Skip to main content

The Turning Tides

I was recently in Houston with some work friends for a long weekend/vacation. It was a lot of fun; we ate & drank plenty, we saw a couple of shows (Miss Saigon & Wonderland), and there was general merriment to be found. Heck, I even found a guy who used to be in the armed services that taught a class called "Bootcamp" (all you other "bootcamp" classes taught at random gyms, I'm pretty sure you got nothing on this guy). It was a good time, and I'm glad I went.

But you know what worries me? On this trip, it felt like my friends were slowly taking more liberties with messing with me. It's not like anyone was out and out being a jerk (if they were, we'd have words). No, it was far more insidious & devious than that. It felt like a slow turning of the tides, with yours truly on the receiving end of the crashing wave.

Don't believe me? I present to the jury Exhibit A: after watching Miss Saigon, a couple of people joked that I reminded them of the Engineer. If you haven't seen the show, he's the one who's part comedic relief, part hustler. He swears, he's a pimp for the girls, he's always trying to cheat people, and he's generally the opposite of strait-laced. And they compared him to me. Innocent old me. Yeah, I scoffed, too.

It gets better, though. When I expressed aloud my disbelief, one of them actually clarified, "oh no, you don't remind me of the Engineer. The Engineer reminds me of you." So, I'm the cloth from which the Engineer is cut, or I'm the Form of rogue-ish behavior (who says I wasn't paying attention in class?). Great, that makes it *so* much better.

But wait, ladies & gentlemen of the jury, there's more. Friday lunches have become something of a tradition with the work crew, but not everyone is in the office on the same Friday (we have flex schedules). A couple of the regulars just switched their schedules, so on the Friday that I'm in the office, my lunch options have become more limited. You know what the understanding, empathic response to this was? "Heh, sounds like that's your problem, not ours." Admittedly, this was late on a Sunday night, and we were a couple of pizzas and a few glasses of beer/wine in, but still. No love for the brown kid.

I'm not sure I like where this is headed. Combined with my recent slide down the social ladder, this could be trouble. Next thing you know, they'll actually be teasing me. Openly. And I can't be having that. No, I need to nip this in the bud. If it weren't for the fact that the office is generally tame, I'd be tempted to start multiple prank wars. Or declare a few blood feuds.

That's it, I'm off to go scheme up an appropriate response.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New York City Trip (Day 3)

By the third day of the trip, I was tired enough from the previous day's adventures/subway rides that I felt like sleeping in. And sleep in I did. I think I woke up at something like 11:30 or noon. Of course, that meant that a later start to the day, which started the vicious cycle all over again. By the time we rolled into Manhattan, it was about two in the afternoon. I had tentatively set aside Sunday to see something on Broadway, so we headed over to the tkts booth for discount tickets. There were actually various 3PM options, and after mulling our options, we figured it'd be a good idea to catch one of those. We settled on The Toxic Avenger , which was actually an off-Broadway option. However, we hadn't eaten yet, and the show started about 15 minutes after we got our tickets. Enter the food carts. There happened to be one right outside the theater, and the guy charged a little bit of a premium for the convenience. Still, I was hungry, and I had yet to try...
1 comment
Read more

Moment of Truth

I forget where I first heard it (I think it might have been Descartes), but I have long been a fan of the notion that certain things just have a " ring of truth " to them. If you've never heard the idiom before, the basic idea is that some things are super-true. They are not just true, but they are so obviously true, that as soon as you hear them, you recognize the truthiness inherent in them. I usually get excited when I hear one of these, since it means that I am a tiny bit less ignorant from that moment forward. For the first time in memory, though, I experienced the ring of truth. First, let me paint the scene with a little bit of background. I'd made plans to have dinner with my friend, but we'd agreed to play it by ear. The end result was that we ended up settling on a pretty late dinner in a local spot. That worked out just fine, since we weren't shooting for gourmet, we just wanted to grab some food and catch up in the process. So, we headed out to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Backlog

I am an information junkie. Always have been. I'm one of those people that cares far more about the storyline in a video game than the actual game play. At work, I will spend time researching things related to solved problems, because I want to know exactly why it failed in the first place. And if someone learns something new, I want to go see what it's about, because I want to know what they know. I know it's not exactly the average outlook on life, but it is what it is. Anyhow, this mentality leads to my habit of tracking various websites, blogs, and other internet web sources to keep my information flow constant. Doing all of this manually is tedious at best, though, so I use Google Reader  to organize all of these feeds. It just makes things simpler to have a single source of RSS feeds, so that I can quickly browse through items related to my interests. Given all of that, it should come as no surprise that I also try to keep up with my feeds on a regular basis. I ...
Post a Comment
Read more