Bummers All Round

First, the all-over work bummer for those I’ve not told in person: the whole department that I work for is being laid off.  I guess it’s not that bad of news for me since I’m not really in the dept. that much, and serve a completely different function, but I still think that my two day a week sustenance is coming to an end.  They’re decentralizing (which I don’t think makes any sense in modern business) and so everyone will gradually lose their jobs as others in other areas are trained on how to do those jobs.  So, I guess that’s a bummer for most of the people there, but i kind of doubt they’ll be doing mass layoffs before xmas, you never know with that lot though.

Now to the real bummer, The Bummer.  She doesn’t work in my area any more, as they’re consolidating left and right, but I still get to see her about once a day when she pops her mousy little head in to pick up some papers.  Often these paper pick-ups are accompanied by complaints (which seem to be getting more jolly, like she’s not so down about it, she’s kind of excited or maybe thinks her luck is so bad it’s now funny) about her life in general.  Same old complaints: mostly about her sick dad.  Something new that’s come to light which makes her situation even sadder is that she’s recently dropped the bomb that her whole family hates her.  So, she takes care of her Dad with her one brother, but the rest of the family hates her.  “They don’t want anything to do with me” were her exact words.  For me, this is mind blowing because this lady is very nice, she’s just incredibly annoying – I have no idea why a whole family wants nothing to do with her.

On the bright side, she does have some new complaints, and her new excitedly incredulous delivery makes these complaints worth hearing.  About a week ago, I asked her how she was doing and was met with

“It’d be going a lot better if I could get these darn warts off my foot” while she limped past me to share the same complaints with some co-workers.  I didn’t respond at all but figured the next time it came up I should try and get a bit more out of her.

So, a couple of days later I saw her again and asked her how she was doing and got a similar reply:

“These darn planter’s warts are getting bigger on the bottom of my feet and are making it hard to walk around.”

To which I replied “Can’t the Doctor just burn them off for you? With some Nitroglycerin?”

And she seemed please to share the following information with me.  I feel like she was anticipating someone having some kind of experience with warts; someone who would know the regular procedure so that she could share her outrage at her Doctor’s aberration. “He’s not going to try that yet.  He told me to buy some stuff from the pharmacy to put on it but it’s just not working”.

My response: “Oh, was it Compound W or something?” (I had warts when i was a youngster, I know the lingo).

And to this she gave her best response: “I don’t know what it is, but it’s killing all of the skin on the bottom of my feet!”

Just amazing.  Such  a gross picture and she was almost proud to finally get it out.  Afterwards she seemed to be limping a little less, the weight of that information no longer putting pressure on her painful foot warts.

~ by beenhavingsomethoughts on December 2, 2008.