You Know How I Know It's Friday The 13th?

Cause everyone in the office is wound tighter than the inside of a baseball (not the small rubber ball inside the baseball, but the 25 feet of string inside all wrapped around the little ball. 25 feet! That's some tight winding to fit inside such a small casing. Wrapped by a thin sheet of leather. Then the thick leather skin around that. Held together by stitches.) (Anyone else just get creeped out by the baseball?)

This is already a really high-stress bunch - people tend to freak out if they accidentally hit print twice and the thing spits out two pages instead of one (the horror! whatever will we do with the extra page?! i'll tell you what to do with it), or if someone - and I'm not kidding - knocks on the office door instead of just walking in (the horror! who's gonna get the door?! i'll tell you what to do with the door). See that right there, that reaction where I tell them where to shove it? That's not my normal calm reaction to this place, usually I just shrug and go back to financial statements. Because financial statements can't talk to me, and I appreciate that about them. But right now for some reason there's something weird in the air, something where if I brush past someone in the hallways I have a good feeling they'll go flying into a bookcase and will then ricochet off to the file room where they'll bounce around between the copy machine and the water cooler before landing in the recycle bin. Like a pin ball machine.

I actually just got yelled at for standing too close to the fax machine. Because my body was going to interrupt the signal, beaming down from space apparently, and not through the phone line as I tried to explain, just before shutting up because the woman had a freakish grip on the letter opener for an 80 year old. The fax came through and I did not stick my tongue out at her because I AM NOT GOING TO LET IT AFFECT ME.

Everyone is walking around with their trigger finger just itching to reach for their wands and do some sort of Harry Potter changing-you-into-a-pile-of-spiders-and-then-making-the-pile-explode spell on the next person who breathes wrong. Even my Mom just yelled (to no one at all) "I'm taking Advil as a precaution to all of you."

I think Friday the 13th is just bringing out the crazy that has been lingering now that we only have one guy working here. Just one. One brave soul because the others (small Guatemalan man included) have fled to the safety of somewhere saner, and with more testosterone. And I don't blame them - today this place reads like The Craft, but without the sexy teen witches, and Neve Campbell.

There has to be balance people! Quick, hire some boys before we all start showing up to work in our pjs and talking about our cycles over the intercom. No one wants that. No one wants to hear me say "cycle" either. Me included.