“You’re so quiet,” say the people at work.
“Am I?” I ask. “Should I be hollering?”
“Yes!” they say. “You should!”
There is a woman who works in the office and she is so loud I can hear her coming from the parking lot. Last week she was in a room that shares a wall with my desk. She was photocopying, or trying to. She doesn’t usually photocopy things.
“GODDAMN IT!” I heard. I moved my papers around on my desk and smiled a little.
“MOTHER FUUUUCKER! COME ON! COME ON!” She banged something. The copier rattled churlishly.
“OH I MEAN SERIOUSLY YOU GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING–”
If I could type in something louder than all caps, I would. She’s that loud.
I love that it’s acceptable to shout swear words in the office where I work. I’ll probably hold my tongue for another month or so, if only because the paper I have to move around requires all my concentration at the moment, but knowing that letting a curse word slip free will endear me to rather than estrange me from the people I work with goes a long way to making me feel comfortable and like I have found a place I could stay a while.
Hah! Finding a work culture that suits one is fantastic. The last office job I held was quite casual, as we only had clients actually visit once in a blue moon – as long as we weren’t on the phones assisting anyone, we were free to be as bawdy as we liked. And given that two of our supervisors were part of a local Rocky Horror theatre troupe, that could get quite bawdy indeed.
E said “fucked up” in speech class. It’s a long story, how that happened. Starts with me saying, back when E couldn’t get the hang of initial consonants, that I would praise the day he finally said “fuck,” and EVERYONE telling me it would come back to bite me, and me saying I didn’t care.
His speech therapist, as it turns out, is pretty religious. Came back the next week wearing a gold cross, which makes me think maybe she thinks my kid is a little bit evil. So I guess I do care, if only because I’m sad that he totally freaked her out, but I’m not entirely sorry.
I’m glad there are no gold crosses among your office mates.
Being able to freely swear at work is a HUGE plus. Most if not all arts organizations are very curse-friendly environments.