That Was the Funnest Meeting EVER; or If I Could Just Get You to Stop That for a Moment...

There are three, physically, in the meeting.  A fourth, a woman with a devastating head cold, attends by phone. 

I sit on the “visitor’s” side of the desk, a bit of corporate real estate littered with toys:  beads, magnets, Silly Putty, “stress” balls. 

I am confused. 

The man sitting next to me – not his first visit, apparently – picks up the Silly Putty and removes it from its plastic, candy-colored egg.  He is rolling it out as the call is placed.  “Hello!  Can you hear me?”

The woman on the other end delivers an asthmatic greeting.  “I cad hear you, yeh,” she gasps.  “I’b sorry I’b dot inna office.”

The man next to me molds the Silly Putty around the plastic egg it came in, smooths its surface.  I turn away.  “We’re not,” I say.  “You sound completely contagious.”

There are polite chuckles from everyone but the man with the putty, who is working an elaborate design along its outside edge. 

“I think I’b gettig bedder,” she says.

Bless her.  She sounds as bad Tuesday as she did Monday.

The meeting proceeds, as meetings are wont to do, but I can't pay attention.

Like the hypnotic, glowing pulse of late-night television, my eyes return, again and again, to the Silly Putty, to the basket of toys.

“Go ahead and take one,” the office's resident whispers.  “That’s what they’re there for.”

But the thing is, I don’t want one.  And I don’t want him to want one, either.  I want to get to the point of this meeting, I want to learn what it is I don’t know, and I want to return to my desk, to write it up, to incorporate it into what I do next.

I don’t want to sit at the kids’ table.

I close my eyes, the better to concentrate on the woman on the phone. 


Holy Hannah.  I have entered "crotchety office worker" territory.