New Office Furniture, or Watch Your Bowls

Our office is moving. And one of my friends is on the team to choose the new office furniture, among other things. She returned from the furniture scouting outing with the following to say.

"So Lisa," she said, with a significant look, "do you want to know what I was thinking when we were looking at conference room furniture?"

"What were you thinking?"

"I was thinking about your brother!"

"My brother?"

"Yes, your brother, who I have never even met! They had this big glass table! And I couldn't even listen to the guy who was showing us around. Because all I could think of was your brother!"

My brother and I are not, on the surface, much alike. He's big and tall and broad-shouldered, with dark brown hair and lovely dark brown eyes. He has skin that turns a gorgeous color practically the minute the summer sun comes out.

He dresses fairly conservatively. I think it's only the last few years that he's ventured into two colors for dress shirts. It used to be that anything but white or blue was crazy. Now, sometimes he gets a little wild with a check or stripes!

But underneath this normal exterior, he's just as bizarre as the rest of my family.

He's very successful, with this impressive, high powered job. He travels a lot for work, and he meets with tons of people.

So this one day, he said, he was at a client's office. He'd been in meetings all day. He was, at this point, a little tired and bored. He and one of the VPs were walking down the hallway. They happened to pass a conference room.

All the walls were glass. The table was glass. And in the middle of the table? A large, crystal bowl.

My brother had this split-second vision of himself strolling nonchalantly into the conference room, climbing up onto the glass table, pulling down his pants, and taking a poo in the crystal bowl.

He said, "And you know what would happen? That woman, the VP, she'd turn and see what was going on, and she'd flip out!"

"Yes, I imagine she would."

"So she'd have no choice but to call the president of our company, and tell him what happened. My boss initially would not believe it. And she'd swear it was true. And in the end, he'd have to believe her."

"Yes..."

"So then he would have no choice but to fire me! And people would ask, and he'd have to tell them. So everyone in my company would know that I got fired for taking a poo in a client's bowl."

Personally, I think this is somehow related to being raised overseas and his childhood penchant for pooing in flowerbeds.

Anyway, I told my friend this story months ago. I'd forgotten all about it.

She said, "I couldn't get it out of my mind! The whole time we were at the showroom."

"You didn't tell our boss, did you?"

"Are you kidding? You want him to think I'm insane?"

I didn't say I don't care if he thinks she's insane; I don't want him to think I am.