Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Let my ostracization begin (or continue, if you prefer)

Alright, blog. I have a question for you. Should I get fired from my job?

Let me give some backstory to this question. Ahem.

It's raining really hard in Long Island today. Superhard. Except I didn't know this until 12:50 today. I had looked out my window earlier and I couldn't tell, because the sheets of rain were coming down so fast that they were invisible. Problem is, I have to be at work at 1. My car was destroyed a few weeks ago in an accident, so now I'm boned. I can't really afford cabs, but it's also way too late to call one; they usually take at least a half hour in the rain, and then I'd be late. At this point, I might even be late if I walked to work, plus I'd be soaked. Solution? How about biking...?

I often bike to work. It's a short, easy trip, but I've never really biked in superhard rain. I did, however, think it would be the lesser of two evils (the other evil being evil walking). It would get me to work faster, so I wouldn't be late and I'd have minimal exposure to the rain. So I put on my rain slicker, strapped my helmet over my hood, and took off into the rainy afternoon.

Then I got splashed over and over and over again.

I got to work on time, completely covered in rainwater. Turns out, little pools of water that I learned are called "puddles" seem to collect all over the place when it rains superhard, and when I wasn't failing to avoid them, I was getting splashed by cars and pedestrians who failed to avoid them. I got splashed by one puddle so bad that it drenched my entire ass.

So this brings us back to my original question about being fired. I came into work really really soaking wet. My boxer shorts were completely soaked beneath my corduroys, particularly in the butt region. I sit the whole time I'm at work, and I really didn't want to be sitting in a puddle. I get sick kinda easily, and I thought maybe I'd catch a cold or something. So I went to the kitchen and I microwaved my underwear.

WAIT! First of all, I didn't stand there naked; I went to the bathroom, changed out of my boxers, and put my pants back on before proceeding to the kitchen. WAIT! I know people could get freaked if anyone saw me, so just to avoid any cleanliness concerns, I cleaned the entire inside of the microwave with Lysol afterwards. Nobody probably would have known anything had happened had I not left them in the microwave a little too long. So I accidentally burned my underwear a little bit, and a couple of people noticed. Luckily, my boss wasn't in at this point.

So now I'm slightly freaked. I told everybody what had happened, and I was still soaked, so hopefully they believed me. But they all kinda laughed and were like, "That's really weird" and "Why'd you do that?" and "That's a first!" etc. But am I really the only person who's ever heated up their soaked clothing before? So what if it was in the workplace? Thing is, some of the older folks at work are a little conservative, and I'm a tiny bit worried that this story will get back to my boss and then that will be it for me.

Would you fire me for nuking my boxers? Would you have done the same? Please tell me I'm not a sick office pervert. I cleaned the microwave really thoroughly!! OK, I've made my case. Comment away.

5 comments:

christopher said...

Jesus Christ, Jeff, this is probably the funniest thing I've read in the last month. Wow...I'm still recovering and my eyes are still watery from laughing. If only there were some way to convey that emotion in an easy typable form. Oh well.

Anyway, I don't think you should be fired for coming into work wet and microwaving your underwear. Intention counts for a whole lot in my mind, and I don't think you were maliciously trying to poison your coworkers' environment or anything.

HOWEVER, It certainly wasn't the smartest course of action, man. I would've probably just lost the underwear altogether and free-balled it. But firing you would be unfair, 'cause I don't think you really did anything wrong.

However, there's no way you should not submit this question to the Ethicist as soon as you possibly can.

Alex said...

Chris, I think the emoticon for "crying your eyes out is:

?!

Jeff said...

If it strengthens my case at all, the IT guy (who's about our age) tried to get my back; he said that "if he had been soaked, he would have done the same." Yay IT guy.

Also, I think my sub-boss told my boss. Fricking sub-boss.

Geoffrey said...

I didn't laugh as I was reading it because I thought Jeff was implying as the story started that he DID get fired over it and I was really sad. But it's very funny.

I wouldn't fire you, but I would beat up a certain sub-boss...

Alex said...

That's the funniest thing I've read all morning, and I've been up for an hour already.