The newest member of Irritating Co-Workers, Inc.

Regular riders of the Hell Bus remember my horrid adventures with Ajax, the King of Irritating Co-Workers. And yall should remember the joy and peace I celebrated on his leaving. And yall may remember a couple of brief encounters with the new co-worker, who shall now and forever be referred to as “Barb” (not her real name).

Altho Barb is nowhere NEAR the massive ball of irritation that Ajax ever was, she IS racking up some serious STFU points (STFU=Shut The Fuck Up for you noobs).

Barb chatters a lot. She LOVES to talk, often to herself. She talks ALL DAY. Her vocal endurance is legendary. The rest of us in our department quickly learned to re-install our selective hearing that had been discarded with Ajax. But even that doesn’t block out everything.

Barb will also repeat stories. A lot. How much, you ask? Well, there’s this one story about her last vacation... trouble with the plane on the way home... blah blah blah. I’ll be merciful and spare you the details, even tho I know them by rote because she’s told this story TEN times. And, no, I am NOT making that up. I’m keeping count. The ninth time was about 2 weeks ago. The tenth time was Monday. Every time a new person swings by our department, Barb feels her story is entertaining enough to retell... again.

Yesterday Barb, fellow worker and humorous partner-in-crime “T,” and I were working in bindery, putting together some spiral-bound books. With all the cutting and stitching going on there was a real mess of scraps on the floor, most of which were snippets of the spiral ring binders. The area we were working in is a crossroads of sorts. Several departments kinda merge in this one area and there’s a lot of traffic. Sales people, pressmen, customer service, they all come thru this area frequently.

At one point one of the press guys came thru, noticed the small spring scraps on the floor and said, “Better watch out on these things. They could put a SPRING in your step!”

At this point we all gave our best nerdy laugh: “Har har har! Yuk yuk yuk!”

Being the goofball humorist that I am, I snapped back with, “Well, ya know, if you put on of these things in a glass of water, you’ll have yourself some... SPRING water!”

Insert nerdy laugh here: “Har har har! Yuk yuk yuk!”

Yeah, it was bad, but our work was tedious and we had to break the monotony somehow. What I didn’t know was that Barb leached onto that rotten joke like a hungry tick to a dog.

A few moments later a sales guy walked thru, asked how we were doing and Barb barks out, “Hey ____, you know if you put one of these in a glass of water, you’ll have spring water!” The sales guy chuckled (politely) since he hadn’t heard it yet. But T and I glanced at each other, mortified.

Oh dear god, please tell me she it NOT gonna ride this one into the ground.

Fuck. She is.

Several minutes later another person came thru our area. “Hey guys, how are yall doin’?”

“Oh, hi ____. Hey ____, you know if you put one of these in a glass of water, you’ll have spring water!”

(Polite snickering from new person, evil looks shot between T and myself. Steam is slowly starting to escape from ears.)

I’m sure yall can guess what happened later, can’t ya? Yeah, I’m not kidding. A third time. Yup. Another new person strolling thru, another violent raping of my lame joke. Some serious self control kept me from telling Barb to STFU already.

Once our work was done in bindery, T went back to his desk. I arrived a little later to overhear him telling our supervisor what had happened back there. I catch the words “spring water” as I see my supervisor look up at me with an expression that said, “Are you serious?!”

I groaned nodded sadly.

T and I are still ranting about it this morning. And eagerly waiting to see what story, joke or phrase Barb is going to ass-rape and run into the ground next.