A Friday Mystery

To give you a little background, my boss is very anal-retentive and also fairly self-righteous. Not always the easiest combo to deal with, as I'm sure you can imagine. Well he just happened to run out of gas on a very busy highway on his way home from work yesterday. This is completely uncharacteristic of him. As he was telling me the story this morning I had a good laugh, and then I commented on how priceless it would have been if one of his employees had driven by to see this spectacle. This office runs on mockery and that story could easily live 10 years around here.

And that’s where this gets good – one of his employees actually did drive by. He drove by, saw the President of the company walking down the side of the highway, and just kept on driving. Even better still – this employee actually called my boss (after passing him) to ask if he was having some car trouble. When he explained that he had run out of gas, the employee said something to the effect of “Wow that stinks, see you tomorrow.” While this is somewhat hilarious, it’s also pretty ballsy, and not very nice. I mean who hasn’t daydreamed of that perfect opportunity to stick it to ‘the man’…but how many people would actually do that when it came down to reality? Am I just naïve?

So the mystery is that my boss won’t tell me who it was. He gave me a hint – because he enjoys holding things over my head – but it wasn’t too helpful. Whoever it was told him they were on their way to "have a bite or lay down on the couch”. Wow. Nothing like taking that extra jab. As a clue though, that didn’t do much for me. I definitely don’t know that much about the post-workday habits of everyone around the office. I assume word will travel eventually, but I just can’t imagine which of my co-workers would actually do that.

This whole thing reminds me of a moment I shared with my lovely Beth back in high school. We had the same lunch period our senior year, and we would hop in Beth’s car most days and exercise our oh-so-grown-up off campus lunch privileges. I’ve always preferred to blend into the crowd, so the day that Beth’s little car sputtered to a crawl directly in front of the school as dozens of our classmates drove by, I died a thousand deaths. And oh was I mad! I clearly remember yelling “Who runs out of gas???” What a mean girl. Embarrassment has always made me a wee bit irrational. The good news is that the last time this story came up in conversation I discovered that Beth didn’t even remember it. That’s probably for the best…it clearly wasn’t one of my finer moments. I have yet to run out of gas myself, but the day I do, Beth gets dibs on mocking me!