Urban Thought Collective

While making my weekly rounds to pick up time cards from everyone in the building, it’s not uncommon for me to notice any changes around the office.

Like Jessica in accounting, who manages to decorate her cubicle for every holiday on the calendar. Even the Canadian ones. Having worked at this place for a while now, I quickly noticed that her usual ceramic jack o’ lantern bowl filled with mini Snickers and Twix bars had been replaced by a Frankenstein. “My grandson was running in the house and broke my ghost. Damn kids. His mama don’t believe in whippin’s, but I sure did swat that boy a few times with his belt, and told him if he said anything to his mama, I would do it again,” she’d shared with me when I asked about the replacement bowl.

Another colleague, GiGi, added a new photo to the gallery that has taken over one of her cubicle walls. I know she gets in early and prints out her pictures using the color printer and the City’s photo paper, but I don’t say anything. In these tough economic times, I guess even the $0.09 Wal-Mart prints are steep these days for some of us.

But today, after turning the corner from Accounting and heading over to Tech Services, I found myself getting an eyeful of two of the biggest additions to the Department yet – a brand new pair of breasts pasted onto the teeny frame of our Technology Assistant, Monica. They were like POW, propped up nice and high for all to see and damn near taking over her cubicle. In so much shock at the sight of them, I could barely remember why I’d stopped by in the first place, stammering a bit before remembering that I needed her time card.

Call me a hater if you’d like, but by the time lunchtime rolled around, I was hot. For one, as the VP of the building’s IBTC (that’s the Itty Bitty Titty Committee), I wasn’t too pleased about losing our esteemed President, Monica – the one person in the office whose chest could rival mine in a surfboard simulation contest – to the opposing team (which I’ve dubbed CC&D – C Cups and More). Lucky for me, my derrière more than makes up for what I lack up front. But the other thing that pissed me off was the issue of her time. As I flipped through her last few time cards, I noticed that she used sick time (rather than personal or vacation) for her improvement project, which just doesn’t seem fair to me.

At first, I wondered to myself if she’d been frank with our boss Danny about why she’d requesting sick time in the first place, or if she’d simply skipped the specifics, telling him that she’d be under a doctor’s care for a few weeks without any other explanation. Moments later, however, I found my answer in a note that Danny must have attached at some point to one of her time cards indicating that, indeed, he knew exactly what sort of care she’d be getting. He’d signed off on a letter from her plastic surgeon, who’d indicated that Monica would be off for two weeks for breast augmentation surgery and recovery.

Well if that’s the case, I suppose that the next time I go in to see Olga for a bikini wax, I’ll let the City pay for the time I’m out of the office, using my sick time to cover me. Anybody who’s had a girly wax knows that that is some painful mess. If you really think about it, waxing is sort of like having an operation since it involves having hundreds of parts being extracted from the body in a single rip. Sure, losing a pubic hair isn’t quite as traumatic as having an appendage or some vital organ removed, but it ain’t a day at the spa either.

Come to think about it, any sort of enhancement should be fair game for paid time off if Monica can use time just to fill up her bra with saline. Manicures, pedicures, eyebrow threading, hair appointments, extra time at home in front of the mirror with my pore strips – you name it, I’m gonna claim it.

Or, I can just keep on doing what I’ve been doing and lie to Danny about all of my “illnesses”. Shoot, I barely have any sick time left on the books anyway.

Peace out – Diane Brown, your new IBTC President.

Diane is (quite) a character on the online soap opera Buena Beach (www.buenabeach.com). Her weekly insights on what’s happening at the Beach are featured exclusively on Urban Thought Collective.