On Office Etiquette

It's been a while since I've read any office etiquette information, but I'm pretty sure it's poor form to spit an entire mouthful of water out on a conference table. Which I did yesterday.

It wasn't my fault. We'd been having a post-meeting conversation about how our youngest co-worker S. is more mature than the rest of us thirtysomethings. How she knows how to make Excel do those stupid function thingies and we don't. How, in fact, since we didn't learn how to do anything besides type in high school, we have actually faked our way through between eight and 15 years of not knowing how to make a spreadsheet add two plus two or insert a fancy bar graph into a PowerPoint presentation.

Then the topics turned personal. My other co-worker S. said she feels silly because young S. is already married and has bought a house and she is just now moving in with her boyfriend, even though she's older than young S. Something about the way she said it, though - she kind of whined through her nose in a perfect imitation of me in middle school, lecturing my parents: "Well, my boooyfriiiieeeennndd." I don't know what triggered it. Maybe it was the fact that I've woken up at 5:30 the last two mornings to go torture myself at the YMCA before work. Maybe it was because it's the end of the week. Maybe it was a release of pent-up work stress. Something about her comment was SO FUCKING FUNNY that I couldn't hold myself back, despite the fact that ALL THAT WATER was in my mouth. It was as though a part of me floated up and was stuck to the ceiling of the conference room, watching my earthly body violate every social more known to officedom. Out the water came. It bounced off the conference table and started rolling toward our meeting notes. Then I experienced the fiery snuffle you get when you swallow water at the swimming pool. I thought in horror, Did I actually shoot the water out of my nose, or is this just afterburn from the laughing? To this day, I'm still not sure.