Note: All names have been changed to protect the stupid.

Now that I’m safely out of my last job and have moved far enough away that they can no longer get hold of me, I can tell you about some of the insanity that went on in that place. And quite possibly one of the biggest balls of crazy in the building was a woman named Josie.

Josie was an older woman, easily in her 60s. She was kind of short and portly, with a frizzy white puffball of hair and a gravelly voice that she loved to exercise any chance she got. There were no short conversations with Josie. If she started talking to you, you might as well pull up a chair, ’cause you were in for the long haul. Now, to this day, I’m not entirely certain what Josie’s actual official job title was. I asked around and never got a satisfactory answer. She was married to another employee who’d also been there since the dawn of time, so I guess she sort of had built-in tenure. Still, she did stuff to earn her paycheck. She watered the plants. She handled the shredding duties. And she apparently decided at some point that it was her responsibility–nay, sacred duty–to badger everyone about keeping the place clean.

Understand, we had a hired cleaning crew that came in every night to straighten the place up. No excuse to be a slob, I know, and we weren’t a messy bunch, but we did have people to handle this sort of thing. But Josie had decided that it was up to her to make sure the place remained spotless in between visits by the cleaners. Her main weapon in that regard was The Sign. Josie put signs on everything she felt was in her jurisdiction. “DO NOT LEAVE DISHES IN SINK!” a sign would scream at you from above the faucet. “PUT DISHES BACK IN CABINET!” a sign directly next to the first sign would say. There were signs on the microwave, the coffee maker, the utensil drawer, the plants (”DO NOT MOVE! DO NOT WATER!”), the chairs in the break room (”DO NOT REMOVE CHAIRS FROM BREAK ROOM UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!”), and pretty much anything that held still for more than five minutes and Josie decided fell within her sphere of influence. These were her halls, dammit, and she was going to keep them clean.

Of course, I knew none of this the first time I crossed her path. I’d only been on the job for about two weeks. I’d never met, seen, nor even heard of her. So I was rather surprised one morning when this gray-haired little troll waddled into my office and brandished a dirty bowl at me.

“Is this yours?” she asked with no preamble. I looked up and was confronted with a plastic Tupperware bowl that looked to have some oatmeal detritus in it. I’m not used to having strange women assault me with filthy servingware, but I tried to be polite.

“Uh, no, sorry,” I said and attempted to return to work, figuring the matter closed. She was looking for the owner of the bowl. I was not said owner, therefore our business was concluded. As I said, I didn’t know Josie yet.

“Because it was in the sink,” she informed me. She appeared put out by this, although it seemed to me to be a perfectly logical place for a dirty bowl. I can understand her being cheesed about it being in the cabinet, or the fridge, the closet, maybe, but the sink made sense to me.

“Is that not where it goes?” I asked, not realizing the magnitude of the mistake I had just made.

“Dirty dishes need to be washed. I have to keep this place clean and I don’t have time to follow around cleaning up after you.” I wanted to point out that she wasn’t cleaning up after me, since the bowl wasn’t mine, but she was just working up steam and wasn’t about to be derailed. “You can’t go leaving dirty dishes in the sink. If it’s dirty, you need to wash it. I have too much to do without having to clean up behind you. So if you use a dish, you need to wash it, and then put it back in the cabinet. It’s my job to keep this place neat and I can’t be always doing your dishes.” And on and on it went, the same basic message, repeated various ways.

And again, I had no idea who this woman was. This was a complete stranger who had barged unannounced into my office and was hectoring me about a dish that I had never seen before she shoved it under my nose. I began to wonder if a crazy homeless woman had somehow gotten into the building and wandered into my office. That made more sense than a rational fellow employee berating me about a dirty bowl.

Eventually she wound down, apparently running out of different ways to say the same thing. She stood glaring at me, seeming to expect something. Frankly I was at a loss. “Uh, might be one of my co-workers’. I’ll ask them when they get in,” I tried.

“You do that,” she said. “Because it’s not my job to clean up after you–”

“Got it,” I said, trying to head her off before she lapped herself and started her diatribe all over again. “I’ll ask them.” That seemed to be good enough because she turned and shuffled out, giving me a suspicious, angry look the whole way. I can only assume that she then went from office to office, asking anyone who happened to be in the building if the bowl was theirs and giving her speech, regardless of the answer.

When my co-workers did turn up a little later, I asked if there was a crazy woman on staff who would be upset about a dirty bowl in the sink. “Ah, you met Josie,” they said knowingly. They didn’t seem too surprised by her reaction. Ultimately, the bowl turned out to belong to my co-worker, Jennifer, who got the exact same speech I got when she claimed ownership of it. Jen apologized and dutifully washed the offending dish, getting an earful the entire time. When the bowl was safely stored in Jen’s backpack (she had brought it from home the day before) and Josie had run out of air, the crisis seemed to finally have been averted. There were no more dirty dishes in the sink and all was right and good in the world.

Until the day we used the Christmas tree skirt. But that’s another story.