I was looking for something in the murky archives of my LiveJournal, when I came across a post about finding my high school year book and I laughed because 10+ years later, this is still relevant.

 This has been said to me a lot lately, for some odd reason.

Pretend like this is my year book — leave a comment. It’ll be fun. Maybe.

Tina was my secret santa. I had a sneaking suspicion because the reply to my thank you note the other day said "YOU ARE WELCOME" and Tina never uses contractions. I don’t think she knows about them.

Then it was awkward because people were hugging their secret santas and in my head, I could hear echoes of Tina’s voice talking about past sex acts and nude sleeping and lesbians wanting to buy her cars so instead I flashed her my best smile and said thanks.

She really did get me some cool shit though!

So, supposedly there’s one of those Steelers games on tonight, and Kim and Eleanore are being all football-y and speaking in a lexicon that I am not privy. Oh, but I WOULD be able to join in the revelry if COLLIN had taught me the ins and outs of that dumb sport like he said he would! Can’t I count on anyone anymore?

"We have to win this game, I mean, if they want diamonds and gold," said Eleanore, quite philosophically.

You get diamonds and gold if you win a football game?! I’m signing up Chooch.

"Mmm mmm mmm. Sonofabitch. Play defense now, come on fools." I love listening to Eleanore when the Steelers have their fingers around her proverbial nutsack.

So, Secret Santa — sorry, Holiday Gift Bag, how un-PC of me — festivities have been underway all week. I don’t know who picked me, but they’ve been doing a bang up job. On Monday, in a little red box with glittered snowflakes, sat a bejeweled beetle pin and let me just tell you that it’s practically hemorraging with awesome. I was really excited and yelled, "It has my name written all over it!" hoping my secret gift giver was within earshot. I immediately pinned it to my shirt (after sticking my flesh with it first).

Tuesday, I got a black candle burner with a fierce red dragon emblazoned on the front, the kind of angry dragon that perhaps a fan of Godsmack might have tattooed on their chest. I’m not a big fan of dragons (or Godsmack) normally, but I was pleased that they took note of the fact that I did not want anything with flowers or meat on it. I guess the opposite of flowers would be a dragon, to some people.

Yesterday, I got a really fancy-looking hot cocoa kit — a bottle filled with cocoa powder, a bottle filled with marshmallows, a whisk and a measuring spoon, and two big brown mugs. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with directions, which is a bad, bad thing for someone like me. I tried to wing it last night, but it tasted crappy so I sulked for awhile. Bob said it was probably bought at the dollar store and at first I was offended that he would make such biting accusations against my secret gift giver, but then I thought, "Who am I kidding? Bob’s probably right." Even Kim said, "That doesn’t even smell like it would be good." Still, I’m sure if it was made properly, and with milk instead of water, it would have tasted quite indulgent, like the kind of rich beverage a Queen would sip while watching thieving peasants get beheaded. The mugs are really nice, though.

I left a note on my desk before I left last night, thanking my secret gift giver. Today, there was a reply, in large typed font, in place of my note. I kind of felt a surge of excitement because it reminded me of the time I wrote a note to Santa when I was little and the next day he wrote back. On my own purple notebook paper, even! And I didn’t even find it suspicious a few days later when I watched my step-dad sign his name on a check. "Hey, you and Santa write your ‘D’s the same! Neat."

Today, I came in and found a large rectangular object all wrapped up in shiny red paper. Gum Cracker ran over and said, "Hurry up and open that! We’re all dying to know what it is!" (She thinks I’m her secret gift giver, which I was initially before I traded with Kim, so she’s been talking sweetly to me all week.)

It’s a sparkling gold fabric memo board. I was going to take it home, but then I decided it would be put to better use here. I pulled out some older photos of Chooch that I have in my desk and slid them underneath the ribbon.

"Please don’t put your serial killer friend in there—Oh, Erin, no!" Kim begged.

It was too late.

What has:

• pole-dancing,
• spiked egg nog,
• exotic cheeses,
• Santa with a hard-on,
• shiny door prizes like panini presses and a magic wand for can-opening ease,
• a chocolate fountain centered around an array of fresh fruit and lady fingers in scandelous poses?

Not our department holiday party.

