When a comic-genius co-worker ruins your career simply by doing a visual joke by dotting the 3-dot pen tattoo “My crazy life” on their hand during a meeting and forces you to break out in laughter—unexplainably. Your boss knows you are psychotic. You know your co-worker was playing you. You start to make plans in your head about retraining for a new career.
Your co-worker is actually very, very funny. Warm. Caring. Just guilty of trying to make you laugh. Sometimes just to break the stress. Even allows you to get in your jokes. Has her narcissism in check. She has heart. Even though she thinks you should go every year to the "Blessing of the Animals" and stand next the dogs, cows, and sheep for your blessing.
At lunch your comic genius co-worker and you even agree on the office romances; like when one man thought he was on a date with another gorgeous co-worker and she thought she was catching a quick, free drink and appetizers. The date was only in his head. Karma for him for when he used and dumped the co-worker chick who actually loved him. Your comic co-worker has all the right gestures to visualize the event. You sort of eat through the haze of unstoppable laughter.
When the comic genius’s one eyebrow can arch so slowly, so ironically, and so brilliantly--- that you are forced to remember your dead parents merely to be back in the mood of the meeting. You know your co-worker is going to mouth what the speaker conference phone shape really looks like after the meeting. A flying saucer with unmentionable, special features.
The words and phrases never stop when the boss isn’t around. Not only does your co-worker have humor that is half-Mexican, half-American, half-British, and half of all of all the comic lines ever uttered from movies and TV shows but has comedic physical presence. The mere move of a shoe has comic touches reverberating from every back-ward turned ankle making it look like it was broken. Don't even bring up what the flashing comic eyes can do.
You make an appointment with a retraining center. You can no longer see career steps on your career ladder working next to this person. The hard part is – it’s not even sabotage. She literally is that naturally funny.
You offer to be her agent. Make money for yourself and her. She always had great apathy about being a star. Did not care about it at all. Has the total contentment of being the funniest person around the water cooler or coffee maker. Even if her jokes make you laugh out loud --- unexplainably---hours later while doing the commute home on the highway. She even has the delayed reaction laugh down-pat. Ha ha ha--- always.
Change is good. Retraining is like cross-training ---being ready for a factory shutdown, a slowing in the economy, a downsizing – right?
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