I don't attach any meaning to people chewing ice. I know there are rumors going around that if you chew ice then you are deficient in iron or sexually frustrated. I don't care about all that. All I care about is that ice was not meant to be chewed.
The few times that I have crunched ice, chills go down my spine. In fact, I have goosebumps just from typing that and thinking about it. And when other people do it, and I hear it, the same thing happens. I don't like that other people's actions can have such an effect on my own body.
I never realized how much this irritated me until after college. One of my first "real" jobs was as a claims adjuster for an insurance company. To train us on proper phone etiquette they felt it was imperative to send us to Chicago for a week. In the classroom, we all sat around in a big semi-circle. About one hour into the first day, I realized that it was going to be a very long week. Because the lady next to me (I was second to the end, and she was on the end) was an Ice Chewer. There weren't any assigned seats or anything, but human nature appears to encourage us to take the same seats every day. So I was stuck. Every single day she would have this huge cup of ice and would just sit there chomping on it. I would sit there, writhing in my seat, freezing cold and trying to rub my goosebumps off. People probably thought I had some sort of tic where I was constantly rubbing my skin.
My husband (who was only my boyfriend at the time) would laugh at me every night as I complained to him. To him, it's not a big deal. The sound of ice crunching against teeth does not affect him.
Fast forward to maybe 2 years later. I had decided by this point that I do not want to work in an office setting, and was going to school during the day to take some prerequisites so I could go for a master's degree in something more interesting. I got a night job working at the desk in the Emergency Room of a hospital. This was an interesting experience.
I get along with pretty much all types. But I've never really been the minority anywhere. Here, I was the only one under 30, the only one who weighed less than 250lbs, the only one with a college degree, and the only white girl. I pretty much got along with everyone at first, but it was freakin West Side Story behind the desk there. Lisa and Andrea hated each other. So you were either friends with Lisa or Andrea. You were allowed to tolerate the other, but not be her friend. As the new girl, both teams wanted me on their side. But I refused to decide. I preferred to remain neutral.
Part of the job involved me working the desk alone, and part involved me working with 1 or 2 of the other girls. I LOVED working alone. Always have, always will. And if I was working with 2 girls from the same team, it was ok. We would communicate, there might be some joking around. It actually felt normal.
If I was working with girls from opposing teams, it was very unpleasant. The silence behind the desk was deafening. They wouldn't even want to talk with me, for fear that the other girl would listen and report back to her team. If it happened that they bumped into each other, which was pretty much inevitable with 3 women (2 of them being over 200lbs each) working behind one big desk in a busy emergency room, the death stares would come out and I would duck behind a doctor or a nurse, waiting for the claws to come out.
Each girl tried to "take me under her wing" and show me the ropes and be extra nice to me. I might have been young (maybe 22?) but I was smart. Much smarter than all of them. I could tell they were being phony, and just didn't want me to be able to say anything negative about them to anyone on the other team.
It only took a few months before my side was chosen for me. Lisa was an Ice Chewer. She would sit there with a portable heater blowing right on her, chewing her ice and clacking away at her keyboard with her 1.5" long candy pink nails (which were against hospital dress code and kind of a fire hazard, not to mention gross and nasty). I very quickly began dreading my evenings with her. I used to have a pretty fast metabolism. I was always hot. Even in the cold ER, I was comfortable in just my scrubs. All these fat women would come in with their portable heaters burning the place up, with jackets on over their scrubs, complaining of how they were anemic and therefore always cold. I hated it. As soon as they all left and I was alone I would shut off all the heaters and throw them away from behind the desk.
Anyway, in addition to being an Ice Chewer, Lisa was also lazy. She would let her work pile up, never answer the phone, and would just sit there chatting away with her work bff, Carla. They manipulated the schedule so they could work together all the time. I hated it. One evening, for some random reason, Lisa said she was just going to let me answer the phone. I didn't mean to sound snotty about it, but I couldn't help but retort "But I already am."
Big mistake.
Her eyes narrowed. She stared at me through the slits for a good minute before turning back to her computer without a word.
Uh-oh.
I really didn't want to become part of the drama. But I couldn't help it. Months and months of incessant ice chewing had worn me down and I hated her. I seriously wanted to take her giant cup of ice and throw it at her.
From that point on, Lisa made it a point to make my life miserable. She's the reason that I eventually quit there, even though I rarely had to work with her after that. I later heard that she was going on to nursing school, which scares me to no end. I could totally see her casually putting arsenic into the IV of someone who was there for something as routine as an MRI, just because they asked her to fluff their pillow.
Personally, I believe it was all the ice chewing that made her so evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment