Joe-Man

In 1973, at the age of 19 (Jesus Christ that was a long time ago), I started a co-op job at The Mitre Corporation in Bedford, MA.

I was attending Northeastern University as a co-op student. The co-op thing means you go to school for six months, NU gets you a real job which you work for six months, back to school for 3, back to work for 3 etc. It really is a good program. You get thrown out into the real world right off the bat with a chance to use whatever minimal knowledge you have already  accumulated in the classroom.

I worked in the accounting office. There was an accounting manager there named Jim Hanley. This guy was hilarious. He had a dry, sarcastic sense of humor as well as a dry, sarcastic appreciation of the absurdity of working for a corporation.

Examples of his sense of humor: My amazing wife Carol worked there (that's where I met this 36 year life partner of mine). Carol being Carol, she took it upon herself to tend to all the plants in the office.

Jim had plants in his office. Carol tended to them. They suffered and did not flourish. All the other plants in the office flourished. Carol could not understand it. One day she took down one of Jim's plants and found cigarette butts ground out in the soil. This was way back in the day when people could smoke in the office. Kind of like Mad Men.

Jim confessed to Carol that he ground out his cigarettes in the plants and also dumped the dregs of his coffee into the soil.

Very funny dude.

He also had a big rubber gorilla hanging on the back of the door to his office. Whenever anybody asked him what it was, he would explain that it was his mother-in-law.

Jim was such a cool guy that of course he was cut down quite prematurely by cancer.

Anyway, once he got to know me he called me Joe-Boy. Joe-Boy this and Joe-Boy that.

Right now in the hideous job I currently hold I work with a woman named Sue.

Sue calls me Joe-Man.

It took 41 years, but I have evolved.