An email popped up in my inbox from a single sender requesting a favor.
"Hey Mari," it read. "I need a favor."
And it went on and on about some really boring shit that I'm not going to tell you about because it will literally put you to sleep. Literally. Alarm. Snooze. Repeat.
But just as my eyelids were feeling heavy, she closed her note with an ominous, "Let us know if you have any questions."
Let us know if you have any questions?
I suspected the emailer forgot to copy someone on this note. A silly, but common, oversight when operating at a million miles a minute. And I didn't give it much thought.
Later that day I met with that same person, face to face, with no one else around. And out of her mouth came, "We will pull a report."
I politely let them finish their thought before asking, "Who is pulling the report?"
She responded, "We will."
We will? Does this mean I have to sit there while she mundanely types at her keyboard creating some godforsaken pivot table because she has codependency issues?
Or is this her pompous way of asking me to pull the report because they are a direct descendant of the Earl of Downton Abbey and, therefore, entitled to use the royal 'we'?
Then I thought that perhaps this could be a more serious issue. One that might involve her health.
A few weeks ago I learned all about dermoid cysts not from watching some horrifying Discovery Channel program, but from a friend who had one silently growing inside of her. Like something out of the mind of Sir Ridley Scott, this thing was big and gross and had hair.
Hair I tell you.
Luckily, they removed the watermelon-sized growth without complication and, more importantly, before it fully hatched into an evil Gremlin.
What if my email-sending, royal-we-using co-worker, by some weird twist of gross-tumor-fate, also had one of these cysts growing inside? Only hers was inoperable, forcing her to carry around the twin they swallowed in the womb for the rest of her life. Or lives.
Therein lies the exact problem. Could she technically be two people?
It wouldn't be too inconceivable that the guilt of her gluttony had led her to not only count herself as two people, but also attribute certain characteristics to the alien egg inside of them. For all I know her madness led her to believe that the inoperable monster is a wiz at creating reports.
And I certainly would not blame her for using we to avoid the potentially embarrassing conversation that would go something like, "...we, meaning my insanely scary dermoid cyst and I, will work to get that report over to you in a timely manner."
I was momentarily placated by this idea. I've seen Harry Potter, I know how demanding parasitic beings can be. You end up having to carry them around on the back of your head and covering them up with a turban so they can get their evil-doing on.
Instead of letting it go, I insisted one more time. I asked firmly and directly in the hopes of getting a clear indication as to who the hell was going to pull this now embittered report.
"Just to be clear," I said. "Am I pulling the report or are you pulling the report?"
"I'm pulling the report," she responded.
Making it crystal clear that she is in fact an overbearing ego maniac that ate her twin in the womb on purpose.