Where's Ashton Kutcher?

Am I getting Punk’d?

In the earlier hours of an office work day, inter-employee communication is scarce. It’s the few precious hours before the West Coast wakes up and starts making phone calls here, whereupon any semblance of a plan for the day goes right out the window. Everyone here on the East Coast silently shares this opinion, and as a result, chooses to keep office banter to a minimum. Fine by me, really – I’ve got nothing of real value to say until I write today’s blog post.

Save the Funny for the Readers. That’s what I occasionally say.

As I scrambled to prepare for a 9:30 conference call this morning (no, not to the West Coast), I was moving briskly between my office and the printer, with no real intention of making small talk or big promises. As I rounded Admin Corner – the section of the office just outside the big officers that command a direct support employee each, I noticed that two of our Admin were clearing space on the corner hutch.

This is great news.

If there is space being cleared on the corner hutch, that means only one thing: free eats. Most often it occurs after lunch, when an executive moves the leftovers of a catered lunch meeting to the hutch, whereby it’s open season for those surplus sandwiches and cookies. But being nowhere near lunchtime, it had to be a rare occurrence where some employee (likely one of the execs) has decided to bestow grace upon his co-workers with enough bagels or donuts to feed the whole office. Gotta love those days. Saves me a trip downstairs and I don’t even have to pick one up off the floor.

Or it could always be the third option.

Social office culture dictates that when someone has a birthday, the office chef goes home the night before and makes them a cake. It’s a really sweet gesture, unless that person is on vacation, whereby someone from Admin Corner gets sent out of the office to pick one up from the nearest supermarket. This must have been one such instance, as while one cleared the hutch, the other patiently held a circular, nicely decorated cake enveloped in one of those clear plastic lids. Then the Cake Holder began the following dialogue with a clearly stunned Chris Condon:

CH: Hey, if you’re hungry we got an ice cream cake for you.
CC: Oh yeah?
CH: Yeah. It’s for your birthday.
CC: (pause) What?

Ok, here’s the problem here. The cake looks delicious. Sweets are always good on a Casual Friday. It was really nice of them to think of me on my very special day. Except, of course –

It’s not my very special day. It’s not my birthday.

CH: We heard it was your birthday. Happy birthday!
CC: Wow. Thanks. But, um, it’s not my birthday.
CH: It’s not?
CC: Nope. Not until the end of September. Do you think the cake can wait.
CH: It’s an ice cream cake.
CC: Right.