"Look what I brought in, in honor of --" Cathy started to say.
"Henrietta the Cow!" Chiquita loudly exclaimed. When she realized she had blown it with her snide comment, she tried to rationalize it by saying, "You know Cathy was about to say it!"
I said, "Yes, but she didn’t get a chance."
After discussing the fact that Chiquita was the first to crack, Eugenia and I decided to give her a second chance. This was a good move on our part since Chiquita had the potential of derailing our efforts to continue being nice to everyone.
Eugenia had already resisted temptation on her way into our building coming up the escalator. She had gotten on the escalator behind a woman with crusty feet that needed a good washing. Normally, she would have related the extent of the feet’s dirtiness to us, but this morning she held her tongue because she had to be nice.
In another incident when Eugenia was exceptionally nice was when a fellow employee with bad hair came over to talk to us. This employee I’ll call "Sally" had such bad hair that it was previously equated to looking like a bad wig, slightly askew. "Sally" came over to talk to us and was right up in our faces, but Eugenia didn’t crack. She didn’t make any comments about "Sally’s" hair or anything. I was shocked that Eugenia was able to maintain her pleasant demeanor.
While we were at Max’s having lunch, we could see into the mall. Eugenia spotted an older couple walking around in the mall. She pointed them out to me by saying, "My, what an interesting couple!"
When I saw them all I could think of was: Isn’t inbreeding a terrible thing. Because of their unusual appearances, it appeared to me that their family had suffered many generations of genetic inbreeding where ugly cousin had married and procreated with ugly cousin since no outside genes wanted to get mixed up in that gene pool. But because of the contest to be nice, all I could do was sit there and smile quietly to myself. Eugenia was unable to get me to crack.
Throughout the rest of the day there were opportunities galore to cap on people but Eugenia, Chiquita and I continued to be nice to everyone. Eugenia and I discussed the surplus of opportunities that presented themselves to us on this of all days. I surmised that in bottling up our normal responses we were just focusing on them for longer periods. On a regular day we would just let the comments fly and then move on to the next target.
So, in all it was a good day at work. We had fun and strengthened our interpersonal relationships.
