Paula’s Email
No self-pity. Stay on your business, girl. Do not dwell on personal drama. STAY FOCUSED!! Breathe in. Breathe out. You got this. Now get to work!!!!!!
… she typed into her word processor, telling herself that she would delete the passage before sending out the weekly mass email to her co-workers reminding them to submit their self-assessments no later than Friday end of day. It wasn’t until about fifteen minutes or so after she had already sent the message that she suddenly realized, oh shit, she had indeed forgotten to remove that first part from her email. Now the entire office was going to know about the embarrassing levels of neurotic she was. Though indeed everyone had read it, no one ever brought it up or mentioned it to her. It seemed a topic of conversation too uncomfortable for these socially awkward wage slaves. Look at it this way, she thought to herself while trying to calm down, everybody feels this way. It’s late-stage capitalism: everybody’s depressed and neurotic these days. It’s a totally normal, not unusual thing. Boy, could she not have been more wrong. During regular bouts of break room small talk and mandatory niceties in a crowded morning elevator, she would often try to break the tension or instill some ill-conceived humor by making every other comment something similar to: “Well, we all sure do hate life don’t we?” or the ever groan-inducing, “huh, well now I wanna die. But get in line, am I right?!” She would often laugh uproariously after such comments to let the listener know it was indeed meant as a joke. But it was always met with a look of concern or puzzlement. She vastly misunderstood how normal her co-workers were. No, even though they all worked in internet security, they were not all chronically online, as the kiddos say, as her. They were not all spastically deficient in paying attention to anything for more than five seconds like she was. And they did not particularly enjoy the bleak levels of humor that brought her so much joy. Can’t joke make a joke about anything these days, she lamented by herself. Uptight bitches, all of them.
After the email incident, Paula would go on to head one of her weekly bullshit seminars in which she pretended to be more important than she really was by relaying tons of useless, easily emailable information to a group of overworked underlings. When she heard them snicker during her meeting, she couldn’t tell if it was because they were laughing at what she did in the email or if they were laughing at the funny cat meme she had put into her PowerPoint presentation. Please be the latter, she quietly pleaded to herself. And so continued her day of silent embarrassment. Thankfully for her, everyone forgot the incident by that Monday. And it would only be a matter of time before she did something else that would give them all something new to feel awkward about.