Work it

So a couple people have requested me to post an experience I had at work last week. It is a little embarrassing, but I should probably confess my sins.

If you weren't sure, I work as a nutritionist at a doctor's office. My day consists of seeing ornery, hungry, irritable people (Ok, i'm over exaggerating, I love a lot of my patients but some are evil) and discussing with them diet plans and their health. I'm sort of the peon of the office. There is a medical doctor who loves charging people a ridiculous amount of money and is not too concerned about it; kind of a typical jerk doctor (i'm training Travis to not be like that). Luckily Dr. T is only in the office twice a week. We also have a male Nurse Practioner, aka Dr. Wannabe who not kidding, is basically a Dwight (from The Office). He is a butt kisser know-it-all. Then we have a dietician who has a four year degree (which I have) but two-year internship (which I don't have thus downsizing my credentials), and then there is me... the lonely nutritionist.

A couple of weeks ago our dietician (we will call her Sparky), who I really like but sometimes her intensity can really get to me, comes into my office and says that there is this really cool obesity conference in which Dr. T said we could all go too. Sweet, I finally get to feel important. WRONG! The following week I get an email from our office manager Anna (a very cool girl who shares the same feelings about our supervisors). The email is a forward from Dwight saying that Dr. T actually only wants Dwight and Sparky to attend the conference, and pond scum Milli can just stay back and work. This infuriates me. Snubbed again! The cool thing about where I work are the girls I work with. We all send each other emails all day long ripping on our authorities. After receiving the forward from Anna, the moaning and backbiting begins. It feels good to have all of their support. There is name calling, badmouthing and silliness in all of these emails. The "team" decides for me that I should email Dwight and tell him how I feel about my un-invitation. So I did.

I send Dwight the forward that Anna sent to me adding to it an explaination of how I felt, yadda yadda yadda. It was actually a genius piece of work, and I feel great about it. After I send it to him, I forward the copy to my girls. In the next instant, I can hear Sparky say "Milli is this the copy you sent to Dwight?" Thinking she would totally toot my horn with how awesome it sounds, I answer "yeah, why," she goes on to use a few choice words that I will edit from this post. She points out that along with the email I sent him; I also forwarded him the emails that we all had been sending each other. Various quotes from those emails are; "he is such a freak" and "we can't wait till he goes to the conference so we can have a day of fun without him." I immediately start sweating profusely in my armpits. Dwight luckily was in his office with a patient, so he hadn't had a chance to read the email i sent him, but the email was there just sitting inches away from him. I ran into Sparky's office and just kept saying "he can't read that email, we will all get fired!!!

Dwight's door opens, he is done with his patient. By the grace of Heaven, Dwight walks out of his office, leaving his computer alone and goes to the chart stack. I punch Sparky and say "go distract him, I'm going in his office and getting rid of that email." She jumps up and goes to him and starts talking about the benefits of soy nuts while I run into his office. At this point, my heart rate is nearing the numbers of 250 at least and I can actually hear it beat in my ears. I get on his computer and click on his email. His email is not formatted the way mine is, so it was hard to tell if he had read my email or not. "He couldn't have read it because he was with a patient" I keep telling myself. Even though my hands are shaking I somehow manage to right click and push 'delete' on the implicating email. Then I sprint straight back to my office and pretty much have a seizure. I hurry and copy and paste the same email to a nice fresh email and send it to Dwight just in case he had happened to glance at his computer and see an email from me in his inbox while he was seeing that patient.

Time was ticking, and I was eagerly awaiting a response, when I realized, crap, I didn't delete the bad email from his deleted folder. He still has a chance of reading it. As I was thinking this, I heard the dreadful "ding" the noise of a brand new email. It was from him. This was either going to be very good or very bad. The email was actually polite and apologetic. He had responded to my nice email. I actually pulled it off without getting the whole staff fired! He had no clue!

Luckily it was close to lunchtime and he leaves for lunch, so the second he left the office, I re-snuck in his office to do my final destruction of deleting the deleted file. The email was not in there. I looked in all of his files and could not find the evidence. To this day I have no idea if maybe I double deleted it, or if he actually read it, or if it is just floating around cyber space.

I still am not invited to the obesity conference. But at this point I don't really care. All that matters is that the true me was not revealed. He still thinks I am sweet. I know I should go on to say that I learned a lesson, and that I should never talk behind somebody's back, but to be honest, how can you not make fun of Dwight? The days are funny and it makes work go by fast. I may be justifying myself to Hell, but instead of learning my lesson and trying not to talk bad about him I made a rule to always read an email from top to bottom before sending one.