FROM THE MOUTH OF MY CO-WORKER

Part 1

Some co-workers are nice, some are not so nice, some irritate you occasionally, some irritate you all the time, and some live to make your life miserable. Such are the facts or human relationships, and I do not think anybody, no mater how much they love their jobs, are immune from irritating or very irritating co-workers. Yours truly is no exception. My job is generally pretty boring, but my co-workers are surprisingly nice en mass. Of course, they all get moody, cranky and unreasonable, have good days and not so good days, but over all they usually do not annoy me much, with slight exceptions. One of them has a slight case of princessness (or maybe I am getting a bit cranky in my old age, but sometimes she says or does things that I can't help but call princessness); and most of the times whenever I hold a conversation with her, at the end of it I feel like calling her a useful idiot.

So, few days ago another lady came into the office to discuss some kind of professional supplies with her. For some inexplicable reason they decided to stay in the lobby to hold their meeting, so I ended up overhearing most of their conversation. The supplies themselves were totally outside my sphere of expertise, or interest, for that matter, so that in itself was boring and unremarkable. The tail end of the conversation was what caught my attention. I am not sure how they arrived at that topic, but my co-worker jokingly said that she is going to divorce her husband and marry a European guy, because, apparently, Europeans have more relaxed lives then we do. Her visitor nodded and said that she is married to a "German", who can not get our "being married to our jobs". No, the quotation marks around the word German were not a mistake, because in the next sentence the lady revealed that her hubs is really from Iran; he was just living in Germany for the past eighteen years; but he still misses Iran.

Oh, how I was busting to tell them both a couple of things!! Alas, as I keep reminding my parents, they did not bring us up properly, which constantly impedes our lives. I couldn't interrupt a private conversation (even though it was held in my general working area), and tell these people that not only are they useful idiots, but ingrates as well. Yes, ingrates! Yes, nobody else in the civilized world works as much or as hard as we do here. Yes, Europeans have more holidays, better ability to have a decent lunch, etc. They also have two digit unemployment rate, much lower standard of living, and horrendous taxes. They have universal health care; we have less people (percentage vise) dying from cancer because they had to wait for half a year to see a specialist or were denied chemo because they are too old to waste money on their treatment. Yes, unless we are welfare recipients or government workers (or posses the sublime talent of one of my former supervisors), we usually spent long hours working and bust our guts while doing it; because of that we have such high standard of living and are the envy of the entire world! People from all over the world are trying to get a job in America (legally or illegally). These moronic ingrates want leisure! They can get all the leisure the want (it is a free country); they just have to remember that they wont be able to afford the shoes they were admiring on each other.