Surviving the Workday

My morning writing partner and I are using prompts since recently we seem to spend a lot of time staring at the blank screen . Here’s our morning prompt from Writer’s Digest.

Look around the room and pick an object. Write one paragraph describing the object in full detail and a second paragraph explaining where it came from.

Here’s mine from this morning. Feel free to play along, if you’d like, with what’s in your workplace. You can post in comments. Every object has a story:

In my office, there is a tropical tree with four brown leaves; I’m tempted to remove them as I type. There. Now they’re gone. Talk about compulsive. I’m not sure what sort of tropical plant it is. It has a bamboo-like stalk, and wide dark green leaves. I’ve seen this tree in restaurants and office buildings. 
 
The tree used to be in my former boss’s enormous corner office. At that point, most of the leaves were brown because we had someone whose job it was to water plants and he overwatered everything as that was his entire job. Really. My boss would trim the brown away with scissors, a practice I found a bit creepy (but she was also an editor, so trimming is really what we do). While she was out of town at her mother’s funeral, our nonprofit was evicted and I took her plant home rather than leaving it in the office to die. I asked her if she wanted it when she returned, but a dying plant after having her mother die wasn’t what she wanted. Four years later, the tropical tree lives in the desert and is still alive.

This entry was posted by Ms. Theologian on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 9:52 am and is filed under fun You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.