicion and hostility toward me the way Dixie at Big Death did, people like my husband for whom it causes distress, and those just get a kick out of it like Dave in my office does now.
Dave doesn’t even work on this side of the building, and if he weren’t going out of his way to mess with me I probably wouldn’t even see him but once or twice a day. Whenever he goes to the copier/printer/fax/scanner (it looks like a copy machine, but it’s all four of those things), he makes a point to take the long way back to his office so he can scare the hell out of me. Yesterday, he decided to smoke behind the building, instead of in front of it, so he could go out the back door and make me scream as he passed by. Of course I leaped from my chair after that and followed him to the door and locked it behind him so he could not get back inside.
“I should stop doing that. I’m going to give you a heart attack,” he said earlier today, after enjoying my second scream followed by a string of expletives in a single morning. He was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. I could barely hear him because my heart was beating so loud.
“You think?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll stop.”
“That’d be really nice, Dave. I’m not taking back what I said about you being a son of a bitch, though. I meant that.”
“You don’t have to. I’d’ve said the same thing if I were you.”
He’s not going to stop. He can’t help himself. He hates his job and scaring the bejeezus out of me is one of the few things he does every day that makes him happy. I’m not even going to complain too much because I suspect that Dave is just fulfilling the role that Karma has laid out for him.
You see, when Dave and I first met 10 years ago, I was working for the Toll Road Authority, where the assistant to the Public Relations officer was a woman named Jonnie B. Jonnie had a rodent phobia, and seeing what even looked like a rodent made her scream and jump out of her skin, much like I do when Dave hits the back of my chair.
I, on the other hand, had a plastic bag full of little rubber mice that I bought one Halloween to use as decorations.
These little rubber mice made their way into Jonnie’s desk drawers, her chair, and occasionally, her purse. They weren’t very realistic looking, but Jonnie reacted to them as if they were. She wouldn’t even touch them and had to use a piece of paper to pick up their little rubber bodies and deliver them back to me, along with a death threat. I loved that she kept bringing them back instead of throwing them away, because it meant my little bag of mice never got any emptier.
I liked Jonnie, and Jonnie like me in spite of the rubber mouse thing. Dave and I get along pretty well, too, when he isn’t giving me a heart attack. But the universe has decreed that Dave be the weight that balances my Karmic scales. I think that everything I call Dave a son of a bitch, a woman in the Public Relations office of the Harris County Toll Road Authority gets a warm fuzzy feeling of well-being deep inside of her and her face lights up in a smile. I’m happy for her. One of these days when Dave is getting his own payback at some future time down the road, maybe the same thing will happen to me. If it does, I plan to smile and say to myself, "Serves you right, you son of a bitch."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 07:49 pm (UTC)Tamara used to love to sneak up behind me and pluck my ear or lean in really close and say "boo" just to scare me. No matter how much I complained, she kept it up until one day she scared me so bad that before I realized what I was doing, I'd jumped up out of my chair and went after her.
I'm not quite sure what I was going to do with her when I caught her and thankfully my senses returned before either of us found out.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 02:06 am (UTC)I think I'm going to kidnap my tormentor's precious red stapler to teach him a lesson. That'll learn him. :P
no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-22 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-22 06:44 pm (UTC)