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Tanktop Lady

There’s this middle-aged lady who annoys the crap out of me by merely existing. Both of my regular readers know that this isn’t an unusual occurrence. What is unusual, I guess, are my reasons why. I only have two:

1. To quote Roseanne, she has a voice that bends steel. She has one of those heavy South Side accents at just the right frequency to torture my ears. On top of that, I’m convinced that (much like me) she doesn’t do any actual work; she just wanders from cubicle to cubicle, all day long, yammering as shrilly as possible. I don’t think she’s doing this specifically to drive me nuts, but…she drives me nuts anyway.
2. She’s constantly overheated. I’ll admit, the office isn’t exactly cold, but I’m a fatass who sits around in flannel shirts all day (on the rare occasions I work all day), and I don’t break a sweat. So for somebody who’s little more than skin and bones to get hot enough that she feels the need to traipse around all day in a tanktop, it’s…just weird. But she has this weird air like she’s metaphoric hot stuff (as every man in our giant compound rolls his eyes in unison), so she wants to show off. “If you got it, flaunt it,” unfortunately, lacks a contingency plan for those who think they’ve got it but…don’t. At all.

In the grand scheme of things, these issues aren’t huge. With the exception of escaping through the stairwell right next to my cubicle, I try to avoid leaving my cubicle as much as possible, so I don’t generally bear witness to her traipsing around in less clothing than anybody else in the office. And when I do hear her voice — well, sometimes even turning up the headphones isn’t even enough, but usually it can drown her out. So really, her annoyance factor is minimal.

That doesn’t mean I’m not gleeful when she gets busted down a notch. Call me mean, call me bitter, call me the unrepetant king of schadenfreude: I love it when bad things happen to people I dislike. Especially when I dislike them for ridiculous, superficial reasons. Somehow that makes it sweeter, as if it’s confirming my superficial reasons have merit.

So last week, we had a staff meeting. These are, by and large, utterly boring and a complete waste of time. When some new people took over the department a few months ago, they threatened to have weekly staff meetings but, thank God, that plan fell by the wayside. We actually haven’t had a staff meeting since they announced (then retracted by email a few hours later) that we’d be having them weekly, and I think that was way back in November. So a few hours every four months isn’t so bad.

But seriously, one of the items on the agenda was: “Dress code reminders.” Dress code reminders? Are you kidding me? Does anybody even violate the dress code?

Answer: yes. One single person in the department violates the dress code, and she — and only she — was the reason this was put on the agenda. It was almost like an intervention, because right up there on the big screen, “No tanktops.”

Tanktop Lady, who happened to be leaning against the wall next to me because she came late (I would have offered my chair, but I have a policy against being nice to people I can’t stand), was stunned and horrified. “What about summer?” she shrieked, and as she spoke the screen flickered and a ceramic vase shattered.

The Big Boss said, “Well, there are some tanktops that are a little more formal, and those are acceptable. But those thin, just-came-from the-gym-type tanktops —”

“Wifebeaters,” another employee added helpfully, which prompted a five-minute discussion from old fogies about whether or not that was an actual accepted term for the type of tanktop; most of them had never heard of it.

“So those aren’t allowed,” the Big Boss finally said and watched Tanktop Lady’s face fall. I almost want to say the Big Boss had the tiniest bit of glee herself. I hate this job, but I like the cut of her jib.

I snickered, and Tanktop Lady looked down at me, so I pretended to cough as I stared down at my feet.

I think life is better this way, although with our recent heat wave (it got up to the 50s yesterday, and only yesterday) the office has been warmer, which has prompted a lot of bitching about the heat from Tanktopless Lady…oh man, now that just gave me the image of her topless. I have a cyanide capsule for just that purpose. Hold on while I

Posted by Stan on February 15, 2006 3:56 PM  | Permalink | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace | Digg It