Friday, August 10, 2007

Too much information

I think someone slipped me some alli diet pills.

I'll spare you the details. As it appears half of the western world read my post about these pills there's very little chance a reader of this doesn't know what I was suggesting. The short version of the story is I was in a meeting when my body, in its own special way, suggested to me I should leave the room. Very quickly.

Figuring that nobody in the meeting wanted specifics, I stood up in the middle of a cow-orker's droning monologue and said:

"Excuse me, I have to leave the room."

I was standing up when droning cow-orker felt compelled to ask:

"Can't it wait?"

I paused for a microsecond. Even though I was wearing dark pants, I had to make a quick decision. Waste time justifying myself to this moron or just make for the facilities I so desperately required. As justifying myself would (a) take up valuable time and (b) involve sharing more information than I'm sure most people would be comfortable with, I chose the rapid exit option.

"No. Sorry. I'll be back in a few minutes."

It seems droning doofus had not paid a visit to Clue Town recently. He was still going on as I charged out the door.

"It's just that we're right in the middle of something and..."

I considered shouting "Can you not fucking tell I'm about to shit my pants?" But that falls into a grey are with regard to acceptable workplace conversation, even for me. Besides, I didn't want to be known as "Mr ShittyPants" around the office. Trust me, the people I work with would do this.

Anyway, disaster averted. I made it back to my seat with no major trauma and only a few minutes had elapsed. But it seemed as though Captain Fuckhead wasn't prepared to let it go. As I came through the door he made a big show of suspending his monologue until I sat down. Then he did the condescending schoolteacher thing of saying:

"I trust you can stay with us now?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. Go ahead now."

"Because I wouldn't want to stop you from doing something that's so important you can't tell us about it."

"Look, me leaving the room wasn't optional OK? I'm back now, let's just move on."

"Well, it isn't as if the group deserves an explanation, we've all given up time to be here."

At this point pretty much everyone else around the table has taken a good guess as to why I had to leave so suddenly. People are rolling their eyes at how clueless this fuckwit is. I'm about to say "the same stuff coming out of your mouth was just shooting out of my arse" when someone defuses the situation by saying "Let's forget about it and keep going."

What I couldn't get over was this dork's inability to accept that I'm a grownup and I wouldn't just leave the room without good reason. The thing is, he's such a control freak if I had told him the nature of my emergency he'd probably want a detailed report on proceedings. Worse still would be the same emergency befalling him. I have a horrible feeling he'd recount his time away from the meeting in graphic detail.

There really is such a thing as too much information.

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