A Conspirancy

The cleaning people are fucking with me.
I’m convinced.

It started when I tried to pick up my glass jar ‘o paper-clips sometime earlier this year.
It didn’t move.

I pulled harder.
No dice.

I huffed and puffed tried to pry that sucker off with all my might, until I feared that I’d break the glass and cut my hand (although I did consider the bright side of having to leave work early).

It was beyond stuck to my desk.

It stayed that way for the better part of 3 months. It became a novelty; a funny story spread around the office about how the cleaning people must have super-glued it to my desk.

And then, one day, after showing my novelty paper-clip holder to someone from the IT department and daring her to try to move it…

….she did.

And I was all, “well, I must have loosened it for you”
It was a good time, but it had come to an end.

And then the bag.
The same free shoulder bag, obtained at a medical conference, that has happily lived under my desk since March of 2008:

Two weeks ago?
The cleaning people tried to kill me with it.

The strap from the bag – the same strap that has been in the same position since March of 2008, was suddenly relocated in such a way as to grab the toe of my shoe as I tried to get up one day.

Guys, I seriously almost died
(thank god for my ninja-like reflexes).

The strap, that sumbitch, was violently replaced in a less dangerous location while I muttered “Jesus fucking Christ” and angrily kicked the bag.

But they weren’t finished with me.

Later that week, they threw out my cup.
Granted, it was a red solo cup, but I used it each and every day to take my lunchtime doxycycline.
So I replaced it, cursing the cleaning people under my breath because really, is that necessary?!?!
Yeah…they threw that cup out too.

At my wits end, I got a third cup, and taped a note to it:

PLEASE do not throw out
(and a smiley face for diplomacy)

The cup was there in the morning; I was victorious. But then…I think the cleaning people declared an all-out war.
I came to work last week and things on my desk were out of place.
Seriously out of place.
My screen and keyboard were pushed back, my papers were reshuffled, and my little chotchkeys – tiny representatives of the personality I once had before becoming a corporate zombie – were awry.

You see, a corporate environment is like a zoo, and our little cubicles, our enclosures, must be maintained in their current state, or we balk like gazelles at the first whiff of a predator. We encounter the smallest hint of rearrangement or disorder, and we lose our shit.

So I lost my shit.

An email to the proper individual ensured that this snaffoo would never happen again, but I was…for lack of a better term…all out of wack for the rest of the day.

And somewhere, a cleaning person is getting chewed out by his/her boss about an email sent from my company.

I dread to see what they have in store for me next.