My computer will be down today and maybe tomorrow, so I won’t be responding to comments or emails for awhile.  In the meantime, enjoy this re-blog of an older post – while I futz around with my new “home office.”

(NOTE:  This post was written way before the creation of Not CM – but I still think she might have had something to do with it!)

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A lot of my clients and a lot of my readers seem to be under the assumption that I am a nice, grandmotherly type person.

That’s is so not true.

Please be advised that I cheat at Super Text Twist.  When I get stumped, I go onto my favorite anagrams website and find the word I need to win the level.  As of the writing of this post, I have had the same game running for a couple of years and have accrued over 66,500 points (woo-hoo, my life is soooo exciting!)

In addition, I constantly yell at other drivers.

Here are just a few examples (but I can get really creative sometimes …):

• Driver in front of me makes a really slow turn:  “Just do it already – you’re not driving a semi!”

• Driver in front of me fails to use a turn signal:  “What – I’m supposed to guess? Or don’t they require signals wherever you come from?”

• Driver behind me is way too close:  “Wanna just join me in my own back seat?”

• Car in front of me has a flower on the antenna and a white-haired driver, and is going really, really slow:  “Come on, Granny, you can do it!”

• Driver cuts me off, and then goes too slow:  “If you’re going to cut somebody off, you might want to get out of the [effing] way!”

• Driver in front of me sits at the stop sign, seemingly forever:  “You know – it’s STOP AND GO, not STOP AND STAY!”

• Driver in front of me takes off really slow when the light changes:  “Come on, didn’t that [INSERT CAR MODEL HERE] come with an engine?”

• Driver in front of me doesn’t take off when the light changes – or starts to go and then stops again – and I almost get rear-ended by the car behind me:  “Goddammit, would you just [effing] go?”

• Driver in front of  me has his/her left arm out the window, usually with a cigarette at the end of it, and is driving in very leisurely manner:  “OK, I know you’re going to do something stupid, so I’ll just stay way back here.”

• Driver in front of me throws a cigarette or some other trash out the window:  “PIG!”

(That almost backfired once, when I happened to glance in my rearview mirror and found a cop car behind me … fortunately it was summer and my windows were up to keep the air conditioning in, and I wasn’t doing any illegal driving at that particular moment.)

• Everyone else gets the non-verbal finger wave, the number of fingers depending on the severity of the affront.

***

While I try to be a nicer person once I get to the office, sometimes things just get to me, ya know?

For instance, it was a very stressful time at work.  We were in temporary offices after a fire, my boss’s secretary had quit, and he was trying to get by with a temp.  My boss was out of town, and the temp did something really stupid.

• My boss called in from wherever he was and yelled at ME for the temp’s error.
• I yelled back and threatened to quit.
• My boss backed off.
• I hung up.

The temp, who had overheard my side of the conversation, skittered into my office and asked what she could do to help.

She, too, must’ve thought I was a nice person, because she was quite surprised when I lost it and snapped:

“YOU!  Go back into your office, sit down, and LEAVE ME ALONE!”

She skittered away – and I felt like shit, especially since this temp was older than me by a number of years and really was a sweet, albeit somewhat stupid, woman.

After I finally cooled off, I did apologize to her, but our work relationship was never the same.  Thankfully (well, for me, anyway) she got fired as soon as the boss returned the following week, thereby relieving me of the need to be extra nice to make up for my nastiness.

***

Try as I might, I simply can’t change my basic personality.  I can put on a good, professional front for work and a nice, sweet face for social occasions, but I’m still ME.  And ME still isn’t Mother Teresa.

And that’s probably never going to change.

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I love to hear from my readers. You may comment on this post, comment on my Facebook or Twitter pages, or email me at cordeliasmom2012@yahoo.com or notcordeliasmom@aol.com

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Images by: Heather F, and Cordelia’s Mom’s Dad (sometime around 1955-ish!), and Liberty Photos, respectively