5 Across the Eye
(Coldplay - What If)

You can always tell when people are having bad days. People who are having bad days become bad poker players. They have all these "tells" that give away the relative strength of their hand. For example, the crazy lady at my workplace is in a bad mood today. She’s banging on her keyboard again. That’s her tell. She takes out all her frustrations on her keyboard.

(I’d hate to be a keyboard; it would suck having someone pressing my buttons all day long.)

My tell is shortness in patience. I’m generally impatient to begin with but on a bad day, my patience is almost zero. I can’t wait 2 minutes for my computer to reboot. I can’t wait 30 seconds for my program to compile. I can’t wait 5 minutes to get an email reply back from a vendor about a quote.

Back to the crazy lady. Her other tell is huffing. She likes to huff when she’s frustrated -- Like little kids in toy stores that can’t get their parents to buy them that cool action figure or Barbie. If she were part of my family and tried to do that in the toy store, she would’ve had five across the eye as soon as she got home. Yet somehow, that’s not acceptable in the workplace.