The Sisterhood of the Big Panties

In a word, my job is an oxymoron.

This is because there is no such thing as 'convention management', no more than there is such a thing as herding cats. Some things defy any attempts to manage them.

Conventions are, at their essence, large gatherings of people typically conceived and planned by committee. This means details are ever-changing, definite plans are forever morphing into something completely different, and agendas are best created by Etch A Sketch.

Nothing, I like to say, is set in stone until five minutes after it happens. I have spent literal hours in talks with a a planning committee debating the relative merits of bananas over oranges in a fruit display. I've had no less than six phone calls and two meetings over the placement of a single 6' table, and I fielded an after hours (way after hours) call to discuss the possibility of removing the turkey bacon from the next morning's six a.m. breakfast buffet for twelve hundred.

I called the Chef at home and regular bacon prevailed but I literally and quite sincerely lost sleep over the stress of the whole situation.

This is both sad and ridiculous.

I have bid good morning to the same committee at five a.m. for breakfast and finally said goodnight to them after eleven-forty-five that night when their bar service ended and they'd run out of changes/additions to the next day's agenda, completely jamming up the sand in their Etch A Sketch.

This is not rocket science, I regularly remind myself, and a bit of detachment is imperative.

Fortunately I work with three women who live the same experiences on a daily basis and remind me that a sense of humor -- preferably a warped one -- is key. We remain convinced the job is impossible without it and as a consequence, you never really know what's going to happen next around here.

Case in Point: Our HR offices were recently remodeled and expanded. As a team, we remain collectively relieved the reason for the expansion was not, as we'd originally feared, strictly for our benefit.

Christmas is not Christmas without our annual White Elephant Gift Exchange. There is always at least one gift that defies not only the limits of good taste but also the parameters of personnel policies. This did not stop us from gifting our AV Salesman (at the time, one of only two men on our staff. Today there are none and to date no others have been brave enough to office around quite this much estrogen) with a pair of stress balls directly replicating a female body part (actually, a pair of them). He was never quite brave enough to display them on his desk but was notably less stressed for months afterward.

Conventions leave odd things behind.

A medical group left one fake but remarkably lifelike and equally impressive female breast after their Mammography Summit. It wound up, respectively, in the office refrigerator, on our former boss's chair and inside the desk drawer of the new administrative assistant before mysteriously disappearing one day in the middle of winter. Yes, we wondered where it went but nobody felt comfortable asking and posting a "Have You Seen Me?" poster of a lone breast in the break room was tempting but ultimately not feasible.

The Cranio Facial Symposium left me a skull.

Not, thank goodness, a real one, but another lifelike model. I forgave them only because they'd tucked a cash gratuity in the jawbone. Regardless of the good intentions behind the gift I couldn't fathom keeping it in my office, not even wedged down inside the bottom drawer of my credenza because frankly it was creeping me out and completely disturbing the Feng Shui.

Problem solved when the former boss left and we cleaned out his office. His credenzas netted one cowboy hat, a stadium blanket, one cigar and for some reason we've never understood, a waterproof radio designed for use in the shower.

There was only one thing to do and do immediately: Configure these items into a proper memorial for our departed leader before we closed up his office for good.

At last, I had a home for my skull.

It donned a cowboy hat, reclining beneath the desk in a fashioned-from-phonebooks body, and was covered with the blanket. What better position to be in to smoke a cigar and listen to the radio. We added a pair of boots (don't ask) , took several pictures to email our former leader, closed up the office and basically forgot all about him.

Until the day maybe a month ago when a planner needed a room to quickly hold a conference call. We unlocked the old boss's office and thought nothing of it. Until the call finished and The Planner stuck his head around the corner to thank us. "And you might want to remove the body," he added. Apparently his assistant had nearly screamed when she peeked under the desk, refraining only because whoever it was on the other end of the phone was pretty important. We appreciate, to this day, her restraint.

We've been shameless.

There was the sandwich bag of crushed oregano we planted in Rachel's top drawer the day the GM came through to check every one's desk for cleanliness and orderliness. As this coincided neatly with random drug testing we were pretty proud.

There was the day I retrieved the "Temporary Women's Restroom" sign from a men's room door after an all-female nursing convention departed ...

Taking full advantage of the unlocked office of the AV salesman who had gone home for the weekend, we posted the sign on his door, hung toilet paper rolls from hangers on one side of his chair, and mounted paper towels, hairspray, brushes, combs, and a liquid soap dispenser on his desk.

Yes, there is a reason men are very afraid to work with us, but we pick on each other, as well.

Nobody has ever owned up to them but, following my first real date post-divorce, I was greeted the next morning by an errant set of leather restraints that had been attached to my chair, as well as a pair of handcuffs of dubious origin.

We are consistent.

We'll never pull the same joke twice. Even our voodoo doll, now six years old and completely stuck with pins, paperclips and our own graffiti, remains stoic in the supply cabinet.

We may, however, use the same prop ad nauseaum, and this has been going on for years, ever since JC Penny messed up our Convention Concierge's order and shipped her three size four sweaters and one three pack of what we've come to call "The BIG Panties" and we only call them that because at the time the word GINORMOUS had not yet been recognized by Websters or verbalized by anyone over twenty years old.

The Big Panties turn up everywhere, most recently wedged into our reception area's couch cushions just prior to our weekly staff meeting with the sales team. They were discovered by a young male rookie sales guy and after he screamed like a girl (sorry, it's true...) and flung them across the room, we had the very first meeting ever where we had the couch to ourselves and didn't have to stand up.


The Big Panties have resided, respectively:
In the jacket pocket of one of the aforementioned former men in the office;
In a file folder about to be opened by a new Catering Manager during orientation;
Dangling from a ceiling tile outside our new boss's office;
--And even wrapped around someone's windshield wiper in the parking garage.

As a trick they're as predictable as the magician's 'flowers from the sleeve of the jacket', but somehow we never tire of them.


Its what we're known for," Diane observed.

"It's what we are," I added. "The sisterhood of the big panties."

That's very true.

We're all very grown up, mature ladies who should have better use for our time than stashing huge panties in odd places.

We should have, but we choose not to.

At least not so long as we're debating apples and oranges for a living.