It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts. Last time, even though I was doing the exact job I’m doing now, it was in a different building with different people. My company was sold a year ago and I was sold with it. Other than one warehouse worker, I’m surrounded by entirely different coworkers. Let’s dish the dirt on some current coworkers!

Stripper Shoes

I call her stripper shoes, because she wears shoes like these to work almost every day:

Our office is casual attire. I don’t mean business casual where you can wear khakis and a buttoned down shirt. I mean casual, as in essentially whatever you’d wear on the weekend. It’s really the only perk of my job.

The only rules we have at all are no open-toed shoes in the warehouse and no ripped clothing, and those rules are simply for liability insurance purposes. Other than that, pretty much anything goes. Hell, I even saw this one day (though he was a model hired for a photo shoot for our lingerie company):

Casual dress code, yet Stripper Shoes wears six-inch platform stripper shoes to work nearly every day, no matter what she’s wearing. I’ve seen her wear jean shorts and stripper shoes, not a good look.

For the record, stripper shoes are meant to strip in, not to wear in an office. Even when I wore heels every day, and I could run, dance or whatever else in them, I stayed away from six-inch platforms, because they are impossible to do anything in besides strip. No one looks good walking in stripper shoes, because they’re not designed for walking. They make even the most agile woman look like a newborn giraffe.

Lesbian Stereotype

On the complete opposite end of the girly spectrum, we have Lesbian Stereotype. She walks and dresses like a man, with a lot of flannel and work boots even though she works in an office, and she has a mostly shaved head in the form of a mohawk.

By the way, I’m still mad at lesbians for stealing the shaved head. When I had a shaved head, I never got hit on by women more in my life and I normally get hit on by a lot of lesbians. I think it’s because I’m a bit of a tomboy. I am not, however, a lesbian. I tried it and it didn’t take.

When I had a shaved head, people either assumed that I was a lesbian or in chemotherapy. Eventually, I got tired of the presumptions, which annoys me, because a shaved head was the best haircut I ever had.

Lesbian Stereotype is, in fact, a lesbian, which is good I suppose. If you’re going to be a stereotype, you might as well be whatever you’re stereotyping. She seems to have a mild crush on me. Every time she walks by my desk, she stares at me sidelong.

Oversharer

My cubicle is surrounded by salespeople who talk on the phone all day. This is the main reason I wear headphones. Directly opposite me is the loudest of the salespeople and I can hear her over my headphones.

I know all the intimate details of her life, because she tells them to her customers. I know where she lives, what her dog’s name is, all about her boyfriend, what she did over the weekend and that she went to a nudist beach one weekend. In a year, I think we’ve spoken face to face maybe a dozen times and I probably know more about her than her mother.

Ain’t no know English

I have to deal with our web guy a lot. He seems fairly competent at his job and knows quite a bit about web development. He even has some halfway decent marketing ideas, which continually amazes me, because if you heard him talk, you’d think he was a total raging idiot.

For example, here is a real email he sent me with no editing:

It was written in red, too, which is another pet peeve. At least it wasn’t in Comic Sans.

His emails are a direct reflection of the way he talks. He uses double negatives in sentences constantly. He actually, not ironically, uses the word “ain’t” when speaking in business meetings. How can someone be fairly competent at their technology job and come off as such a moron?

Rainbow Kitten Lady

My company was bought by the same company that bought the company I worked for before that. As a consequence, I work with a lot of people I worked with ten years ago. One of them is Rainbow Kitten Lady. I wrote about her before in an ancient post from 2009, so I’ll just quote myself:

[Rainbow Kitten Lady is] one of the meekest people I’ve ever met in my life. She is so demure that, if you happen to run into her in the narrow hallway, she will back up and make room for you to pass. Always. Most of the time, the process of retreat is accompanied by “Sorry, sorry, sorry” until you make your way on by. The only interaction she seems to enjoy is talking to animals in baby-talk. She never gives eye contact and she wears shirts that have puppies, rainbows or kittens on them every day. She is a living, breathing Cathy cartoon.

Rainbow Kitten Lady hasn’t changed a bit in six years. Fortunately, Wall Puncher, also mentioned in that post, doesn’t work at my company anymore.

I Have To Go…

Another of my former coworkers who I am blessed to work with again is my former manager. Back in 2009, she used her teenage daughter as an excuse to leave work constantly. She’d come over and say, “I have to go. My daughter has/needs/is doing…” whatever. She used that excuse at least once, sometimes, twice a week.

Her daughter is no longer a teenager. In fact, she doesn’t even live at home anymore. So, I was curious as to what excuses I Have To Go would use to leave work early now.

So far, it’s mostly been a range of medical ailments. “I have to go to the doctor, because,” this was this week’s excuse and it’s only Tuesday, “I tripped on a grape this weekend and hurt my back.”

Other excuses she has used: I have to meet my gardener/pool guy. I have to go get ready for Rosh Hashana/Yom Kippur/Chanukah, etc. I have to go take my dog to the vet. One day, she spent over two hours buying dog food. I’ve bought dog food at lunch, too. It takes less than a half an hour to go to the nearest pet store, buy food and come back. I don’t know what she’s feeding her dog.

On election day, she had to go vote. She lives five minutes away and it took her three hours to vote during record-setting low voter turnout when only 1 in 10 Angelinos voted, and most of them voted by mail.

It’s become a running joke with other coworkers as to the most outlandish excuse. I have to go register for the draft. I have to go defend my property from zombies. I have to go stock up on rocket ship fuel. I have to go.