The Blowback of Impatience

I am an impatient person. When facing a problem, the use of brute force is always the first, usually my preferred, and sometimes the only solution that comes to mind. Wires tangled together? Yank on one until it's freed. Luggage won't close? Jump on it. Can't get a package open? Tear it with your teeth if necessary.

Unfortunately, brute force is rarely the most effective solution (though the most satisfying). More often than not, it causes more trouble that it's worth.

A few weeks ago, I was attempting to secure a bike rack on my car. I had trouble wriggling one of the hooks into the crevice between the trunk of my car and my rear brake light. A person with disciplined mind would have simply opened the trunk, arranged the hook properly, and then closed the trunk to secure the hook. I, on the other hand, tried to mash the hook in with my fingers. When that didn't work, I hit it with the palm of my hand. The hook did not move, and I hurt my hand. Frustrated with myself and the pain in my hand, I then kicked the hook with the bottom of my foot with full force.

I cracked my rear brake light casing. I also smashed the light bulb. The hook, of course, still didn't move.

Workplace Indignities

Perhaps you're like me and sometimes find yourself day dreaming of being flawlessly competent at work. I like to picture myself as that woman who strides into a room and can inspire, by virtue of her posture alone, respect and a little awe. Unflappable, dignified, self-assured -- the woman who needs only a tense moment of deliberation to conjure the right answer to any crisis.

Alas, I am not her. I am in a galaxy far, far away from her. I am the woman who hits the door jamb with her shoulder on the way into a room. I am that woman who breaks out in a sweat at the approach of conflict. When it comes to the workplace, I am a bumbling ball of moron tax. I am Don Knotts.

Here are a few instances:

1. I have a black dress that has a side zipper that begins just below my armpit and ends at my hip. Today, I wore that dress to work, but forgot to close the zipper. When I finally noticed and zipped it up, my manager commented, "Oh, I thought you had decided to wear a very daring dress today." Shudder.

2. When I was an intern at a law firm, I called one of the head partners at the firm to ask a simple question. The partner didn't answer, and I was directed to voicemail. I started to talk, but stuttered, so I pressed a button to scuttle and re-record my message. Instead, the button I pressed sent my garbled message as-is to the partner. The partner laughed at me a few weeks later.

3. At the end of a job interview, I walked over to the coatrack to put on my coat and retrieve my purse. Unbeknownst to me, the interviewer followed behind me to walk me out. When I swung my purse over my shoulder, I hit her with my purse...in the face.

4. I overflowed a toilet at work that I did not realize was malfunctioning. I don't need to say more. It was disgusting and horrifying.

5. One summer, I interned at a posh magazine company. Part of my duties was to relieve the receptionist during lunch; however, the phone was a complex machine with numerous lines and extensions and I had difficulty transferring calls to the right place. One day, my father called me at the office just as another call came in. I attempted to put my father on hold, but accidentally transferred him to the editor-in-chief. The editor-in-chief was a man of such reserved and imposing eminence that you wondered if there really could be a Priory of Sion. According to my father, the conversation went like this:

Scary Editor Guy: "Hello, this is Scary Editor Guy."
My dad: "Yah, where's Wendy? Can I talk to Wendy?"
Scary Editor Guy: "Excuse me, Sir. I'm afraid, I don't know to whom you are referring."
My dad: "My daughter? She's the one that works in your office for no pay."
Scary Editor Guy: "Sir, I don't understand."
My dad: "Hello, Wendy? Wendy?"

My dad assured me that he repeated my name several times to the editor. "Yah, sure, he knows your name now. You can thank your dad for that."

Pieces of Me (Part II)

WARNING: This posting continues my story of a self-inflicted injury (see Pieces of Me (Part I)). If you are squeamish about pain and blood, you might want to skip this posting and revisit the blog later. I promise the next posting will be gore-free.

When I arrived at the nurse's office, the nurse was chatting on the phone. She glanced at me and casually waved for me to sit down on the waiting bench. Exhausted, now, from my panic, I slumped onto the bench without any protest, cradled my injured hand, and waited.

The nurse soon noticed the small pool of blood congealing at my feet. She lept up, grabbed my wrist, and, with surprising strength pulled me over to the sink. Before I could even brace for the pain I knew would be coming, she turned on the faucet and plunged my finger under cold water. It hurt just as much the second time around.

The nurse dried my hand and methodically wrapped my finger in a voluminous amount of gauze. If you had passed by me then and caught a glimpse of my finger out of the corner of your eye, you couldn't be faulted for thinking that I might be holding a stick of cotton candy. The nurse patted me on the head and sent me back to my classroom. When I returned to class, I was mortified to see the janitor mopping up my blood.

Later that night, I was cowering in my bedroom when my parents came home from work. My parents are loving people, but they ascribe to a discipline of tough love. As a rule, injury that I brought upon myself -- tripping over my feet, falling down stairs, walking into doors -- would be met with criticism about my carelessness rather than kisses on my boo-boos. So, having just inflicted upon myself an injury far greater in magnitude than anything I had previously done, I was very afraid of what would happen when they unveiled my wound.

My parents immediately called me down the kitchen. I stood, closed my eyes, offered up my finger, and quietly wimpered as they unwound the thick layer of gauze. When they finished unraveling, I could hear them hold their breath as they grasped the extent of the damage I had done. My father asked sternly, "Where is the fingertip? Did you bring the fingertip back?" I started to explain that I had not thought to preserve it. He demanded again, "Could we find the fingertip? If we went back do you know where we could get it?" Until this moment, it hadn't occurred to me that such a thing could be reattached. I started to cry.

My parents began whispering to each other in Mandarin. I took this to be a very bad sign. As a household, we mostly spoke in Taiwanese. My parents reserved Mandarin for only the most serious topics, like finances and whether or not to put down the family pet. As I didn't understand the language well, the best I could grasp was that there was another problem in addition to the fact that I was missing a fingertip.

My mother went to the cupboard and pulled out a bowl, into which she poured a small amount of hydrogen peroxide. My father, in the meantime, reexamined my finger and tugged lightly at the gauze still around my finger. I was about to ask why they hadn't fully removed the gauze, when I looked again at my finger. And then I understood the problem.

When the nurse wrapped my finger in gauze, she placed the gauze directly onto my muscle without any padding. My finger had continued to bleed, and the blood had seeped through the first few layers of gauze. The blood then hardened into a stiff, thick clot, sealing the gauze against my muscle. To prevent infection, the gauze had to be removed.

We were all silent now. My parents led me to the bathroom where the sink was closer to my reach. My mother placed the bowl of peroxide beside the sink, drew me close, and clenched her hands over mine so that only my injured finger protruded from her grasp. My father grabbed the ends of the gauze firmly. My parents looked at each other and, with the slightest nod between them, my father jerked the gauze, yanking the clot free from my finger. My mother then swiftly dipped my finger into the bowl of peroxide.

I remember hearing the sizzling of the peroxide as it came into contact with my reopened wound. I don't remember much else after that moment as I might have blacked out from the pain. In any case, it's safe to assume that my parents likely washed my finger in the sink under cold water for the third time that day.

**This posting is continuing a story from an earlier posting.