Seeing work colleagues naked
What lurks beneath the shirts?
It’s preferable for your work colleagues never to see you in your swimming togs. It might be okay, of course, if you’re a lifeguard or a swimming togs model, then go for it, shake those jugs in front of your manager.
But if you’re just a regular nothing of a person like me, working in a nine to five with people that you only want to see fully-clothed, then it’s nicer not to have to see the horrors that are festering under… say… Dave from account’s shirt. So, what I want for Christmas is for the universe to stop presenting me with semi-naked men from work.
I was in a public swimming pool recently with my toddler. He was splashing water in my eyes and I was desperately hoping that he wouldn’t shit in the pool again. Those swimming nappies aren’t very forgiving. With the sudden feeling of being watched, I whipped my head around and saw Ted, one of the managers from work, submerged in the shallow water two feet from me. Our eyes met for a split second before he quickly turned away, giving me the full view of his hairy shoulders and faded tattoos that he probably got in Thailand when he was twenty (he’s now early forties).
Hairy shoulders are fine, if you’re into that, but I just don’t need to see them attached to work colleagues’ bodies. In the same way that I don’t want men in work to think that I have breasts or an arse, let’s just keep this relationship face-based. Got it? I’m a head with a face, that’s all I am to you.
I can’t go anywhere without seeing someone I don’t want to see. Just the previous week, I’d been in a different pool and had ended up literally bumping into another man from work as he threw one of his kids in the air and she almost landed on my head.
And last summer, I was in the sauna in a hotel in Kerry when Tom, a software developer from work, emerged from the steam with his dad. We sat there pissing sweat, me in my low cut Tesco togs, him and his dad with their matching moobs out, saying oh how funny it was to meet each other this way whilst we really wanted to shrivel up and die.
And now there’s me and Ted in the swimming pool, two colleagues who had been in a meeting together just weeks previously and were now semi-naked and ignoring one another. A few minutes later, my toddler climbed out of the pool and I’d to go after him, hooshing my middle-aged arse up onto the side of the pool right at eye-level with my auld work-pal Ted.
“Get a good look at that crack. Post that on LinkedIn,” I thought as I plodded away as fast as I could.
Fast forward two weeks and I was texting a woman called Francis on Adverts about a chair she was selling. I arrived at Francis’ house to collect it and her husband opened the door. Who was it? It was fucking Ted, shirt on.
“I know you!” I sing-songed, unable to ignore him this time.
“Yeah!” he said, pretend delighted.
When you live in Dublin, it’s easy to feel like you’re in a play with a very limited number of characters that have to keep being reused. Like how Adele is always being played on the radio, where are all the other singers? In Dublin, where are all the new people? Why am I seeing a Dad at the school gates that I kissed in Irish college? Why did the cashier in Lidl massage me two years ago? Why is a girl from school now my local councillor? What’s going on?
I’ve had enough of it, universe, please give me a break. Let’s fire the existing cast and get some newbies in.