No, we got cold cuts drowning in a mucous-like moat, cheese slices that needed the aid of Freddy Krueger’s nails to be surgically removed from each other, a bowl of frozen fruit slices, and a giant sheet cake that had nauseating pink flowers piped precariously around the perimeter. (I deduced at once that it was going to be an offensive supermarket bakery cake, so I walked past it with my nose in the air.) We got scratch off tickets and Tina’s hair collar and a platter of bland cookies that were at least moist and not stale like I had initially suspected.

The cheese lasagna was a real treat, though.

1. A dayshifter who sits next to me. I rue the days she works late because she laughs like an engorged elephant cock is lodged in her throat and she’s trying to summon her inner Vesuvius to phlegm it back up. She handles a runny nose like your typical Teamster: loud, wet and crackly, like a bowl of exploding Rice Krispies is draining down her throat. She’s nice though.

2. Hey Tina, ever since you switched to the day shift, something really confusing and alarming has arrested me: I think I like you. Not in a ‘Hey, let’s go French in a bathroom stall’ kind of way, but in a ‘You’re over here talking to me yet I have no urge to inflict any bodily damage.’ But no, I’m not sad that I wasn’t sitting at your table. And while I imagine playing games with a bullyishly dominate personality such as your own is a dream come true for some (like perhaps a tribe of indigents who have never played games before) I’m not jealous that your table was playing  Taboo, as rousing and scintillating as it sounded.

3. Big Bob. He stole Collin’s Hot Pockets and made him cry.

4. Non-Big Bob’s plate of meat goods were a little too close to me. I felt violated and kept imagining someone gagging me with that slab of ham.

I was happy to be seated at a table of socially capable people — Lindsay, Bill, Brandie, and (Non-Big) Bob. However, we were joined by Stanley. I am fortunate to not have to deal with him because he works during the day and sits over by Bill and Lindsay. He has no filter, kind of like a child, and random strings of rudeness spray from his mouth in fairly consistent intervals. When we were walking up to the Mezzanine, one of the more heavy and elderly employees was up ahead, taking each step with deliberate slowness. Stanley yelled up, “Hey, Donna, we need to get you an escalator.” Someone behind him called him on his rudeness, only making him justify himself. “What? It’s true! Donna needs an escalator!” If I had to deal with that brand of idiocy for eight hours a day, one of us would have lost our job by now.

Stanley spent a good fifteen minutes diligently rubbing off five scratch off tickets, and even after inspecting them closely above his head, he still found reasonable cause to have Lindsay double-check. I took a picture of his crotch from under the table. Sadly, no boners arose from the rub-off frenzy.

And Bob, poor Bob; he stared off into the distance most of the time, mourning his other half’s absence. (Collin called off.) He seemed lost in thought, and I wondered if he was thinking about all the nights he and Collin spent playing their little celebrity chain game to pass the time while braiding daisy chain crowns for each other’s heads.

One of the games everyone (and by everyone I mean the Daytime Clique) was playing consisted of taping the name of a celebrity to each player’s back, and then everyone had to take turns asking a question to find out who they were. I told Bob it would be a good game for him and Collin to play and he lit up. “You’re right! I didn’t even make that connection!” Then he smiled to himself for awhile, probably rewinding the Collin-montage in his head.

Bill spoke of foreign-sounding things for awhile before I realized he was speaking in baking-tongue, while Lindsay smiled at me like an adoring fan and laughed at all of my antics, like when I took a picture of this guy who I have never seen before in my life, but supposedly he’s part of our department and works upstairs (if you want to take Bill’s word for it) and then ten minutes later I blurted out, “Oh shit, I think I made myself have a crush on that guy!” Lindsay giggled. In my head, I dubbed her my new work BFF. I’m not sure who the old one was. Bill perhaps, even though working opposing shifts has really driven a wrench in our rapport.

He doesn’t even bring me brownies anymore. I bet he brings some for Tina, in tiny baskets lined with rich Italian linen. Well, they can have each other.

Kim approached our table and asked why we weren’t playing games. Maybe it was just me, but I thought it was pretty obvious that our table was way too cool for parlor games, at least the ones that didn’t involve heavy betting and liquor. “We’re playing our own game,” I said. “It’s where everyone tells me how cool I am.” I smirked appropriately and Kim acted like she was about to be sick.

Since I pitched in a devastating twenty dollars to this elitist shindig, I gave myself a goal of “eat more than you paid for,” but the party started at 11AM and I just really wasn’t hungry. So in the end, I probably only ate $5 worth, which jacks me right off. (However, later on that evening, I had a piece of leftover lasagna for dinner. This is how it was made possible:  “Tina, you know how you’re always looking for a reason to leave your desk?” Tina looks at me, slightly frightened, before cautiously saying, “……yes?” I jump in for the kill. “Will you get me lasagna?” What? I didn’t want to lift that big pan-y thing out of the fridge! So Tina did. And it was decent.)

