Yokels

The girl who sits a couple of cubes down from me is sick. She's been a little off all week, and was blaming allergies, but today's coughing and sore throat are a dead giveaway that it's something more than that. She came to my desk this morning to see if I had anything that might help her throat.

Part of my job is to order tons of products from our competitors. Since I work on the apothecary stuff, a lot of the things I order come from drugstore.com and places like that, and every time I order something they enclose a sample bag of something or other. I generally just throw these samples into my middle drawer, unless it's teeth-whitening gum, saline solution, nutsack powder, or something else I can use at home. There are a lot of sample bags in my middle drawer.

Anyway, I gave my co-worker a bunch of these hard candy-type throat lozenges this morning. Just after lunch, she came over to thank me, and ask if I had any more. I opened the drawer, fished around a little bit, paused uncomfortably, and then told her that I must have thrown the bag away.

I hadn't really thrown the bag away. I just didn't think it would be a good idea to tell her that I had mistakenly given her what I had just discovered to be a handful of "Fiber Choice" fiber supplements. According to the little pamphlet in the sample bag, one Fiber Choice lozenge has four times as much fiber as one Metamucil pill. They look exactly like orange-flavored hard candies, even down to the transparent wrapper. They do say "Fiber Choice" on the wrapper, but since it's in cursive and the wrapper overlaps itself, I'm not surprised she didn't notice.

I guess the right thing to do would be to tell her what she has been eating all morning, but I think I'm just going to pretend none of this ever happened.