Tales From the Proletariat: The Stringless Chatty Cathy Doll One Cubicle Over
Every office has employed this creature in one form or another. It's the co-worker who hasn't clue what he or she is saying, but decides to say it anyway. It's the person who can instantly make a joke not funny merely by laughing. It's the Stringless Chatty Cathy Doll one cubicle over.
These beings are not malicious but axiomatically irritating. Normal protocol in dealing with them is to simply ignore them, but this can become difficult when they try to involve you in their conversations. I, being just one cubicle away from the Doll, am often presented with such difficulties.
Instead of ignoring this parrot, which is practically impossible to do, I have decided to chronicle it. Its thoughts are unprocessed, and they offer an unfiltered glimpse into the human psyche. Most of these thoughts are obviously not the Doll's own. Presumably, they crept into its mind and found its vacancy comfortable; the thoughts certainly aren't being crowded. Still, for one reason or another, the Doll has chosen to not only remember them, but to repeat them. Aloud.
Here are just a few examples:
To a caller: "Are you on a cellphone? Are you driving? Sir you need to get off the road right now. You are going to get into an accident. Are you on the side of the road now? Did you have an accident? Good"
***
Somehow, a conversation turned theological: "I don't understand how people can believe in Allah or in Hindu. That ain't gonna save ya."
***
Doll:"Dallas, I went digging for some rocks this weekend"
Me: "Oh?"
Doll:"Yeah, the geologist said they were a couple million years old. But I don't believe in that"
It later added gratuitously that it didn't believe in evolution, either.
***
Sometimes the doll, feeling that its life's purpose is not being fulfilled, will speak to inanimate objects:
Doll: You stay right there.
Me: Excuse me?
Doll: Oh, I was just talking to my tickets
These dolls are not a new phenomena. They have been written about and accounted for throughout history. In "1984", Orwell wrote of a particularly brainless doll:
She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. ‘The human sound-track’ he nicknamed her in his own mind.
I can't help but wonder whether Orwell knew a Stringless Chatty Cathy Doll much like mine.
posted by Dallas @ 11:19 AM
2 Comments:
Ah, the teller of the "non-story". I work with one of these too. He says things like:
"The other day when I went to the store, I was coming up to the intersection and the light changed. So I turned."
--
I dare not fail to mention the other variety, the - "I have no stories of my own, so I will repeat everyone elses instead", (which you covered in your post.)
I have also have an aquaintance who
recently started working at a new office - and suddenly she is over-using (and sometimes mis-using) words like; hence, ergo, and thus.
I am not sure who the primary influcence of this habit might be.
"I was in San Francisco and met a guy who is a DeeJay and I was talking to him, thus he offered to do the party for way less than the guy I hired last time I talked to you; ergo I lost my deposit when I decided to not use Scott."
"I have also have an aquaintance who
recently started working at a new office - and suddenly she is over-using (and sometimes mis-using) words like; hence, ergo, and thus."
You should be able to laugh those words out of her vocabulary, like how collective society does to some of its members when they start using words that begin with "meta-".
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