You Say “Walkway,” I Say “Gap”

I did survive that bout of what I guess was food poisoning due to eating garlic in oil that had been left (by me) out of the refrigerator for a week. Live and learn.

And I did move back to the crappy cube, slightly improved by the addition of a filing cabinet to block the gap that leads to the next cube. One of the people who sits near me informed me that I needed to move this filing cabinet because it’s blocking a “walkway.”

I told him the Cube Lady had said to put it there, and that was the end of that. Don't even start with me on this.

As for the loud eating guy, he’s working from home two days a week, which does help. I think it's not actually when he eats per se; it's that when he eats hard candy or cough drops, he makes quite a tremendous slurping sound. A few days ago he was doing this, and I saw, with displeasure, that he had a whole bag of cough drops sitting on his desk.

But I had made up my mind—I mean, what a ridiculous little problem—to learn to live with it, so when he started up—and he has been known to do this for hours on end—I told myself, "It's just a sound." And then I told myself again, "It's just a sound."

And then I went over to him and said something like, "That’s the sound I'm talking about," and he said, "I'm having a cough drop," and I said, "Yes, I know you are. I can hear it. We can all hear it." And that was certainly extremely rude on my part. I mean, I wouldn't have said that to my grandmother, for instance, or my father.

(Of course, none of my relatives would ever make a sound like that to begin with.)

Then I got to thinking about the first of the Twelve Steps: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, and that our lives had become unmanageable, or something like that (today is my 29th sobriety birthday; you’d think the Twelve Steps would be etched, word for word, in my brain by now).

People in Alcoholics Anonymous use this to mean exactly what it says, people in Al-Anon use the exact same wording to express the inability to cure or control someone else’s problems with alcohol, and it can also be applied to pretty much anything: I’m powerless over slurping noises and I’m powerless over gril—all kinds of things.

Part of my problem is that the list of things I think I’m truly powerless over is extremely short. As I think I’ve said before, if it’s something I can achieve without the use of a firearm, then I’m not powerless over it, or so I have tended to think.

It seems to me that making a slurping sound is optional, not required or inevitable. Since it's an optional behavior on his part and it annoys me extremely, shouldn't he stop?

What I realized was that I'd better try to ACT AS IF I'm a person who's not bothered by this kind of thing, because I AM (actually) POWERLESS over his behavior, even if it seems like something I shouldn't be powerless over, because it is something he could easily stop doing.

I must admit that nagging him to change the behavior is not working. It's probably making him angry and upset, and it certainly is me.

So I have to pretend that this is something he is powerless to change, even though I really don’t think that. I have to pretend he has some disease that causes a revolting slurping noise.

A couple of days after I was thinking about this, I read something about the Serenity Prayer and how to interpret it. The Serenity Prayer is “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I guess I’m sorely lacking in that last.

The person who was writing came to think of the things she could change as the things God would WANT her to change. I don’t believe in God, but that did strike me as a useful way to think about it. If there were a God, She probably wouldn’t direct me to pester my co-worker until we end up in a fistfight. She would probably say, “Here is a golden opportunity to practice being with things as they are.”

Not long after this, I realized that the other guy who sits across from me, the one who spends the first four hours of each day reading the newspaper from cover to cover, spends the latter four hours of each day looking at scantily clad young ladies online. It’s not pornography per se, but I feel quite sure is equally discouraged by company policy.

I’m not sure what to do about that, if anything. I do believe that is absolutely not appropriate for the workplace. Yet, if I put my mind to it, I should be able to avert my gaze from his monitor the 20 times per day that I pass by. It is a clue that I think it SHOULD NOT be happening. Many of my most grievous self-inflicted problems begin with the thought that this or that SHOULD NOT be happening.

Nonetheless, I may convey to him that he is not in a private location and that it would be nice if he saved the R-rated research for when he's not at work. I've only heard of three people being fired from the company I work for in the ten years I've worked there, one for frequenting sexually oriented websites, and another for making off-color remarks to women in his group (I met that guy; he followed me all the way to and into Walgreens one day, and commented on everything I was buying: "Mineral oil! Huh! What are you going to do with that?").

(I suppose you want to know about the third guy. I can't go into the details of that one, except to say I'm really sorry he's gone, because he was in my group and now I have a lot more work to do!)