Then it was time to go back to work. Most people offered to help clean up, but I just got up and left.

My death row pen pal Greg, a charming gent with whom I have been exchanging delicately penned letters for the past six years, sent me a recent photo of himself today. Naturally, I hung it on my wall at work and every time my boss turns around to talk to me, she screams, “Ugh, I wish you would take that down!

It looks like he’s leering at me!

“

Then I sent her his website and she refuses to look at it.

Ten minutes later, she shuddered and said, “I can’t believe you sent me that.

”

What? What’d I do?

There was this awesome seafoam green desk for sale at my job. A retro metal kind from the ’50s, like one that a teacher would prop his feet on and wish was mahogany, while the students were busy writing lines. It had nicks and scratches in just the right places, deep drawers perfect for stowing hatchets and paper clips, and rounded edges so my kid wouldn’t bust his head open.

The original asking price was $20. I’d slow my pace each time I went outside for a break, dragging my fingertips over the top in admiration.

“I really have to have this,” I would tell Bob and Collin each and every time like clock work. I’m sure they cared.

A few days later, a fat red line was struck through the $20, and a tempting $15 was scrawled above.

“Holy fuck, that’s a steal of a deal,” I thought in amazement.

By Friday, it was on sale for TEN DOLLARS.

Last night, I told Henry about it.

“For what?” he asked when I whined about having to have it.

“Just to have!” It’s annoying when I’m expected to have a reason for everything.

He rolled his eyes and said I could alert the guards today that I wanted to buy it. I channeled my inner-adult and decided it would be a Good Idea to maybe measure the thing first, make sure we’d have room for it. Kim just happened to have a tape measure in her purse, because she’s the best boss ever.

I ran out to the hall excitedly. Then I stopped and spun around.

The fucking desk was gone.

GONE.

I asked the guard if someone bought it and she very ambivalently said, “Yeah, I guess.”

“Could you find out?”

And she walked away. She probably had better things to do, like fighting cubicle crime and shaking down vending machines.

I came back to my desk, holding back some serious tears. Honest-to-God salty eye-water. I couldn’t stop picturing the desk in various positions around my house; sometimes there would be rivulets of candle wax flowing over the edges, other times it would be flanked by an armada of merlot while wearing a spread of fine European cheeses

Yet another dream unrealized.

“Here,” I mumbled, handing the tape measure back to Kim. “I won’t be needing this.” I waited for her to ask why not. She didn’t, but I continued on as if she had.

“Because someone bought it.” I waited for the condolences to roll in.

“Oh, too bad.” And she turned her attention to much less important matters, like work.

“I wanted to sit at it and pretend like I was a PI,” I said quietly. Dayshift Brandie laughed and Kim muttered, “You gotta love her. I don’t know why, but you just do.”

I’m angry at the lack of sympathy I’m receiving over my loss.

Dear Diary,

I was outside enjoying the nice view of the parking lot and bus garage in the distance, when a shifty man wearing maroon track pants and a hockey jersey approached. He claimed that he worked here but left his security badge at home and could one of us let him in.

A flimsy excuse if ever there was.

I shook my head no, but Collin shrugged and said sure. I gave him a Very Stern Look, which he either didn’t see or ignored, and he let the homicidal wanderer into our ONCE SAFE place of employment. He couldn’t have, oh I don’t know, PATTED HIM DOWN first?

Now there’s some jilted ex-employee (or homeless cave dweller with a data processor rape fantasy which he’s trying to bring to fruition) roaming the halls of this building and I feel so unsafe. I can’t believe Collin would endanger his fellow co-workers like that. I told Kim immediately, hoping she would say, “Oh, well that’s grounds for termination” but she shrugged and said, “Hmm. Oh well. Next time, just let the guards handle it.” Then she went back to work. Just like that.

Well, I hope she’s his first victim. And while he’s garroting her, I’ll slip away into the night.

Later, I cautiously journeyed to one of the other areas of our floor to snatch Hershey Kisses from the secretary’s desk. (How do they make the hot cocoa ones taste so much like hot cocoa?! It really is quite remarkable.) I speed-walked back, craning my neck around cubicle walls before nervously rounding corners. At one point, my heart exploded when I heard jingling next to me, but then I realized it was just the change in my pocket.

