| March 1, 2003 - Betty of the Bumbling Bureaucracy |
| Dear Friends, in my section called My Thoughts on Important Matters I discussed having worked for a BUMBLING BUREAUCRACY (BB) at one point in my past. On that page I promised all of you that I would tell you other interesting and amusing stories of my tenure there. I realized that many of them revolve around the employee I called Betty in that section. And so today, for your scrutiny and pleasure, I submit another Betty story. Betty had two daughters in their early to mid-teens. The older one, whom I'll call Aphrodite, loved to write poems and Betty was convinced that this 14 year old had a future as a poet laureate or something. She once showed me one of Aphrodite's poems and it ran something like this: I feel you in the nite I see you by the lite I know our love is rite Let us never fite .....or some such drivel. And, of course, "nite", "lite", "rite", and "fite" all had little hearts over the "i's" instead of dots. I offered Betty some vague platitudes about Aphrodite's remarkable poetic style while inwardly guffawing that Betty found this "meaningful" and "promising". Anyway, one day I was searching high and low for Betty because I had something for her to review or we needed to work together on an invoice or something like that. Hours and hours went by and finally she was back at her desk at around 4:00 in the afternoon. I told her I had been looking all day for her in order to meet whatever earth shaking deadline we had. Betty really didn't need to give me an explanation regarding her whereabouts since I was lowly contractor scum, but she did anyway. Apparently Aphrodite had been at a concert or a party with a girlfriend and had had photos taken in the girls' restroom at the event. She showed Betty the pictures of her and her friend acting like silly teenagers when Betty noticed what looked like an ampule or syringe perched on the ledge of the girls' restroom window. Without asking Aphrodite anything about it, she became concerned that this item, whatever it was, was drug-related. So Betty did what any mother would do; she slipped out of work around 10:00 a.m. and went to a photographer friend of hers, who blew the photo up about 1,000 times so Betty could see what the thing was. It turns out that it was a perfume bottle and Betty was quite relieved. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I knew a kid in high school who kept booze in a cologne bottle. Now, I don't know if Betty charged her absence to vacation since I didn't have access to her timecard. But frankly, I doubt that she did. Otherwise, she would have called in and then just gone directly to the photographer's from her house, wouldn't she? Whatever the case, I've been looking in poetry anthologies ever since and not once have I found a poem by Aphrodite. Next entry Previous entry Go to diary entries Go back home |