Dear Diary...

Today I watched men lift things.

Hey, look, I work in the offices of an industrial building where the estrogen far outweighs the male population. From left to right, the offices belong to: The owner of the company, the Controller, and then me. They are the only two men in the near vicinity. The bull pen is full of women, whether from accounting, sales, customer service, or the executive assistant. There is an overabundance of hen talk on any given day.

This morning, I arrived at the office and walked onto a floor full of men. There were two that had come to install our new printer/fax/scanner, one who was there to coordinate the new toy to our intranet, our Controller was back from a week’s vacation, our resident mechanic was hauling things and our immediate supervisor was just wandering around, but he doesn’t count. Latter participant notwithstanding, there was much testosterone being strewn about. I immediately got on the phone to fellow female colleague downstairs, informed her of the abundance of burly voices and concocted a thinly veiled pretext for her to visit my office. I do believe I heard galloping.

The day was a pretty much shot to hell, the way days are when routine gets tossed out the window. It was like assembly day at a junior high. The activity was distracting and eventually put a halt to our actual work when the new machine was declared installed and then proceeded not to print, scan, or fax anything. Everyone’s systems had to be set to default to a second printer which promptly decided to jam, leaving us with no further options until we banged on, cursed it, and walked around to dilute tempers. It eventually came back to life but by then it was so late in the day that we were all pretty much just going with the flow anymore, and watching as the assembly of men slowly trickled down to one.

The last guy left with the rest of us at the close of the work day, with our brand new gadget plugged in and completely useless. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.