Quality Control

Isn't it funny how certain traits become evident at such a young age?

Why just last week, in a bout of office stress relief, I decided to ride my office chair like a scooter into a co-worker's office, only to yell RAMMING SPEED and collide into his desk. During this episode, my coworker's remarked, "Man, I knew you were up to no good cause you had that deviant look on your face."

I know that look. It is the same look evident in about a quarter dozen childhood pics where I was, no doubt, considering some shenanigans for the camera.

Another trait which emerged when I was quite young is my passion for quality control. Inconsistancy is the bane of my existance. Perhaps my favorite example of exercising quality control coupled with psychological sibling warfare comes from when my older sister was in the girl scouts, many moons ago.

Sure they sold cookies back then, but not like nowadays. In the late 70s, you had 1 shot at getting thin mints and tag-a-longs annually and you have to pre-order AND pre-pay. My sister did her duty, making the neighborhood rounds drumming up 50 or so orders and 8-10 weeks later, several crates of cookies arrived on our doorstep.

The arrival was most likely mid-week, so our parents thought the hall closet would be a safe place to store the cookies until the weekend, when my sister could distribute the goods.

It was at this point, where my penchant for quality control came into play. As you see, I decided to sample the goods, but in a highly regimented fashion. I opened every last damn box and ate exactly 1 cookie from each one.

Saturday morning came and I would imagine my sister was pretty much flabergasted not only at the cookie carnage which lay in the closet, but at the prospect that she would now have to face all of her customers and tell them there would be no cookies for them this year. Christ, it must have been like denying christmas for some of these people. Nevermind the fact that my parents had to pony up $300 bucks to cover the slightly used cookie stash.

While I feel a little bad about it now, I imagine I took some perverse sense of empowerment over the situation at the time (and chalked a victory in the brother vs sister war which lasted nearly 16 years).