Of Cabbages and Kings: office stories

Alphabet that spelled trouble.... Minestrone with a mission to destroy... Or chicken noodle with some hate on...

The type of soup matters little. It's legacy lives today, in a scar for the world to see.

I know now that my doom was inevitable. See, I love soup. From bisque to beef barley, I slurp them all down with equal lunchtime gusto...

It was just a question of when the right elements would conspire to seal my fate.

Like the microwave at work-- one of those super-high-powered jobbies, where you put something in for 20 seconds and it comes out glowing green and you need to handle it with tongs.

Or the newfangled style of plastic wrap, called Press 'N' Seal. Which never states that once pressed... 'n' sealed... the wrap is rigidly unwilling to reconsider any later reassignment of its duties.

Or me, just having things other than 131 degree soup on my mind.

I'm not sure how precisely it happened. A time set too long, followed by a too-enthused tug of the Press 'n' Seal, I suppose. But in an instant, soup cascaded over my screaming hand...

Soup slid down the leg of my jeans like lava. Soup was on the floor, the cabinets, the countertops. And I shrieked like a citizen fleeing Pompei, and ran to the sink.

One of my coworkers-- we'll call him Ted-- eyed the scene with the placid observation of an old man rocking on a New England porch. "That's some hot soup," he said helpfully. "Maybe you put it in the microwave too long."

I resisted telling him what he could do with his Pepperidge Farm commentary.

Meanwhile, my friend "The Knave" came rushing in to see if I was dying, and to help clean up the soup. That moment, I even forgave him for making me listen to William Shatner sing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds during our commute. Of course, that's another story.

Together, we looked at my poor right hand, red and unnaturally shiny in the kitchenette light.

"That doesn't look good," murmured The Knave with a frown.

"Aw, the skin hasn't sloughed off," Ted replied with a wave of his own-non scalded digits.

"Hasn't sloughed off?!" I found myself saying shrilly.

The Knave may have had to hold me back, I don't remember anymore.

Now, because I'm me, the giantest nerd in all of Nerddom, I thought for some reason that I would not only finish out the work day, but I really should try to eat the rest of my soup.

To my surprise, I discovered I no longer had a taste for it. Once you've been attacked by your edibles, the magic is gone.

Within the hour, I was radiating heat like Joan of Arc on bonfire day-- and developing nice big blisters the size of grandma's button earrings. And that's when I realized, my red right hand was a ticket to anywhere I wanted to go.

A wave of the red right hand at my boss? "I'm going to leave for the day and go to the doctor's..."

"G-ah!! Go, go, go!"

A wave of the red right hand at the doctor's office receptionist? "I don't have an appointment, but can someone fit me in?"

"Ohmigawd! OH. MY. GAWD. This way! This way!"

Second degree burns.

I don't think this was quite what Nick Cave had in mind with his wickedly eerie song, somehow. But the power of the red right hand-- if not the pain-- is one I'll kind of miss.

Today, the hand is just de-pigmented to a bisque white and tans badly, giving me a spotty leprosy of sorts every summer. It's the only thing that makes me wish Michael Jackson could actually swing that comeback he's been talking about. I wouldn't mind having an excuse for a single glove.

I've finally gone back on soup, as well. Yet every now and then, when my Campbell's Chunky Chicken and Dumplings is bubbling just right, steam squeaking melodically through the Saran... if I listen very carefully I swear... I can just make out this vague haunting refrain...

You're one tiny victim
of that catastrophic can...
Burned and deflected with
a red right hand

Or, maybe it's the wind.

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OH, AND BEFORE YOU GO TODAY.... Just a quick order of business-- You may have noticed, Of Cabbages and Kings now has a brand new URL of its own! Huzzah!! The blog is now officially at http://www.cabbagesnkings.net . So for folks who are kind enough to link to Cabbages, if you could take a moment to update your links, I'd be mightily obliged.

Thanks folks, and have a super (not souper) weekend!

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Humorbloggers
Humor-blogs

Pie charts at two in the morning...

