ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I bonded with my gamer coworker last Friday. She had a spare printer in her cube that she wasn’t using and she offered to give it to me so I wouldn’t have to walk like eight feet to the printer every time I did a journal entry. She brought it over and we set it up. It is one of the old HP LaserJet printers that never die, so while it is old and yellowy looking, it is a solid piece of machinery and of course it works perfectly. “Cool beans!” I said.
“I say cool beans!” she said. “Nobody says that!”

We enthused about this for a moment. “I think we just bonded,” I said.

“We definitely bonded,” she said.

“High five!” I said. We slapped hands.

I was glad we bonded, because it confirmed my suspicion that she would not think I was a freak for the calendar I was about to hang in my cube.  My boyfriend and I have this sort of tradition where every year he purchases the new Extraordinary Chickens calendar for me as sort of a gag gift around my birthday or Christmastime.  I never took my chicken calendar to work before because I did not like my last job, but I decided to take a chance this time and I brought it in to hang in my cube.

I decided based on the interesting things she has hanging up in her own cube, that my gamer coworker would be able to appreciate my decor.  I was correct.  My gamer coworker liked my chicken calendar. We flipped through it month by month so she could see all the chicken pictures. She agreed that they are quite extraordinary. I hung the calendar facing her cube and told her that at any time, she need only turn her head a minimum of 45 degrees to see extraordinary chickens.

If I didn’t think it would be really weird to do this, I’d consider tearing the pages out the calendar after December and hanging all the chicken pictures up in my cube so I’d have full-circle chicken coverage. It’s not that I’m obsessed with chickens. It’s more that I think it would be hilarious to have a cubicle full of chicken photographs.

But I won’t do that. It might jeopardize my painstakingly constructed disguise as a normal person.