How many of you have been handed cards to sign and pass around the office? Let’s face it, you really don’t care, you just do it to placate the false sense of unity in the office. I have standard responses to these cards, typically along the lines of:

Marriage: Congratulations on your marriage, may you enjoy many happy years together.

New Job: Congratulations and good luck on this exciting new path in your life.

Baby: Congratulations on your new addition, may he/she fill your house with joy.

Funeral: My condolences for your loss. May you find comfort in friends and family during this time of grief.

You get the picture. If it was actually someone I cared about, I’d get him or her my own card and write out something a little less cardboard. Yet, my apathy has just caused a rather embarrassing predicament involving synchronized cards circulating about the office. One is for “Barbara”, who is leaving FOL for a better paying, less degrading job with the Attorney General’s office. The other is for “Lisa”, who just lost her father after a long illness.

I think it is unwise to use blank cards with generic, vaguely attributable scenery on the front…and I think it is even more unwise to not label these cards appropriately, because what I wrote was, “Congratulations and good luck on this exciting new path in your life.” to a woman grieving the death of her father, and “My condolences for your loss.” to a colleague getting out of this fuck hole.

That blur you see running through the office is me with a pen in one hand and correction tape in the other, desperately tracking down aforementioned cards before I become a spectacle of public ridicule.

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Comments

t

2004-10-29T13:39:54.000Z

Holy crap!  I didn’t know your office was located in Sitcom land.  Does the canned laughter ever get annoying? 

By the time those cards make it around to me, there’s usually hardly any space left, so I typically have to scribble my name in a corner.  My signature is so illegible I could be writing “Kill Your Parents” and it wouldn’t make any difference.

ashley

2004-10-29T14:59:53.000Z

your little slip up makes ashley laugh and laugh, and cringe, and then laugh more.  It could have been anyone of us making that mistake.  At least you caught it.  I quickly scanned to the end of the post to see if you were able to remedy the situation.  whew.

julie

2004-10-29T16:14:01.000Z

that is fantastic!  Travis is right, how has this not happened on a sitcom?  I guess the Office is calling it quits, so they wouldn’t work, but I bet you could sell this to someone.