I'd stared at the Powerpoint screen with sleep-bleary eyes-- briefly slipping into more soothing hallucinations of coconut cream pies...

Hot apple pies...

And any other pie that wouldn't make me label the friggin' primary and secondary axis.

Yes, I was drifting away on clouds of mind-meringue at this point. I'd been up for almost 24-hours. It was our corporate user conference. And my supervisor would be giving this very presentation... at 8am this same day.

I'd known this was coming, of course. Why, the presentation had already been approved, photocopied and bound. So naturally my boss decided that 2 am the morning of, was the perfect time to look at it and make changes.

It was some kind of Pre-Presentation Insecurity Syndrome he suffered from. Where only at the very last minute could an intelligent, gregarious and authoritarian personality appropriately channel his inner fears and deep-rooted lack of confidence...

And slough it off on down the Corporate Feudal System to us Marketing Paynims.

A skillful Upper Management Two-fer, really.

The well-conditioned paynim I was, I always questioned my own sanity during these moments. Didn't I remember getting the final approval on this presentation weeks ago?...

And then the final-final approval a few days after that?

And oh-- what about that final-final-final approval just two days ago? Where we revised the revisions of the revisions? I recalled a final-final-final-final approval for that, didn't I?

Well, the mind meringue got in the way and I figured I had to be mistaken.

So at 2am, as my supervisor peered over my shoulder breathing anticipation and cold coffee on my neck-- I figured if I could just make these last-minute additions to the revisions of the revised-revised revisions, things would finally be buttoned down.

Meringue makes you naive.

So I added the pie chart. I put in the data my supervisor requested. And waving goodnight to his beaming thanks, I staggered off to my hotel room for four gritty hours of sandman time.

Six a.m. found me groggy, but all was well. The customers seemed happy... My supervisor seemed happy.... The conference center was at Disney so cartoon bluebirds chirped and some broad in poofy sleeves was in the hall singing something thematic...

Maybe "Whistle While You Work" or "Someday My Contract Signature Will Come."

Even my supervisor's opening session started off all right...

Until we bit into the poisoned pie chart.

Now to this day, I don't know if in my weariness of the few hours before, or my desire to just get the thing done, I'd simply overlooked it...

Or if my supervisor noodled around with it some more after I left.

(Whatever, I'm fully willing to take my slice of responsibility here.)

But when the pie chart came up on the giant projection screen, the title was right... the percentages were right... but the labels read like a RandMcNally Roadmap, big as day:

East
West
North
South

Even on four hours of sleep I was pretty sure geography had very little to do with our computer software.

Well, most anyone giving this presentation would probably just look at that and try to shift quickly past it. Or perhaps just mention the labels were incorrect, tell the audience what they should be, and move on.

But remember that whole Authoritian/Insecurity Combo Pack?

My supervisor took one look at that mislabeled pie chart, stopped dead and said with the kind of melodramatic horror Vincent Price was so good at:

"This is wrong!... This isn't supposed to be this way!"

Creepy organ chords might have even played, I'm not sure anymore, I was frozen in slow-mo.

Because he met my gaze as I stood there observing from the back of the room, and he extended a shaking, accusatory finger. He tried to add a note of humor to his voice when he spoke, but it fell just a little flat:

"She did it! It's her fault!"

I kid you not when I say that sixty people in the room... customers I'd been dealing with for years and sales reps I'd dealt with every day... all turned around to look at me, their faces pale and blank.

I watched one of my other supervisors-- Jeff-- wince, his beard bristling with what I think now might have been empathy.

Even Snow White in the hallway stopped sweeping and singing, and turned to peer in the conference room door.

I felt my face redden. I felt my head start to swim. So I did the only thing I could possibly do in this sort of situation...

I smiled and waved. "Yes, yes, hi... It was me."

And you know, it was at about that point in my Marketing Paynim career that I thought I might want to get out of the event planning field...

There just wasn't a big enough piece of the pie in it.

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