I was NOT feeling the Halloween spirit this year.
Call me a witch. Or a word that rhymes with witch. I don’t care.
A big part of it had to do with work-place festivities.
See, I’m in the midst of moving from a lovely, darling, mostly private office in McHenry, to our paper’s main office in Crystal Lake. The main office is filled with people and germs and noise.
To me, at least at first, this was the equivalent of switching from a lovely moisturizing, 7-blade, heated, vibrating, purple razor to a rusty nail pulled from a hobo’s back pocket for my shaving needs.
Awful.
It’s no secret that in McHenry, I was spoiled. I had a luxurious, quiet, writing environment where I could easily slip into “the zone.” The magical place where story ledes flow through my fingertips and words align like stars.
Not so much in Crystal Lake. More like the opposite.
And Friday was probably the worst day to jump in.
I had never been in the main office for a holiday. Or even a party. And there was CRAPTONS of Halloween stuff going on.
People were dressed in costumes, and blaring haunted music and eating more calories in a hour that I usually eat in a week – all while I was on DEADLINE! It’s kinda hard to find “the zone” when there’s rows and rows of hanging bats above the department next door and kids keep walking past looking for candy.
And when I went to work Saturday, I was kinda hoping it had all been a bad dream.
It wasn’t. There were still bats.
During my brief free time I started looking for a cartoon I could put on my work monitor to make me feel better.
I finally found one that said “Evil plans are best.” But I was unclear about how this whole, “working near bosses” thing worked and wanted to check with some co-workers to be sure that none of the higher-ups would interpret that to mean I was crazy and had an actual evil plan to like, hack our system (I don’t) or bring down the paper (Again. I don’t).
And someone chimed in that it’s unlikely that in the spectrum of employees I would fall anywhere near the “crazy” side. And that I’d probably have to bring in a life-size cutout of Johnny Depp (whom I love) for people to think that.
Then another co-worker was all “Speaking of which, there IS a life-size cut-out of Johnny Deep near the front desk. Someone brought it in for the pirate-themed Halloween area.”
OMG!
A LIFE-SIZE CUTOUT OF MY SOUL MATE WAS MERE DESKS AWAY!!?
woah.
I went to take a picture. (See below).
My co-worker than said it’d be “crazy” if I brought in a big bag of money. And just like that, the “crazy-makes things so” magic was dead.
But alas, knowing that at least one person in this strange new office loves Johnny Depp enough to buy a life-size cut out makes me thing this whole transition might not be that bad.
And now, without further ado – the photos. Feel free to pretend it’s the REAL Johnny Depp. I do. And tune in next week to read about my evil plan to steel steal him. (editor’s note: Such a plan may or may not exist).