It’s killing me that I’m blind to the stranger’s location. What if he’s taken a hostage upstairs? Or wiring a bomb in the kitchen? Or fucking a toilet paper roll in the bathroom? These are things I desperately need to know.

Just now, as I’m typing this, one of the cleaning people wheeled a giant garbage can down the hallway and I lurched back in my chair. Kim laughed at me, cruelly. She also suggested that I get medicated. “You have insurance now,” she reminded me.

All of this after I JUST had dialogue with Henry about my need for a butterfly knife.

Later,

Destined to be Murdered.

I am naive. I never know when someone has a crush on me, I keep thinking Days of Our Lives will get good again, I think my cats will live forever.

And I never considered the possibility of retaliation after the Pig Mask Showdown.

I spent the first six hours of last night’s shift being psychologically heckled and taunted by Kim. “What’s wrong, Erin? Scared?” Her voice had a chilling cadence that made me suck air past my teeth. I panicked every time she left her desk and was out of my sight. I jumped at the sound of every padded footstep.

Three times she successfully scared the piss from its sac last night.

Three motherfucking times.

1. I was sitting at my desk, working diligently like I do, when I felt the sensation of being watched. A quick turn to my right showed me Kim standing right next to me, right next to me, holding out a pen in prime poking position. I screamed. She laughed and said, “God, I wasn’t even trying!

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”

2. I had scooted over to Eleanore’s desk so she could show me something on her screen. When I wheeled back to my desk next door, I noticed several small wads of paper had congregated on the floor under my seat.

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Wow, I made a mess tonight, I thought as I went back to work. Seconds later, I glimpsed an airborne paper ball in my peripheral. Kim! I jumped out of my seat and craned my neck, trying to look over top of her desk, thinking for sure that she was crouched down in the hallway on the other side. I turned around to tell Eleanore I was going to get to the bottom of it when I saw her. She had flattened herself against the small partitioning that separates my desk from the day-shift woman who sits next to me and sucks back snot like a Teamster.

Kim was doubled over, face red in silent laughter. She had been chucking folded-up scraps of paper over the partition and running her pen up and down it, in hopes of baiting me to peek around. I don’t know how she was able to stay so quiet! I’d have been snorting and squealing and breathing heavily. I called her a little bitch and ran away.

3. During the last hour of the night, I was regaling Collin and Bob with tales of the pizza guy I was stalking (they were hanging on my every word, believe me). I had my back toward the hallway while visiting them in their area, and it was the perfect set-up for Kim to walk all the way around the perimeter of the department and shove something (fanned papers? I was too scared to notice) in my face while shouting. It was so startling that even Bob was jolted.

I had roller coaster heart for the rest of the night and slept with my lamp on. Kim should be a ninja. Or at the very least, a CIA agent.

Today, I walked into work, determined to give her the silent treatment—you know, the most mature tactic I’m capable of—when she said, “I saw these today and thought of you so I bought them!” and tossed a pair of awesome red-and-white striped fingerless gloves layered over a black pair onto my desk.

She’s always fucking with my emotions and I fall for it every time. Because I’m naive.

Operation:Pig Mask didn’t achieve quite the level of trauma that I had strived for, and daydreamed about on my ride in yesterday.

At approximately 8:30PM, I spied Kim entering the women’s room, so I bolted back to my desk and grabbed my delightful mask. I opted to stand vigil directly on the other side of the door, so that as soon as she exited, we’d be nose to snout.

I heard the toilet flush and I adjusted the mask. I was having a  very difficult time breathing in it and the sneaky anticipation had my pee threatening to escape in giggly droplets; I had to keep squatting.

I heard the water running as Kim washed her hands, and I heard the automatic paper towel dispensing as it churned out for her. I had to keep shifting from one foot to the other and my heart hurt from how difficult it was to breathe beneath all that heavy plastic.

It seemed to take forever before she finally pulled back the door and we locked eyes. She didn’t cry or scream or emit Turkish expletives like I had hoped, but she did take a giant step back and her facial muscles seemed taut with fear. Or maybe it was just confusion. After a few moments, her hand flew up to her chest and I took that as my signal to rip off the mask and it felt so good to have cool air hit my face. That mask is a real fucker.

We laughed for awhile, but it wasn’t climactic enough to make a scrap book for the grandkids, and eventually the laughter trickled down into amused intakes of air and we just went back to work.

