The Rules

I want to tell you about my upcoming date with Pool Boy. But I promised, as a reward for having discovered my blog, not to write about it.

But he just wrote about me so…does that mean all bets are off?

The rules are nebulous, Ladies and Gentlemen. Furthermore, I never met a rule I didn’t want to break.

I keep this character flaw under wraps for the most part. But now and again, I cannot contain it. I blame the women in my family.

Once my grandmother was visiting us in California. She was a religious woman. She went to church everyday. She was a hat and gloves kind of woman. Very proper, well spoken and as mentioned, educated.

My parents were having a party and she was sitting in a chair, tolerating the American heathens. At one point, someone asked about her thoughts on Ian Paisley. (He was this guy of considerable political influence with considerable contempt for Southern Ireland and it’s Catholics.)

My grandmother placed one gloved hand over the other and politely remarked, “I think someone should shoot the fucking bastard.”

My father, they say, passed out and my grandmother became the “hit” of the party. In real life it doesn’t always work out that way.

Just days before I was “laid off” from my former job it became clear that our CFO was escalating the words and actions of the peons. I was one of the peons. She would often get the story “wrong” because she didn’t really understand what any of us did for a living. Everyone knew this was happening. Everyone censored their remarks around her. As my former colleagues will attest, I constantly forgot. I would make incriminating comments all the time to the “shhh” of my colleagues. This woman was formerly an ally so I couldn’t believe it. One day, I believed it after watching the grown woman whispering like a schoolgirl in the office of our President.

When she returned to her office I waltzed in and accused her of being a “ratfink”. That is the word I used. I further went on to query, “where, exactly, in the job description of Chief Financial Officer does it say “must be a ratfink?”

She confessed immediately because, after all, she was a Christian woman. She said something about it being her “fiduciary duty”. I cleverly retorted, “bullshit”.

I was not the hit of the party. I was gone 3 days later.