Peace and Quiet (or Lack Thereof)

You know, my work morning usually starts peacefully. At 7am there are few people in the office, and those who happen to forage in on the frigid mornings usually keep to their desks and their coffee cups and leave me well enough in peace. Even projects left on my desk the night before can be left for the first hour, giving me the precious time to brew a pot of coffee, and prepare the office for the office workers.

That was, of course, not the case today. My morning began deceptively peacefully, there was just one car in the front driveway, so I had no way to prepare myself for the chaos that awaited me as I opened the front door. First, the office Christmas tree had been bought and put up in its stand, which would have been convenient, had not the tree been placed directly between the front foor and my desk, and its pine needles littered all over the floor. Second, some weekend work had required a good section of the floor to become a desk for a huge amount of papers, and the results were piles everywhere, including the floor of the shipping room and the desks of other co-workers. And the phone was ringing. Try to imagine if you can, me bustling around like a indignant mother hen, phone cradled on one shoulder, Dutch Bros. in one hand, the other hand furiously straightening and cleaning. That is nothing to say of me trying to move the eight-foot Christmas tree by myself, on my knees with my head nestled between the pine needles and the office fern fronds as I attempted to maneuver the tree to a more appropriate place in the corner by the windows. There was also the matter of the copier, which has developed a four-page copier jam (all the pages were stuck in different places), which no one else could seem to fix. When I finally got the cluttered office tidy again, and I swept the troublesome needles safely away, I, though covered in toner and pine needles, breathed a brief sigh of relief. I had tidied up my little nest, and I was proud that I accomplished it in less than an hour.

That was, until 8:30, when I found myself, the phone still ringing, trying to keep up with the morning load, and watching, with ruffled feathers, as one of my senior co-workers (who needs not be named) move the tree, the fern, and indeed the other office plants because she decided that she wanted it in the different place. After all, as she told me this morning, she is the Queen of the Christmas tree, and she doesn’t know who put it in that troublesome corner spot, but she knows the perfect place for it.

Silly, silly, me. Like any good housekeeper, I have learned my bitter lesson. Just because this silly hen cleans, tidies, stocks, organizes, and even buys the Christmas decorations, she will never be the master of her own nest.