Many years ago, when the economy was unbreakable, start-ups were booming, and companies bathed in champagne, I worked for a large, established financial magazine in New York. Clients vied to attend our conferences; they’d pay obscene amounts of money to eat bad salmon dinners and get their paws on our take-home goody bags, filled with the latest tech toys and gear-head gadgets. We gifted Tiffany vases and
decanters to our clients for the holidays. The dot-commers upstairs from our department got free Snapple while they worked, all day, every day. Life in corporate America was the way it should be: fat, dumb and happy.
Then the bubble burst. No more Snapple. Goodbye Tiffany trinkets. Sayonara lobster dinners on the company dime. The days of wine and roses were officially over.
Panic set in: Would we lose our jobs? Take pay cuts? What about our benefits? Fear spread like a pair of blubbery thighs. It was ugly.
Never ask, “Can things can worse?” Because yes, Virginia, they will, and usually, very quickly.
A member of my immediate family died.
I took a short leave of absence to “work through my grief”—whatever the hell that means—during which time I mostly stayed in my pajamas, watched bad TV, and ate bacon.
I received a mountain of thoughtful condolence cards, beautiful flowers and homemade pot pies that just wound up in the trash, bless their hearts. So I kept their Tupperware. Even-Steven.
But I received a special delivery one day, and I knew this delivery was different. I could tell by its perfect boxy size, taped in all the right places and delivered with care by a cheerful man clad in brown. I felt like a kid at Christmas, waiting to open the magic Grief Box filled with maudlin toys and prizes—(Six Feet Under, The Board Game! “Name That Corpse” flash cards) The possibilities were endless. For the first time in weeks, I actually felt excited, almost happy.
There was a card on the outside of the box.
It read:
Sory (sic) for your loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with you and family. -The Staff at X Magazine.
Nothing says “I feel your pain” like a misspelled, computer-generated, toe-tag of a card.
I opened the box and dug through the copious amounts of packing peanuts like a Michael Vick dog who’d struck a bone.
And there it rested, nestled safely in a manger of basket grass, surrounded by his closest friends, Stale Crackers and Tiny Salami.
A cheese log.
My caring, compassionate company and colleagues sent a woman in the throes of infinite darkness and despair a nut-encrusted cheese log. No, really, you shouldn’t have. Really.
What they should have sent was nothing.
And it wasn’t your upscale cheese log, if such a thing actually exists. Instead, there it lay like a sad, misshapen soul, a log I’m sure was teased and kicked r
epeatedly during recess at school. Adding insult to injury, the log in question was from Hickory Farms, those scary cardboard kiosks you see at the malls but once a year during the holidays, then, Poof! they disappear, like a salami sleight of hand.
Interestingly, my father died about a month after Christmas that year, so I’m sure my “log-o-sadness” was reduced for quick sale. I knew our company was cutting financial corners, but this was just below the belt.
I ate everything in the basket but the log itself—I don’t eat things I can’t understand, such as cheese logs, Vienna sausages and Slim Jims—and the crackers and salami were actually quite tasty, albeit a bit stale. Like they say, grievers can’t be choosers.
Here’s wishing you a log-free holiday season. Cheers.
