Co-worker Red Alert: It’s V-Day at the Office
 
By PHILIP RECCHIA
Posted Monday, Feb. 9, 2009
 
 
There’s nothing quite like Valentine’s Day – with its heart-shaped boxes of bonbons and bouquets of red roses – to turn an ordinary workplace into a hostile environment.

The day begins like any other, but things get ugly soon after the arrival of the first gift from someone’s special Pookey Bear.

I see it where I work.  Certain coworkers (whose gender I won’t reveal so not to offend female readers) will drop whatever they’re doing and scamper out to the reception area for a peek at the V-Day booty.

How they know a gift has arrived is unclear.  Maybe it’s their “coworkers’ intuition.”  Or maybe it’s the fact that our receptionist (also a coworker) had dashed down the hall shrieking, “Wendy got a SOLID GOLD LOCKET from Max!”

In any event, they’ll “ooh” and “ah” nonstop while Wendy shows them how stunning the symbol of Max’s affection looks around her neck.  Or, worn around her wrist as a bracelet – or around her ankle as an anklet, or around her head as a hood ornament...

Before you know it, it’s around lunchtime, and they still haven’t decided where to hang the damn thing.

Meanwhile, a bushel of roses has arrived for Alyssa from Claude, along with a card that she reads aloud: “I adore you, my Cuddle Muffin.  Forever yours, Snuggle Buns.”  This registers extremely high on the emotion meter, as coworkers begin fainting like divas in “La Traviata.”

But not Alyssa.  She still has much flaunting to do.  “Equal Ooh-ing and Ah-ing Time” is her V-Day motto.  So she barges – without knocking – into my cubicle and waives her flora frantically in my face. 

“Look what...”  Hey, watch those...  “…my boyfriend sent me.”  ...thorns!  “Aren’t they...” Ouch!  “…fabulous?”  SECURITYYYYY!    

I had an equally sadistic experience last February 14.  Marlene, another coworker, insisted I sample the queen-sized slab of peanut brittle sent by Herman, her little Snoopy Woopy.

Apparently lovesick to the point of delirium, she said it was the yummiest thing she’d ever tasted.  When I told her I don’t like peanuts – particularly when encased in what looks like a mixture of subway-track runoff and Krazy Glue – she force-fed it to me until I collapsed under my own weight.

Now, I’m no Harvard Law grad (despite what it says on my resumé), but this was clearly a case of romantic harassment.  If I were a litigious man, I’d be sitting pretty on a seven-figure settlement as we speak.

But deep down, just below the still-undigested peanut brittle, I am as much of a sucker for Valentine’s Day as my coworkers.  Only, extravagant gifts and public declarations of love are not my idea of romance.

My idea of romance – the kind immortalized so sublimely in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning – is a nice quiet evening at home with Keira Knightly in a tub of Cool Whip.

Let her bring her own mink bathrobe.


Tune in Monday, Feb. 23 for the next episode of "Yo, Transit Man!"
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