Miasmatic Review

My Valentine gift.

Well, well, well, I actually had some fun handing out flowers. Now, before you all go thinking, “Hey, Contagion has a soft side.” Let me set you straight, there is no soft spot here.

It all started at 11:00 this morning. The employees could go into the break room and for a $1.00 buy a carnation for someone else. Then some poor sap would deliver the flower to the recipient. Yes, that poor sap was I. Come to find out; this whole thing was a fundraiser for some charity. AKA, my company was bilking the employees for free advertising. You don’t believe me? Let me explain it to you.

When companies, especially large companies like what I work for, do fund raisers for charities it is so they can get their names in the papers. When that charity goes to various places they can list the XYZ Company as a benefactor. Since most of these companies either match their employees’ donation dollar for dollar or set a flat fee, they end up paying in most cases not more then 50% of the donation. Basically the employees foot the bill to spread the company name. Trust me, I’ve sat in on the committees for these drives.

Anyway, I’m way off topic here. Sorry about that, just a little side rant. At first delivering these flowers was annoying. I didn’t know who 90% of the employees where nor where they sat, so it took me forever to deliver them at first. But after the first 30 minutes it started picking up, and I actually started enjoying myself.

I work with mainly females, I believe it’s about 90-95% female environment. When I would start to walk down the rows the females would look on in hope and anticipation. Their faces read, “Mr. Contagion, please stop here. Give me a flower. Confirm that people like me, give me some hope that I’m not an unwanted loser.” Then as I passed them by, as was more likely to happen, the look of rejection was priceless.

Their sagging heads and slumped posture just screamed out, “Nobody loves me, I have no friends. There isn’t even anyone that likes me enough to pretend.” Upon noticing this the first time, I started watching for it. Sure enough every row, every isle, every flower I delivered there was at least one person that would get the look of rejection! There were a handful of women that did the same thing every time I passed. Each time getting more and more dejected, at one point I thought one of them would implode from the stress.

Then to make things even better, whoever planned this did a horrible job. They only bought 400 flowers to sell. We have almost 700 people in our office. Some people where buying flowers by the dozen and giving them to one person. One girl I probably delivered close to 20 flowers to in the course of an hour. We had completely sold out by 11:45 AM and the sale was supposed to go on until 2:00 PM.

People who waited to buy flowers never got a chance. Some of those rejected individuals may actually have had a chance of getting a flower if there were enough to go around. When I noticed that we were starting to run out, I quickly bought a flower for Ktreva (Remember we work together) and delivered it to her. She didn’t need that unloved feeling. As a bonus it denied someone else a flower!

All in all it was actually fun. I may even do it again next year.