I sat next to The Spitter and The Sniffer in my Cube City past. Yes, it's true. I've been truly blessed with a bottomless pit of idiosyncratic cube neighbors.
The Sniffer was really sensitive to smells. If she smelled a perfume or cologne she didn't like, she'd sniff people out until she found the offending smell. Then The Sniffer would inform the offender that s/he could no longer bring that scent to the workplace. The Sniffer was just that crazy to assume she had a voice that people feared. Of course, people did fear her voice...because she was crazy.
One day, the smell of sweet vanilla bean coffee wafted through the morning air in Cube City.
The Sniffer snapped.
"Sniff...sniff...WHAT IS THAT SMELL?" The Sniffer screeched.
Nobody answered. We all cowered in our cubes, hoping The Sniffer would go sell crazy someplace else.
The Sniffer proceeded to barge into people's cubes, making her loud dramatic sniffing noises until she reached a computer programmer who was enjoying his morning brew. We all popped our heads out of our cubes to watch the crazy show.
The Sniffer stuck her nose in the poor guy's coffee mug, sniffing loudly all the way in. She then came up for fresh air and angrily pointed her index finger at the computer programmer guy. "You!" she screamed. "You're the one with the coffee smell that is making me SICK!"
The computer programmer stared at her blankly. I mean, really, what do you say to a crazy person?
The Sniffer screamed, "I forbid you to bring that coffee to work ever again!"
The computer programmer amazed us all with his bold rebuttal: "Are you crazy? I will drink this coffee whenever and wherever I want to!"
The two began a bitter battle of words, and it's unclear who won since we had massive layoffs later that day and they were both let go.
What's most interesting to me is that I could smell the layoffs coming and The Sniffer couldn't. I guess her sense of smell was limited to consumer goods. Correction: Other people's consumer goods. She never hesitated to bring french fries and other stinky food items to her desk each day. She was simply a crazy old bat who was set in her ways and oblivious to her hypocritical practices.
Am I alone in my array of experiences with crazy cube neighbors? Who's the craziest person you've ever worked with?
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3 comments:
Long ago I sat a couple of cubes away from someone who I probably should have been afraid of, but I was young and my brain wasn't fully formed. He was a recent college grad too, not any older than me, he had a very quiet and distant way to speaking, when he spoke at all, that instantly destroyed any desire for conversation you may have been entertaining. He also had that scary ex-marine serious gaze that creeped me out, which is also odd for someone that young.
For lunch, EVERY SINGLE DAY, he would open his desk drawer and pull out a loaf of white bread and a can of beans. He would open the room-temperature can of beans and eat them, right out of the can, along with half of the loaf of bread. EVERY DAY.
Looking back on it I wonder if he was an alien impersonating a human, or a young psychopath honing his eccentricities.
The craziest person that I ever worked with was this insane lady was just simply hateful and rude to every single person in the office. One day, our administrative assistant called me and she was really excited and happy. She had learned that if you typed the mean's lady's unusual name into Microsoft Word, it would suggest replacing her name with "Diarrhea". It turns out, there IS justice in this world after all.
I worked with a girl about my age, also recently married. Thinking we might become friends, I started chatting with her about what they liked to do. As time went on, it became clear that Mr and Mrs. Personality and her husband did nothing. And I mean nothing. Here is the list of things the definitely DID not enjoy doing:
-listening to music (according to her, no CD players, radios or any kind of digital music playing device in their homes)
-watching TV
-reading (despite the fact she was an editor!)
-sports, outdoor activities (ick)
-dancing
-drinking
-bowling (one time Mr. went bowling to the dismay of Mrs. and deservingly caught the flu)
-release of bodily fluids (ok i made that one up but it's not a far stretch)
She did say she cooked, something she picked up when unemployed for a stint. I often imagined them sitting at home with soup bowls. Just sitting there.
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