Today, Kim acted faux-mad at me, but that charade was soon forgotten when I charred a bag of popcorn a little while ago and she became For Real-mad at me.

Gumpopper, rummaging in purse: I can’t find my pack of gum.

Me: :)

Gumpopper: Oh never mind, here it go.

Me: :(

This week, I’ve been working four 10-hour shifts because the system will be down on Friday, which means no work. The only way we were allowed to come in early today was by agreeing to make an appearance at the social. It wouldn’t have been so bad if everyone from evening shift was there, but only Bob and I were retarded enough to come in early and eat shitty hors d’oeurves. The night crew is treated like pariahs when immersed with the dayshifters, especially when our pack is broken up.

Bob wasn’t there when I arrived, and I desperately wanted to get it over with so I got Bill, who’s on the dayshift now, to go up with me. Tina promised she would too but then copped out at the last minute–asshole. Bill had already been up there once and therefore knew of the horrors in store for me. He tried to warn me that it was really crowded up there in the cafeteria, but the prospect of being buffeted in a field of holiday cookies helped me soldier on. Unfortunately, my hunt for cookies was kiboshed by a battlefield of gabby dayshift employees stuffed into a small and overheated cafeteria. I think I whimpered, “I’m going to cry,” three times to Bill. I’m not a social person. Perhaps in a group of three, I am. But I hate walking into a crowd, especially one that’s all loud and a’titter and blocking all of the spreads.

My throat felt constricted and I lost the ability to speak more than the same word over and over. My vision blurred and I momentarily lost sight of my mission.

My shepherd Bill directed me to a table with vegetables and several variations of bruschetta, but then I remembered that I just wanted cookies. “Cookies?” I asked. So he showed me a table that had a punch bowl and one lone picked-over platter occupied by several cookies. I thought he was kidding when he said it was all that was left, but his eyes did not lie.

Apparently, my intense distaste for public interaction rendered my hearing powerless, leaving Bill to have one-sided conversations.

I grabbed two sad oatmeal cranberry cookies (wtf? but they were good), one for me and one for my boss Kim who had to miss the social because of school, and Bill and I retreated back downstairs where they keep us processors locked away.

Fifteen minutes later, Bob came over and asked, “Hey, you ready to go up there now?” and I was like, “Jesus Christ dude, I waited for you but you were late.” Erin don’t wait for no homies. But then I felt bad because he’s still kind of new and he swore he was stuck in traffic. So I groaned and then went back up with him. I waited for him to ladle some festive punch into a styrofoam cup and then hoped we could leave.

“This punch is good,” he said. I agreed and added that it was fizzy, as well.

“Maybe we should stay, just for a little while,” Bob said. So we stood awkwardly off to the side, in semi-silence, not knowing anyone else up there. I saw an IT guy that replaced my mouse, and I’m oddly attracted to him even though he has a slight scent of hoppy aftershave.

“So, fishing, huh?” Bob’s going fishing this week. “Is it the kind where you cut the hole in ice?” I asked, trying to be social. So he talked about fishing for awhile and then we got bottles of complimentary foot lotion (wtf?) and left.

Socials can suck a dick.

There’s a poinsettia on my desk. What am I supposed to do with that?

“Henry didn’t cook for me again; I had to have frozen pizza.

”

“Well, that’s better than nothing. Last time he didn’t cook for you, you didn’t eat anything at all!” Kim laughed as she went to heat up her delicious home-cooked meal.

It took me longer to figure out how to turn the box into a pizza cooker than it took to actually cook the fucker. I was so angry and near-tears by the time I was done, and the muscles in my hands hurt from tearing perforations and folding over flaps.

Tonight, I was daydreaming about going to jail. Just to hang out, you know? (And no, not on conjugal visit day! OK, maybe.) Walk in with a magazine and read aloud some Hollywood gossip while inmates do push ups around me.

Once I murder Henry, I suppose I’ll have a whole lot of time to do that.

Eleanore said inmates smear shit on the walls.

Oh shit, I wish those Steelers played every night because my boss Kim and Eleanore are entertaining the everloving piss out of me, watching their little game feed on the computer.

And then Eleanore gets angry and starts yelling, “You fucking retards!

You fucking pop-eyed Tomlin!” and I don’t know who she’s talking about but it’s making my chest hurt from laughing-strain.

Kim just jumped up and almost missed her chair when she went to sit back down.

Football rules. At work, at least.