The Vanilla Asylum

At least once every thirty-six hours, one of my coworkers tries to tell me how impossibly wacky my office is. They say things like, “I bet you didn’t know you were getting in to such a mental institute!” and “We sure do cut up a lot around here” and “Are you having trouble getting used to the craziness?”

My co-workers are the most normal people I’ve ever met. I mean, I like them; they’re congenial, they’re witty (more or less) and they have interesting things to say about non-work subjects. They’re certainly not bland or uptight. But they’re normal; they’re bourgeois anti-revolutionaries; they’re muggles. The daily strongbad breaks (”it’s, like, weird and funny, at the same time!”) don’t disrupt the professional atmosphere. The German shepherds don’t even disrupt the professional atmosphere, unless they think the Fed Ex man is trying to attack our Bold Office Leader; they’re more like a furry distributed fika break.

There are two possibilities here. One is that everyone at work has an excellent deadpan, and they have been teasing me. The other is that in an office park, cubicle signs reading “do not taunt the animals” are actually dizzying heights of hilarity.