Two good days on the job

Different jobs, though

I was puttering around just now backstage at the Substack site, which meant I was lost, when I came upon an anecdote bearing on a current issue (tampons in boys’ rooms, dear Mother of God) by a writer I don’t know, Hanne Blank Boyd:

Years ago I had a job at a small workplace that had two single-user washrooms, and each of them contained a little cupboard where the people who menstruated kept a communal stock of tampons and pads. This was no big deal until one day, the man who’d been hired as the new general manager happened to idly peek into one of the cupboards and completely lost cabin pressure, spending the next several days ranting about how inappropriate and disgusting it was to anyone who didn’t run away fast enough.

I told him he was being ridiculous and needed to grow up. He threatened to give me an official warning about behavior, a prelude to probably getting fired at that workplace.

So I waited a couple of weeks and then rolled into a meeting he had called, with a wrapped tampon tucked behind my ear like a pencil. Said nothing, minded my own business. He could not stop staring at my ear. I watched everyone else in the meeting trying not to giggle as they realized what was going on.

Finallly he could stand it no longer and asked me flat out why I had a tampon behind my ear. I took it and stared at it in mock shock and horror, then looked at him and said, “Oh by God, what did I do with my pencil?!?!”

The room burst into laughter so loud the woman who owned the business came in to see what was going on and when someone told her, she laughed and looked at her manager and said “You deserved that.”

Then she turned around and walked out.

It remains one of the single best days I have ever had on the job, any job.

“Thank you, great story,” I commented. Then, pleased with myself and things in general, I clicked idly ahead, as one does. And here’s what popped up next: sweaty multi-millionaire guys bumping, hugging and just naturally expressing their heartfelt response to Steph Curry’s having hit his awesome gold-medal-final-victorious three-point shot for the U. S. A. in the Olympics! Against France! And the TV announcer exclaiming:

“IT’S A GOLDEN DAGGER!”