“Put your hands up. This is a mockery.”

We need a superhero with this famous tagline phrase.

He swoops in at the very moment someone sends us a CYA email, one that probably starts with the passive-aggressive “per my last email.”

Or when management blames us for failing to complete a 9,000-item checklist with staff better suited to boil water.

Let’s not forget in-service or education, the kind that includes things we don’t need to know (or we’d already know it), where the goal is to get through as quickly as possible without succumbing to insanity as our fingers click keys faster than a cocaine-fueled chipmunk.

We definitely need this superhero when we have a malingerer. The ones with apparently infinite time to tell us stories, usually punctuated by, “I am SO busy.” All they’ll feel is the splash of the water balloon, right after they feel something press into the small of their back.

When we hear the phrase, “We’re family.” Lord knows that when we’re with family at Thanksgiving, most of us are calculating how quickly we can stuff Uncle Larry and his opinions into the garage deep freezer. It’s best to avoid that phrase at work.

He’d dramatically run into the meeting, the could-have-been-an-email kind, and force us to put our hands up and admit no one knows why we’re in a budget crisis yet spending thousands on a gathering to consume bad pastry products and pray that we might be drinking poisoned coffee.

My superhero would have the elements of Terry Tate, Office Linebacker, armed with only scathing sarcasm, eye-rolls, and water balloons to lob at the offenders upon discovery.

Lastly, my superhero would tell us jokes until we laughed. Even if takes ninety-seven jokes to do so. And to remind us that work is just work, not a mission to save mankind or fool ourselves into getting our identity mixed up with commerce-driven endeavors.

A lot of work is Greek tragedy, at least to those wrapped up in it. Look at how all those turned out.

Take a step back. Lighten up. Do your job well. But not so much that you can’t appreciate the farce of sacrificing your well-being for a position that will be refilled faster than a manager’s coffee cup.

And if you forget? My superhero will be there when you least expect it.

“Put your hands up! This is a mockery!”

Love, X
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