The Suit BOOMS and sparks a peon revolution

There is a person I used to work with that I'm going to call: The Suit.

The Suit irks me to an intolerable degree. There are a multitude of reasons, on this day I'm going to recount to you I was particularly annoyed by a particular character flaw.

Before I hang this person out to dry, I'd first like to say when I was out with the gals one night, we were making fun of his personal appearance. I'd like to point out for the record that this is not usual and customary behavior for me. I revel in making fun of things like personality traits and quirks, character deficiencies and poor grammar. Things people say, flaws in how people think, how they punctuate, et cetera. In my opinion, those are acceptable things to make fun of because they are all VOLUNTARY.

No one is forcing a person to say, "Them are really cute shoes you're wearing today!" In fact, I believe with every fiber of my being that if a person really thinks "them are acceptable Englishes," well then they deserve to be made fun of. Grammatical horrors like them are were supposed to be corrected in elementary school, is that not correct? I'm NOT being mean or implying that if you didn't go to college, then you're not educated properly. I'm saying that a person that says them are is a person that wouldn't graduate from First Grade.

My vote is that any person that says them are is begging to be ridiculed, so why not by me?

But jeering at The Suit that night . . . I do feel remorse about that. I really don't think it's right to make fun of things that can't be changed, such as height, body type, etc. My apologies to The Suit.

That being said, The Suit vexes me to the point of lunacy. If Them Are is the pimple on the butt of MLA style that will one day lead to the suicide of grammatical genius, well then The Suit is the boil on the butt of appropriate behavior toward non-career'ed coworkers that will one day lead to a peon revolution.

Did I lose you? I lost myself, that's for sure. It happens.

Let me throw cleverness out the window; the analogy just didn't work out this time. So I'm just going to simply say: The Suit treats coworkers like stupid, unskilled, menial laborers and it totally PISSES ME OFF.

As a person who is relatively self-assured and accepting about my own level of intelligence, typically this type of attitude wouldn't get under my skin. I would just let it roll off my back in an Eleanor Roosevelt type of way ("No one can make you feel inferior without your consent"). But as a highly sensitive, newly discovered non-career woman, The Suit makes ulcers form on my internal organs.

Case in point: the Boom.

Confused? I'd love to enlighten you. Here we go:

Regular office tasks (view my resume for a complete list)(ha ha) are beneath the offices of The Suit. The Suit is above making copies, using the copy machine in any way, stuffing envelopes, stuffing an envelope, sending out mail . . . you get the idea. Apparently The Suit has so many important thoughts in his little pea-sized head that there just isn't room for anything else like remembering how to push the start button on a copy machine or that an ellipsis only has 3 dots. When any of these tasks come up as part of his job, well . . . he would just give them to me to do.

Sending out a piece of mail, for example. The Suit will bring me a letter or a flier (Or, tricky tricky! A letter and a flier) and proceed to explain to me: "This all goes together in this envelope, then it needs a label, and then BOOM! It's ready to get mailed."

BOOM? BOOM??

The boom is, oddly enough, not the sound of my head exploding because The Suit feels the need to explain to me how to send out a piece of mail.

I'd like to take a moment to clarify an important piece of information. More important than Downey not being in the room when Kendrick gave the order to give the Code Red. Here it is, the TRUTH: The Suit and I have the same effing degree! We both have a Bachelor of Arts, mine in English, his in Fine Arts.

When he comes up to me and explains how to place an item in the mail, I want nothing more than to say: BOOM, you're no better than me! BOOM, you put your pants on one leg at a time!

BOOM, shut up!

The reason he bugs me so much is because I'm relatively certain that The Suit is using the word BOOM not to annoy me (although it does, without fail) but rather as a substitute for something he wants to say but doesn't.

I've been wondering what BOOM could possibly be replacing? Here's my best guess. The sentence started out: "This all goes together in this envelope, then it needs a label, and then BOOM! It's ready to get mailed."

BOOM! = If you don't keep on top of these stupid office grunts then they just run amok on you. I better come back and check that this little stupid office person--what's her name again?--puts this is the mail and not in the garbage. I bet she can't even tell the difference between the mail and the garbage. Should I explain the difference to her? Nah, she'll never understand it. I learned the difference getting my super important Fine Arts degree--there's no way she could ever understand the scope of my almighty brain.

I am having more and more difficulty keeping my face under control when I hear The Suit coming or see him out of the corner of my eye. Once I heard him in the hall and I just got up and walked away so I wouldn't be there when he came by. No explanation, no smile in the hallway . . . nada. I just got up and left.

The really bad news is that my ire is becoming more and more visible to the naked eye--soon he'll start catching on.

Another case in point: Three little things

The Suit came to my desk and said to me, "I need three things!" He didn't say what the three things were, so I calmly asked what he needed.

He sighed impatiently, and said very clearly and precisely, like he was talking to a mentally unbalanced person: "I . . . just . . . need . . . these . . . three . . . things."

My response? "What . . . three . . . things . . . do . . . you . . . need?"

He got angry at me; his voice got squeaky and high at my insolence . . . I just needs these three things! "WHAT are the three things that you need?" I asked again. Everyone in the office could hear his indignation at the amount of impertinence he was being forced to tolerate.

I just want these three, easy things!

"WHAT DO YOU NEED?!" I could barely keep from screaming. And someone who sits nearby was laughing at the whole scenario, had the audacity to find it funny that my blood pressure was no doubt 30 points higher than average. And The Suit continued to get angrier and angrier.

I just need three things!

And . . . THERE'S the ulcer.

I still don't know what the effing hell he wanted.