Two friends (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is the story of how a friendship was born:

We all have different ways of dealing with stress.  Some people drink, some people turn to religion, some people become extreme couponers.  Me, I swear profusely and laugh at completely inappropriate things.  Until recently, I had my own office at work, so it wasn’t a big deal.  Then we made a new hire, and she got put in with me.  I was a little worried about this.  I’m not exactly–what’s that term?–safe for work.  Why would The Powers That Be hire a young and impressionable girl and then deliberately put her in an office with me?  I’m still not sure.  But they did.

I was good for about twenty minutes before I dropped my first expletive.  For me, that’s extremely impressive.  I’ve been known to utter sentences that contained more obscenities than non-obscenities.  I’ve crafted phrases that have used profanity as subject, verb, and object.  For a second, I was really afraid I was going to get a formal complaint.  I apologized for my impropriety.  My new officemate looked at me and said, “What?  Oh, I didn’t even notice.”

Huge f*&%ing sigh of relief!

Since then, I have learned her preferences in candy, lunch destinations, and breakfast muffins, and she has learned the true extent of my shameful addiction to caffeine as well as the depths to which I am willing to sink for the sake of making a joke.  I probably still should have been trying to behave myself around her so she wouldn’t run screaming from the office and file a complaint about the vile cretins surrounding her.  However, when you see each other at 7 AM and spend hours together going through paperwork to get a report in by the deadline, barriers tend to go down.  I was a little disturbed by the fact that she prefers Ryan Gosling to Johnny Depp, but she’s about five minutes old, so I let it pass.  JD can be too much for some people.  It’s okay.

Duct-tape Moving Van (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Officemate–she’s really more of an Office Sister at this point–moved house this past weekend, which is why I haven’t updated for a while:  I helped.  Well, I tried to help.  I’m not what you might call muscular, so I’m no good with moving furniture.  But I can pack like a champ, so that’s mostly what I did.  I packed and vacuumed.  I stayed at Office Sister’s place overnight so I could get up at dawn and pack some more.  Leading up to it, I thought, “Cool!  We’ll hang out, pack some boxes, drink some wine, make inappropriate comments when our supervisors can’t overhear–it’ll be great!”

I’m going to change my name from Little Blind Girl to Little Stupid Girl.  I know better than to think things like that.  Disaster 1:  The refrigerator Office Sister and Office Brother-in-Law ordered didn’t fit the space they had so carefully measured.  Disaster 2:  The microwave didn’t fit, either.  The freaking microwave!  Disaster 3:  Saturday evening traffic in a major metropolis.  Disaster 4:  Half a dozen people who had promised to help canceled.  Disaster 5:  God finally decided to smite us with torrential rain and intermittent tornados.  I’m not saying we didn’t deserve it, but seriously, who gets tornados when they’re moving?  And on, and on, and on.

Exhaustion, tears, the occasional natural disaster:  this is how a friendship is born.  No amount of stress at work can bind two people together quite like driving through tornados and packing away your Office Sister’s bras.  By the time the moving truck had been emptied at the new house and all the furniture had been set up, there was just no point in pretending to be refined and proper.  You can’t move house without swearing and, what’s more important, you can’t move house without revealing who you really are.  Sometimes literally, if you interrupt someone just after a shower because you’re looking for somewhere to brush your teeth and everything’s already packed up.  You just can’t help seeing each other in all your glory.

And it was pretty cool.

English: Clayton Farmhouse Drive (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So my Office Sister is all moved into her new home, her first actual house, and she’s the cutest thing on two legs with her funny, patient husband and her loudmouth cat (shrieked the entire way to the new house.  Hour and a half.  Oh, my God!) and I don’t even remember how many boxes of couscous we ended up unpacking.  And three different kinds of salsa.  And at least twenty pillows.  And that’s it; we’re friends.  Done.  End of story, professionalism be d%&*ed.  You can’t lay hands on someone’s lingerie and then look them in the eye without laughing.

And that’s the story of how a friendship was born.