Worker Bee

Tragedy Minus Time

A hoity-toity comedy theorist — or was he just toity? It’s hard to remember — speculated that comedy is tragedy plus time. In other words, it takes a while to be able to laugh about things that are the most painful. That’s certainly the case right now. Of course, The Worker Bee estimates that comedy sometimes is tragedy minus time. For instance, if you’re walking with a klutzy friend and he falls headfirst into a vat of cottage cheese, you’re awfully liable to start laughing. But then, after about 15 minutes or so, when you’ve finished taking pictures, calling your friends and making sure a local news crew is sending it to “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” there may be an uncomfortable moment when you say, “Um ... Dwayne? Did you hit your head on the side, there, buddy?” (Don’t worry, cottage cheese containers are soft and Dwayne’s head is hard.) The point is, with events as permanently tragic as the recent attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, chances are that we will never be able to laugh about them, but we will be able to laugh again. Simply having faith in that is perhaps the hardest and most important thing you can do, not just for yourself but for your co-workers and loved ones as well. Anyway, who would leave a giant vat of cottage cheese lying around? I’m writing an angry letter to the Cottage Cheese Association.

Give Bees a Chance

Sometimes going to work and just having a place where you can show up is helpful while waiting to see how the plot unfolds — as they say, after all, a watched plot never boils. The point is that all you can do in the heat of the moment is to continue with whatever tasks might take your mind off the situation. Here at The Hive — simply one of The Worker Bee’s many offices around the world, though the only one where he can walk outside and see different nationalities waiting in the same line together at tarbucks — a number of co-workers’ friends and family members remain unaccounted for. Sitting in my office in Times Square, concentrating on work is hard. So ... today is Filing Day! Nobody is going to get anything complicated done, so we might as well dig into that pile that’s been obscuring our view of ... oh, that other pile behind it. (Maybe we’re going to need two days for filing.)

Bee As Kind As You Can

OK, I don’t want to get all ‘Scrooge-McDuck-having-an-epiphany’ here, but it’s good to “epiph” once in a while. So, be grateful and exuberantly happy about what you have and who you have, even on your worst days at work. Rather than just accepting the kind words of someone whom you might not normally get along with or even talk to, why not take this opportunity to become closer? And try holding on to that feeling months from now, when you’re about to yell at them because they’ve just nixed your proposal for a new kosher vegetarian restaurant called Soy Vey. Hey, who thought matzoh could taste so much like chicken?

Karmic Relief

By the time you read this, things hopefully will be much brighter, and we will all be able to eat our cereal — Cinnamon Life is The Worker Bee’s favorite — without seeing violence on the morning news. Remember: Work is always going to be a part of life, but life will always be a part of work. Good stuff is around the corner. And Cinnamon Life goes on.

Bee In Touch...

Got a work-related question for The Worker Bee? E-mail it to him at mybuddybrett@yahoo.com.