Collating, Damn Collating

by tess

Since we haven’t heard nearly enough about The Great Collating Incident that occurred nine years ago, I’d like to provide some additional information. Gretchen very kindly stayed late (or was it one of the many weekends we were locked up together?) to help me work on a project. She did so not only because she is a dedicated employee but also because she could see that I was drowning in a project much too demanding for my tiny little brain. She had ulterior motives: she helped me because she didn’t want to go home and because I paid for her food. Now I may be slightly off base here but I think when a woman hangs out with you for free food that makes her more of a date than a colleague. And maybe that’s why it seemed okay to make her cry. See, all my dates cried. All of them. Every. Single. One. So you can see how that would seem totally normal to me: food = date = tears. Of course there are those who might employ deductive reasoning to surmise that I was a seriously crappy girlfriend. Deduce away, eggheads, I was an awesome girlfriend. I just happened to date every loser between Bangor and San Diego!

But back to The Incident. Gretchen tried to help me collate, but because she’s more of an artistic, outside-of-the-box kind of thinker, the collating was neither as sprightly nor as defect-free as one might have wished for had there been a wishing star handy. Which, sadly, there wasn’t. So there might have been some sighing, eye rolling, and testy words tossed about. For those of you who have spent more than twelve consecutive seconds with me, you know that sighing, eye rolling, and testy words are par for the course on a good day. So why, on a not-so-great day, this completely commonplace behavior struck Gretchen as cry-worthy I cannot fathom. Was she PMSy? Had she quarreled with some lame-ass ex-boyfriend who wasn’t fit to lick the sole of her lipstick-red stiletto? Had she just gained half a pound and split the seam of her favorite boob-sling … errr … shirt? We’ll never know for sure but when in doubt of your own guilt over making a dear friend cry: deflect, deflect, deflect!

Now just relax all you Gretchen Groupies out there in the blogosphere. God gets me back!

The next day I boarded a plane to NYC with my boss’s boss. It was my first business trip ever and I was predictably hella-nauseous. Happily he sat in First Class so I could suffer convulsions in the relative peace of Coach. Not long after takeoff, I started reviewing the pages that I had re-collated after Gretchen tippy-toed out of the office. In a moment of horror forever crystallized in my brain, I recognized that I had twelve copies of The Wrong Version. Thirty seconds later, six and one-half feet of fuming Italian male (looking fabulous in a charcoal suit, might I add) came striding ferociously down the airplane aisle toward me. Apparently he had come to the same God-forsaken conclusion. The next twelve hours were a living hell on earth that I cannot bring myself to re-live nine years later. The Goddess of Getting Even had most assuredly wreaked all kinds of vengeance on my soul that day.

So in conclusion, dearest Gretchen, if the collating was monotonous, I’m sorry. If I was a hateful mega-beast, mea culpa. But I gotta say, G, if you thought my impersonation of Godzilla was scary, then you really should have been there to see The Man’s head explode all over the cabin of that plane. Bones, blood, and brains hanging from every surface. And yet somehow we all lived to tell the tale.

NOTE FROM GRETCHEN:
The Date Theory. Everything makes sense now. And I think it proves something else: We are definitely meant to be friends: bowing to each other's superior greatness, fantastic wit, and deep wisdom. No dating relationship can be built on that kind of thing because a dating relationship sort of needs to dwell in at least a margin of reality.