Takes a lickin', keeps on tickin'.
So here is a story, unlocked by another story. But I am going to add several metaphorical (if not actual) parentheses (they will not be apparent as actual parentheses).
I'm reading Making Money by Terry Pratchett (I'm working my way through the Discworld), and I came across this:
"...in the muted silence of the banking hall, the click of the green pen being deployed had the same effect of the sound of the axe-man sharpening his blade."
And I remember Pat (previously known as my foster mother...at least as far as this blog is concerned), telling me a story.
She had a degree in economics, with a side of accountancy (it always does one good to learn a trade). But in her day, women could only ever make seventy-five percent of a man's wage at best, and could not, under any circumstances, be in charge (unless, well, she opened her own business and got called a prostitute all the time, regardless of what the bidniz actually iz). Ahem.
So there she is, an accountant, in a bookkeeping farm. (A bookkeeping farm is like a server farm, except that instead of hard drives, you have people adding up profit and loss thingies for the accountants to deal with so they can formulate...the balance sheet.) (That should probably be punctuated as "The Balance Sheet".)
And she worked for this utter stereotype of a man: long lunches, no work (hey, she did it, but since it was done...he did it, right?). But he was the kind of twerp who would pull up the smallest mistake of an underling. So as to make a big deal of it? So as make it clear he was in charge? Probably both, that part I don't know, I only know what she told me. But I'll go with the latter...it validated his job, this pointing out of others' mistakes, rather than teaching them how not to make them. And he'd mark those in green pen.
Green pen, the scourge of bookkeepers everywhere.
So she knew the underlings' work and workload, and she'd watch as the overlord vetted: he would find increasingly small errors, and then SCORE THEM WITH THE GREEN PEN.
The caps are important, because she used to watch this, knowing any mistake would be small, but that he would make that junior's life a misery once the green pen thus spoke.
And one Friday (of course these things happened on a Friday, so better to let everyone stew over the weekend), he read the reports. He pulled out the green pen-
"DON'T YOU DARE!" Thus spoke Zarathustra. She cursed him. She wished him dead: in the moment for what he was doing, but really, because of what he was (I'm adding my own interp here: an immense twat with delusions of grandeur).
She went home assuming she was not only fired, but could never find work again. She duly showed up to work on Monday morning. She wasn't fired.
She wasn't fired. He'd had a massive heart attack, and died that Friday.
But she thought for years that her curse had worked. That she had wished him dead, and thus he was. She told me this as a way to understand how powerful words (and actions) are: mean what you say, and do what you mean. Never be frivolous about any curse you throw, because even if it's all bunkum: if it comes true you have to live with its consequences.
It might seem paradoxical, but given how poisonous I have felt her parenting to be...it's good to have found words to live by that I have tried to live by.
Love and peace, peeps.
