Office Dares: Not a one accepted

For the largest uninterrupted segment of my professional career, I worked at a nonprofit staffed almost exclusively by crazies. It may have taken us (me and the 2.5 other noncrazies) a while longer than it should have to pick up on this inclination towards mental illness, but our steep learning curve can be easily forgiven when you consider our admirable coping strategies.

We'd take longer than necessary lunches, send coded emails to one another, and whenever possible I and a certain co-worker would hold 3:30 "meetings" in her humid closet-like office. In these meetings we'd hold official looking legal pads and discuss celebrity coke-addicts or annoying co-workers while she repeated played the Lightning Bolt! video.

Some nights we drank a lot. Some of us drank too much and spent the evening convincing college dropouts to let us spit Bud Light in their mouths. Some of us went home to husbands that were unimpressed.

As it became more and more obvious that we were working in a mad house, our ideas (still talk) of how to cope became more brazen and bizarre. But if your bitnez manager is going to announce that that benign tumor you had removed six years ago has caused a substantial jump in the organization's health care spending, well then you should be able launch a campaign to boycott the consumption of hard boiled eggs in the office - citing her repeated ability to cause a substantial decrease in air quality in her cube and surrounding areas. Or if your boss sees fit to require that you spend considerable amounts of your free time setting up tables and bartend at snooty events, well you should be able to just grab her hand and hold on while you are walking back from lunch together. And when she freaks out and looks at you like you are insane, you just smile and say, "Oh, I thought it would be nice if we started doing this from now on."

Oh, but I never did either of those things. We promised to, dared each other to do a keg stand at that event with the keg (toplessness optional), get tipsy and sit on the Board Chair's lap and ask him "how come we never hang out," insist on closing staff meetings with a prayer or a hymn, refusing to work one more f'n Friday night, bitch slapping difficult co-workers (ahem - Michael), or wear jeans ever.

But we almost never did any of those things. Instead we wrote long emails about them and drank the diet cokes reserved for board meetings and really got back at "the management" by leaving five minutes early on Fridays. Rebels we were not, but we managed to keep ourselves happy, or at least not crazy, most of the time.