Dunzo

A funny thing happened to me yesterday. I walked out of my last class, at 6 PM. The hallway of the building was completely empty, except for a few ratty newspapers and the general grime of people coming in and out all day long. It was silent, though, and that's what struck me first.

I have to say, I'm glad that the silence stopped me, because it did. I was maybe ten seconds - no, not even - from just walking out of the building just like I had done for the last five years after every class, but the silence made me take another look. I stood there, probably looking like a complete idiot, trying to think of the next time I would be in CAS. And I couldn't come up with anything. Sure, I could stop in whenever I wanted throughout the next few weeks and summer, but it wouldn't be the same. And part of me, no matter how little I really liked the building, didn't want to recognize that. But the silence, in its way, sort of made me.

I stood there for a few minutes and remembered a lot of the times I was in the building, but as soon as I tried to focus on anything significant, I couldn't remember anything. I tried to remember my first class, and I couldn't remember. I couldn't even remember how I felt as a freshman. Everything was just kind of hazy. The only thing I could sort of feel was this sense of time having gone by.

Five years, just like that. To say it went by fast would be obvious, because I think I've - and everyone has - found that life goes by pretty quickly. There's a completeness to it, though, however strange it felt to know that this really was my last class, because unlike last year when I graduated, there is no next year here. That's one thing I realized while standing in that hallway: I'm done. Like, done-done. Dunzo, if you will.

As my favorite TV guy, Kevin Arnold, says, "Change is never easy. You fight to hold on. You fight to let go." The Wonder Years always had it right. It's never easy to give up something that you've really loved.

And that's the other thing I realized, standing there in the silence: I felt good about the five years I've spent here. Say what you will about BU, about college in general, fuck it, even Warren Towers (hey, I'm in a giving mood right now), but when it comes down to it, the experience I have had here, in these five years, is, top to bottom, completely, everything - something I would never wish to change. If you ask me, I'll tell you that I grew up in my five years here. I could try to explain that more, but I think you just have to trust me that it's true.

Smile?!

Every time I walk by this guy at work, he says, like he's ordering or reminding me, "Smile!"

It drives me nuts.

I try to be friendly and all. I really do. And I try to smile. But when someone tells you to smile, it's probably the last thing you want to do. You really want to just jam a fork into their eye, or something equivalent.

Actually, when you think about it, you never want to do anything once someone tells you to do it. I remember a few years ago, I was at home, and I was really tired. It was about midnight, and my mom was like, "I think it's bedtime, no?" Now, look, I was about thirty seconds from going to bed, but just because my mother had the audacity to tell her 20-year-old daughter to go to bed, I decided to stay up. I stayed up for thirty painstaking minutes, just to get my point across.

Well, it's almost the same thing. I'm just not going to smile when I see this guy. In fact, I might frown, just to really get him going. What's he going to do then, huh? That will teach him.

Since when do people feel like it's okay to dictate facial expression? I don't tell him, "Get that dumb look off your face," do I? No. I say it silently. God, since when do people not learn proper etiquette?!?!

Don't answer that.

Double Whopper

Here's a quick ironic story for you. Today, we had this marathon staff training session at work. Part of that session includes a mandatory sensitivity/harassment information session given by this attorney. Every single person working as part of our staff must go through this training in order to work. It's company policy.

There's this whole gimmick throughout where the guy gives scenarios that might come up at work. If you think the scenario is okay, you hold up a green "okay" card. If you think the scenario crosses the line of appropriateness, you hold up the red "not okay" card. For about forty-five minutes, you're getting a training-wheels session about how not to offend everyone at work and get fired.

So, the session is taking place about fifteen feet from a group of us, who have already been through the training. There are three of us standing around, talking about how long the day is going to be and what our plans are for after the sessions are through. We start approximating what time we'll be done, and then, the one guy of the three of us, my co-worker/boss, goes, "I'm going to Fuddruckers and getting a burger the size of Elana."

Yeah.

YEAH.

I was like, dumbfounded. First of all, that's a pretty insulting thing to say to someone, but the thing is, I couldn't help but laugh because seriously ten feet away was a group of 200 people getting trained on what's inappropriate to say in the workplace. I think making an analogy between the size of a giant hamburger and the size of your co-worker/subordinate pretty much falls on the far side of the red "definitely definitely NOT OKAY" spectrum. Seriously, I felt like stopping the whole session and asking the attorney, "So, what if your co-worker slash boss says that he's going to a local chain restaurant to eat a hamburger the size of you? Is that okay, or is that not okay?" Ten bucks says all of the red cards would be held waayyyy high in the air and this guy would have a meeting with the head of human resources pronto. Like do not pass go do not collect giant hamburger pronto.

The other thing about this is that the guy had no clue why he was being offensive. He kept saying that if he said he was going to eat a burger the size of my real boss's five-year-old daughter, it would be ridiculous. The point, he argued, was that he was saying he was going to eat a burger the size of a human, not that he meant anything about the size of the human to which he was comparing said burger.

Well, I don't care. I still think comparing a co-worker to the size of a hamburger is offensive, and every single female I've told this story to has reacted in the same, "Oh my god, he did NOT say that" way. It's like this, "Who SAYS that?" reaction. Total horror.

So to sum up, while the company paid an attorney a pretty sizeable chunk of change to talk about sensitivity training, ten feet away, I was being compared to a giant hamburger. Huh. I don't know whether that should be a career highlight (like the ultimate oxymoron moment) or, like, a personal life all-time low. Things to think about.