Office Companions and Yellow Ducklings
Ponderables:
– How is it that I can be insomniac and wide-awake at 6:00 a.m. only to be jolted out of a deep sleep at 6:30 a.m. by my alarm clock?
– Why is the Kitten’s favorite place to sleep while I’m at the computer directly behind the wheels of my chair?
– How do the disc jockeys know how to time things so that the first thing I hear when I turn on the radio is the last ten seconds of my favorite song?
– Why is Cattitude’s affection for any given food item in direct proportion to the likelihood it will make her throw up?
– Is it a requirement that I will only be able to figure out where I put some pricey item after I’ve gone out and purchased a replacement for it?
– What cosmic karma ensures that my Mr. Coffee at work will die the final death five seconds after the onset of my most intense caffeine craving in months?
I haven’t mentioned my office companion, The Mouth, in a while now. She’s the one with the non-stop vocal cords whose office is two down from mine. I haven’t mentioned her much because she hasn’t been around much in the past few weeks. A big project that she’s spearheading is under way, and the data-gathering phase has been intense. She’s putting in 70-hour weeks at the moment. It would be much easier to feel sorry for her if she didn’t feel the need to announce to me that she’s putting in 70-hour weeks every time I see her. It would also be easier to feel sorry for her if she’d just go home when she was done, instead of hanging around complaining about how long her day is. No lie – I have seen her hanging around her for over an hour bending people’s ears at the end of the day. She makes few friends with that habit, since we’re all working as hard as we can so we can finally leave for the day.
Anyhow, she passed through our area this morning to check her phone messages before she headed back in to the main building to continue her labors. On her way through she informed me in what was almost a joyful tone of voice that she’d been working so hard that she had gone and caught a cold. All I could do was stare at her for a few seconds. I have asked *everyone* in my department to avoid contact with me if they were sick, because if I catch something and get sick I get kicked off the transplant list until I’m fully recovered. She knew that, and yet there she stood in front of me sharing the same airspace. When I regained my composure I asked her if she could please avoid me until she felt better. At least she had the good graces to admit she’d forgotten as she hightailed it out of my office.
A very mean part of me hopes this cold of hers hangs around for a while, so that I’ll have a few more weeks to enjoy some continued respite from her ramblings. I am ashamed of myself, but I just can’t help myself.
Wednesday nights are the regularly scheduled chat time for the liver transplant group I discovered on the web. I spent a little over an hour in the chat room with them last night. It really puts into perspective how good I have it. The woman who runs the chat is the wife of a man who got his transplant last November. He had a heart attack two weeks ago, and they had to stop the Hepatitis treatments he must continue to receive because of that. Now he’s spiking high fevers. She had to abruptly leave the chat room last night because his temperature went over 101 degrees Fahrenheit. That is not a good sign, and I hope that all will be OK for her. A couple of the people in the chat have liver cancer, and live with the constant worry that it will metastasize before they get their transplants. One woman’s husband has severe cirrhosis because of drinking, and can’t even be put on the transplant list until July (you need to be sober for six months straight before they’ll even do the full evaluations). One person on the board rejected their first liver and is now on his second. It makes it hard to feel sorry for myself, when I’m still fully ambulatory and my worst symptoms are chronic diarrhea and itchiness.
On a lighter note, I stopped by the company store today. Our company has a small convenience store in it that employees can purchase our products at as well as convenience items. I’m friendly with the women who work there, and had just popped in to answer their questions on how I was doing. By the checkout was a new display of Easter novelties, including a box of tiny Gund duckling toys that quack rather realistically and persistently when you press their tummies. Yellow, with orange bills and feet and round black eyes, they were absolutely irresistible. I got three. Two I’ll give to my sisters for Easter. One is for Kitten from Hell, to celebrate the first anniversary of when I unjustly accused her of stealing my billfold last year. That’s the nice thing about keeping a journal … it’s so easy to go back and revisit past guilts.