Another way to amuse yourself at work

So, my group at work is "leading by example"* and as a result, I have moved from my office to open plan. (Door, walls...how I love and miss you so). As such, I sit and stare at 3 other attorneys all day, one of whom came onboard about three weeks ago. Dilbert has nothing on us at this point. This morning, not really thinking that I am in full view of my co-workers, I take out my gallon-bag holding my daily prescriptions and start laying out my pills. As I am popping roughly 8 pills into my mouth I look up and see one of my co-workers staring at me. Now, I am not psychic but sometimes you just know what someone is thinking (or at least I pretend I do). As he watches me medicate myself, you can see him dying to ask why in the world I am taking all this medicine. Almost immediately after the curiosity, stark fear chases across his face. This man should never play poker.

I imagine his internal dialogue went something like this: "holy crap that's a lot of medicine. How can she swallow all of that at once? I wonder why she is taking all of that......dear lord, is she sick? Is it contagious? I am sitting less than 8 feet away with nothing between us!"
At this point, I smile at him and ask, "which explanation would scare you less: I am the resident drug dealer or that what I have isn't catching so long as you cross your fingers in front of you and say ewww cooties?"

I am strongly considering giving myself my weekly shot in front of him next week. Just imagining myself bare ass in front of my co-workers is enough to give myself a chuckle :)

*Leading by example-another fine example of corporate speak...translation: you're getting screwed but you have to be happy about it and sell it to everyone else.

Does it all even out in the end?

SO...I have been sitting here wondering about this today. Is it true that everyone gets what's coming to them? Is there a karmic balance sheet? If so, I think I gotta be due some good stuff but enough about that.
As I have been staring a spreadsheets and lamenting my life (why is a lawyer doing property taxes again?) I have been wondering if all that advice about making lists of pros and cons/pluses and minuses actually works. How do you quantify the nebulous? How to rate someone's muchness? If all the minuses are small but beginning to mount but the pluses are nebulous and hard to cound, is this a valid measure? Can all of a person be assessed as cells in a spreadsheet?

All of this nonsense is making me long for the days of grey, of the crazy hypothetical where there is no 'right' answer. I am living in a world of too much black and white/right and wrong etc. Where's the middle ground? Where does it balance out?

A work in progress

Outside my door is a vine that smells like the honeysuckle that my parents used to have. The four-petal white flower emits a sweet, cloying, almost overpowering scent. It seems to have bloomed overnight, one day nothing and the next an oppressive sweetness permeates the air. The scent presses down on me reminding me of the inexorable passage of time, spring to summer which gives way to fall and fades into winter. The relentless reek is almost too much to bear.

Ethics, Integrity....

I have been sitting in a room staring at a poster for the last 2 hours. The poster stares back at me, questioning, accusing. It just inccessantly looks at me. It demands an answer. It will not be silenced.

It wants to know, 'Are you ethical? Do you have integrity?' I can't quite look the poster in the eye or should I say that I can only glance at it out of the corner of my eye for fear that lightning bolts will erupt from it's serifs and attack me.

I keep contemplating its accusation. That somehow it knows that last week I left an hour early because I looked at the clock I have yet to reset for daylight savings and decided that really WAS 4:30. That it knows that I haven't heard a word that has been said in this meeting but I stay because it might be better than being at my desk doing actual work. Maybe it knows that I sold out and took a comfortable corporate gig instead of sticking out the underpaid but oh-so-rewarding prosecution job. Maybe it has already foretold that I want to cheat on my taxes and get a bigger refund. perhaps it is judging me because even though I make all the right sounds of horror and disbelief, I secretly knew your marriage wasn't going to work and kinda want to say 'I told you so'.

Really, I just want to yell at the damn piece of cardboard. "I am not a nice person and you can't make me." So no, to answer its question. I suppose I am not ethical and sold my integrity for vacation and 401k.

Speechless with disgust.

I sometimes hate people. I really hate small minded idiotic back-assward, redneck, hillbilly, chauvinistic......you really don't need to hear the rest of this description. I recently was sitting in an office of a gentleman (and I use this term incorrectly b/c he was anything but) and having been kept waiting I surveyed his office. He had some pro-military posters, photos of guns, some prayer in needlepoint. None of those things really made me raise an eyebrow. I already had a pretty good idea of who I was dealing with and his office decor only reinforced my perception of him.

What torqued me off was his newest addition to his artistic collection. It depicted in a line, Hitler, Stalin and Obama (the latter sporting a new moustache to round out the trio). Now, I am all about the right to express yourself and your opinions. I understand that some really do not like the current President of the United States. That is their right as American citizens. Even so, this struck me as in terrible taste, especially in your office.

I sat in this man's office and couldn't concentrate because the poster distracted me. I couldn't get around it. It made me sick. I tried to keep my mouth shut. I tried to be professional. I tried to simply ignore it. I failed. Finally, I asked him how he could hang something like that in his office. He got this grin on his face and an evil look in his eye. "I knew you were one of those bleeding hearts" Okay, now I am pissed. "My political views and whether I am a fan of our current president or not has little bearing on why that is distasteful. You are comparing Obama to two of the most terrible men in modern history."
His response--what that man is doing to this country is terrible, a desecration, he is as bad as the other two, yadayadayada (I would try to recount more of his position except my blood pressure had skyrocketed so high I couldn't hear anything but the pounding in my ears).

"Quite frankly that poster makes me sick and so does your justification for displaying it. How dare you trivialize the atrocities those men committed by even suggesting that Obama's politics are on the same level! How can you disrespect the memory of so many innocents that were tortured and slaughtered? Do you understand what that poster actually does? You mean it as a dig at Obama but by suggesting that what the President has done during his service to the USA is even comparable to the other men you make what Hitler and Stalin did less horrible. You spit on the experiences of the survivors and desecrate the memory of the dead. You really should think about statements like that and the power behind them."

Him--"You could have just said you were Jewish."
WTF?!? Yeah because the only way I would be sensitive to the message that poster is sending is because I'm Jewish? "I'm not Jewish".
A look at confusion came across his face and he just shrugged at me like it was some sort of crazy mystical reason why I'm reacting the way I am.

I don't think I'm one of those overly-sensitive (I'm trying to think of the way a friend describes it), hyper-politically correct social crusader. That poster just made me sick and I think it is necessary to confront that sort of callousness.

I would really appreciate some thoughts on this. Am I a hypocrite b/c I criticized his choice of expression? Did I do the right or wrong thing?