Halloween

“You could be Kung Fu Panda,” Thomas proclaimed.

“I could be what?,” I asked after catching only the first few syllables.

“You could be Kung Fu Panda,” he restated with even more pleasure.

“What is Kung Fu Panda?,” I asked only because social norms required it of me. Ignoring him completely would have broken one of the countless rules of workplace etiquette which we all feel pressured to obey. The type of rules that say you must indulge dumb ass comments made by dumb asses like Thomas.

“Kung Fu Panda! That animated movie with the polar bear that does karate. You could be him,” Thomas further explained.

To his credit, I was wearing a karate uniform. Actually, a gi to more specific. I wore it for Ju Jitsu, but to 99.9% of the world it was a karate uniform and no one really cared what the difference was. It was Halloween and Sonya and I had lost a vote 4 to 2 over whether we should all dress up. David had argued that it would look silly if only half of us were in costumes, so it needed to be a group effort. Thus, honoring the vote, I had agreed to dress up. Sonya, god bless her, stood her ground and came to work in her normal attire. She later agreed to wear a witch hat someone else had brought, but only wore it for an hour or so.

“Why would I be Kung Fu Panda,” I asked Thomas.

“Cause, what else would you be,?” Thomas replied looking up from the online fantasy game he was 20 years too old to be playing.

“How about the Karate Kid? Or anything else involving karate or martial arts or something? Why would the obvious first choice be an animated cartoon that no adult without children should have watched,?” This last part was a direct dig at him. His dumb ass comments had bothered me for some time, but I’d usually brushed them aside. Now, however, I had an opportunity to verbally smack him around. Thomas was so fat and stupid that I would have been curious to meet his parents. He wasn’t necessarily the fattest person, nor was he stupidest, but his particular anit-charm was that the term “fat and stupid”, as if it were one word, suited him perfectly. He was a fat blob of a man, whose fascination with online games, and apparently children’s movies, bordered on suspicious. While he routinely boasted out of his huge ass, he was protected by the soft shell of workplace decorum that prevented the type of feedback that would appropriately call him out. We were all forced to listen to him babble on and pretend he was something other than an obnoxious noise.

“Why have you watched this movie” I questioned.

“Hey you guys, can you all come out here for a second? I want to get a picture of all of us,” David said entering the lobby. He knew where I was going with Thomas and intervened before it went any further.

I cannot fathom who would ever want this picture we were lining up to take. None of us really got along and I doubt anyone gave a second thought to this place after they left each night. The idea of taking a picture of all of us was stupid to begin with, but given the fact we were all in stupid costumes made the idea completely ridiculous.

David was dressed like a gladiator. He thought that was creative. He also thought wearing that outfit showed he could let his guard down and didn’t mind looking silly. Unfortunately, it was hard for him to let his guard down and he did mind looking silly, so all day he had felt self-conscious and was having a tough time dealing with his conflicting emotions.

We did four takes of the picture, as David said the first three were “bad”. Afterwards I asked to see the camera, curious as to what could have possibly fallen outside the range of acceptable for our particular situation. David explained that he’d already erased the pictures while sheepishly breaking eye contact. Judging by the final take, he must not have looked tough enough in the first pictures, since in the last he displayed a clenched jaw and puffed chest typically used by douche bags trying to look tough in photos.

Cindy, one of the other tellers, asked if she could get a copy of the picture. She had a decent sense of humor, so I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. When I requested a copy as well, David knew without a doubt that I was being an asshole and mocking the entire situation.

Another entertaining aspect of this disastrous idea was the reaction we received from customers. While a few offered a bland smile or acknowledgement, the vast majority conveyed disapproval. I doubt that any of them had a problem with costumes or Halloween per se, but there is something unsettling about opening an IRA or discussing your mortgage payments with an adult dressed like Julius Caesar. This was particularly evident later in the day, once everyone’s post-lunch, mid-afternoon lull had set in and the jokes and smiles had subsided. By then we were just a handful of idiots in novelty outfits for which the novelty had long worn off.

After Sonya had finished with a customer, she took her witch hat off in defiance and came over to by cube to complain.

“This is ridiculous. I’m trying to help customer and discuss his money, but I have on this stupid hat on. This whole thing is so stupid,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed, “This whole thing is stupid, in more ways than you even realize.”