i work with a 12 year old

i have a 12 year old co-worker masquerading as a 50+ year old boy. we’ll call him “conan”.

in my department, i’m one of 2 females. this doesn’t really mean a whole lot, since the department is small and there’s only 8 of us, total. still, there’s the usual silly boy, puffed-chest bravado, talk of being The Rooster and wearing The Pants in The Family. and there are the quickly corrected stereotypical comments of staff or patrons acting like “whiney little girls”. and while i haven’t gotten the boys to stop calling all female employees “girls”, i’ve at least opened their eyes to the idea that a girl is, by definition, a child.

(this is just a small pet peeve of mine. it’s why i like to use the term “boy” when referring to boys or men. if they’re going to use “girl” to refer to all females, i’ll do, conversely, the same.)

when i first started working in this department, conan found out that i liked coffee. i had my own little one-cup french press! and the group of us would head out to the branches and do a quick stop for a caffeinated boost. i’d always get a café con leche, since we’d stop at the local cuban breakfast joint. and then, once the branch field trips were over… i kept finding cups of café con leche at my desk. at least three times a week. sometimes in the mini fridge, only needing and silently awaiting a little microwave radiation to bring it back to glorious life.

it was weird.

don’t get me wrong, i love coffee. but
1) drinking that much café con leche makes your pee start to smell wrong and
2) ummm… it’s just weird to have your married co-worker buy you coffee without one’s consent and not want monetary compensation.

eventually he stopped, though most likely at the request of supervisors who (would hopefully) tend to notice such obvious favoritism.

naturally, conan then buys a $30 espresso machine for the department to make café con leche in situ.

he also finds it necessary to bestow upon me his 12 year old wisdom. he’ll pry into my personal life and when, at the time, i had decided to get back together with anthony, he informed me that i was making a bad decision, blah blah blah. i couldn’t believe it. who did this guy think he was? he doesn't know me, much less my middle name, the names of my cats, my favorite wine, books, pens, nicknames, movies, charcoal. he later told me that i needed a Man who liked Football and tried to set me up with his son. no thanks, buddy.

conan is also a fan of talk radio. i loathe talk radio. my blood pressure shoots up when i listen to talk radio, which is difficult to do since my blood pressure is naturally uber low. a few fridays ago, 6 of us gathered and trundled into a van to help one of our branches shelve their plethora of books. 5 of the 6 hated talk radio. only one person, the driver, conan, wanted to listen to it. frustration and pouting ensued by said talk radio fan when, after much cajoling and pleases and reasoning, i simply turned the radio off if conan attempted to listen.

i cannot convey the amount of uncaring i have for conan when he’s being a petulant 12 yr old. he listened to country instead, which wasn’t so great either, but is leaps and bounds better than talk radio. the death rattle of my only child would be preferable over talk radio.

and at the oddest time, when we’re all proclaiming how much we hate talk radio and how it hurts more than helps, he asks, “are you engaged?” out of the blue. he’s just so WEIRD.

at the end of our shelving duties, we head to the nearest chinese buffet for greasy sustenance. instead of letting us know what he’s doing, conan does not follow us into the restaurant, choosing instead to sit at a bench for the entirety of our lunch hour. childish. he attemps to blast country music on the way to home base.

really, it's quite amazing.