After ignoring me for about 2 years while I worked in The Firm, the pantry aunty decided out of the blue one day that she shall wash and fill my cup and bottle every day as she does for all the other lawyers on the floor.
That’s really nice, except that she picks up my cup and bottle at about 9am and doesn’t come back with it till close to 12 noon, just round the time I am about to die from thirst.
So I should just get my own water and wash my own cup, right?
But then I can’t!! Because when I do and if I am not at my desk when she comes round [which is really often since I would have either run off to Court, be in my boss’s room or haven’t got to work yet], she’d still pick up my cup and bottle and only return it to me at noon anyway. And I can’t just go up to her and tell her that I don’t want her picking up my water and cup anymore. She might think that I am trying to break up with her and take it personally and stop emptying my trash or something. As it is, she doesn’t empty my trash everyday [because she would come round in the evenings, look in my bin, and cursorily decide on some days that it’s not worth her time to empty it] and as a result I have just killed a cockroach nymph on my desk last week. She also doesn’t vacuum my office all the time too. Sometimes when she comes round with the vacuum during lunch and I am in my office, she just skips my room. When I had a granola disaster in my room a few months back and begged her to vacuum, she told me she would only do it at lunch but didn’t so I picked up all the granola off the floor with my hands through the course of the day.
So I decided that I should bring my own drinks in so that I won’t die from thirst in the mornings if I am not going to Court, which worked out all right for a while.
Then one day while I was sitting in my desk and she came round to return the cups and bottles, she gave me the wrong cup. After about 5 years of me working here and owning the same cup.
One off incident, right?
And then it happened three more times.
Today, she returned my cup to me while I was seated at my desk. It is the correct cup, except that she didn’t tell me that she had somehow accidentally chipped my cup. I only found out when I tried to drink out of it.
No big deal, I thought. I’d just go and buy a new cup during lunch.
Except that if she can return the wrong cup to me on some days even after close to 6 years of me working here, there is a very significant possibility that she’d be so utterly confused if I were to procure a new cup. Her cosmic balance will be upset or something and then she might have a meltdown and throw her trolley full of cups and bottles at me or something. I have no desire to round the whole 24th floor peering into all the lawyers’ rooms to find my [new] cup.
Argh.
ETA at 3:13pm – I have failed to buy a new cup over lunch in spite of scouring the area for one, because, according to School Marm, “Only Christians drink water.” How sad is my life? On our way back from lunch, I remarked that I should just go home tonight and ask my mother for one because mothers always have plenty of these things lying around. And then it occurred to us that our daughters might have this very same conversation about us 20 years from now. :S












