I've cemented my reputation as a nut at work.
It's not like it's any big surprise, but on Halloween I confirmed that my workplace is (hold your breath now) no longer a fun place to be. Alert the media!
I'd been thinking about how to dress for Halloween for weeks, with pretty much no results. Aside from the costume part of it, I really got into Halloween this year, decorating the walkway to our house with a huge stuffed spider, a cauldron filled with dry ice, blacklights, pumpkins, creepy music - the whole nine yards. We had a stack of candy from Costco that any kid would die for (I've always wanted to be that house on the block that all the kids know for its good candy, including full size Butterfingers and Crunch bars). But I didn't know what, if anything, I would dress as.
I briefly toyed with the idea of wearing my pajamas and robe, putting my hair up in curlers, slapping on too much make-up and going as a worn out prostitute, but I didn't think it would translate well at work. Plus, I'm too lazy and cheap to go out and buy curlers.
So when I woke up on Halloween morning I was ready to go into work with no costume at all. Then I remembered my tacky Hawaiian shirt down in the garage, and paired it with a T-shirt. I put on my comfy jean shorts, smacked my straw hat on, and slung my camera around my neck. Instant tourist.
I went into the office early so I could leave at 3:30. There weren't many people in yet, as things tend not to pick up until about 10 am. But the first person I saw gave me an odd look until I raised the camera, pretending to take a picture, and said, "Trick or Treat!"
"Oh. I thought I was missing something," was the flat reply.
Well, yes, you were missing something actually. A sense of humor. The desire for fun. Any notion of what day it is.
The next couple of people I saw were from the testing group, a team that has a much better developed sense of the absurd, I think. Why I ever left testing is beyond me at this point. These folks grinned and nodded. But they weren't in costume. As far as I could tell, nobody was in costume except the cafeteria lady. I began to think that if I was the only person in a costume I might well have to throw myself out the window. Then I could be a dead tourist.
At ten thirty someone asked me if I was going to a Jimmy Buffett concert after work. Do these people not have calendars?
A while later I got another grin of recognition, this time from a European employee from France. Now I was in France two years ago for Halloween and the whole dressing up thing isn't really big over there. But this woman knew why I was dressed up and saw the fun in it. It doesn't say much for my American colleagues. On the other hand, she wasn't dressed up herself, but with her being French, I forgave her.
I wasn't looking forward to the staff meeting I had to attend, though. I was able to handle the momentary odd looks as I walked down the hall, but I could just imagine having to sit in a room with all my colleagues giving me shifty glances for 90 minutes as though I dress like a Love Boat reject every day of the year... which I don't. Just to clarify.
Fortunately, another colleague dressed up so I wasn't completely alone in the staff meeting. He dressed as the Big Bad Wolf, complete with furry pants. We sat next to each other, two lonely fools in a sea of normalcy.
I began to wander the halls suspecting that people were dressed in costumes when they actually weren't. Anyone looks like they're dressed for Halloween if you put your mind to it. I began fooling myself into believing that the interns were dressed as Britney Spears. That the managers were posing as Eddie Bauer models. I began scoping out everyone's clothing for sign of the joke, and when I couldn't immediately see it, I made things up.
An engineer told me he was dressed as an engineer for Halloween. It wasn't much of a stretch, but I had to take what I could get.
By the time I got home, I was a bit deflated. It had been exhausting walking around sticking out like a sore thumb. To help my flagging spirits, Dave and I hauled out the four big pumpkins that we bought in Oakland a few weeks ago (at the "Pumpkin Coliseum", right across the freeway from the real Oakland Coliseum - the name just drew us in like flies to honey). We spent the next hour and a half cleaning out these monstrosities of gourd-dom, and carving faces both funny and frightening. After setting them out in the walkway and firing them up with candles, I set the scary music playing, and we waited.
As we watched the sun setting, I reflected on not having gotten much into Halloween over the last few years. As I mentioned, it's not a big holiday in France, though I was told it's growing in popularity. Last year we were moving into our house on Halloween night, so there were no spooky festivities for us. But this year I remembered the joy of it and the anticipation. As I waited for kids, I watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" for the first time in probably 18 years, and I smiled a lot. I had forgotten much of the show, and I appreciated Charlie Brown's earnest failings a lot more than I could when I was younger.
This year I was nearly as excited when our doorbell started ringing as the kids on the other side were.
Our cauldron filled with dry ice was a huge hit. Nearly every kid asked, "What is that!?" with breathless excitement. For a while Dave answered the door while drinking a glass of water with a chunk of dry ice in, just to freak kids out. He told them it was his anti-werewolf potion. After a while, some smarty-pants kid sneered, "Yeah, it's just dry ice," to which his younger female cohort gazed up at Dave and inquired, "How do you dry it?" Dave told her some cock and bull story about letting regular ice lay out in the sun until it's dried, and she would have believed it if I hadn't straightened her out. I didn't want her to go home and tell her parent that the nice man who gave her the full size Crunch bar also told her to lay blocks of ice out in the backyard.
By the time the last kids were straggling through, I felt much better about my workday as a Gilligan's Island extra. It's true that things are tense at my workplace, as at many workplaces across the nation, and nobody wants to be known as That Freak In The Creepy Outfit because it just might come up during reviews. Ensuring you don't call too much attention to yourself is a hallmark of office life, and I respect that on all other days of the year.
But even if you decide not to dress up for Halloween, what's with giving judgmental looks to those of us who do? You're not fooling anybody - I don't buy that you don't know what day it is. I assume you've been to a store in the last 30 days and therefore had some inkling that the holiday was approaching. What did you think all that candy was about? And the pumpkins? And the plastic flame retardant costumes?
In an environment where blending in and not rocking the boat is paramount, I think it would be wise to encourage those of us with enough of a screw loose to buck the system and dress up, if only because it deflects even more attention away from you! We're the brave, the fun-loving, or the just plain goofy. With the faith of Charlie Brown, we don our sheets with too many eyeholes, and we go out into the world like that, assuming that while plenty of you would like to just throw us a rock, there are still those who have full size Crunch bars, just waiting for us.
- KNP, Nov 3, '02
