Wish I had had time to put this one in before the tail end of the day! About ten years ago I was working at a non-profit that was very mission driven and attracted people with a lot of backgrounds; it was a true melting-pot style workplace, with epic potluck lunches and diversity events. For Halloween, our company unfailingly held a pumpkin carving contest, a costume contest, and a department decorating contest with prizes for all things. I was new to management in the IT department and improbably, also running the department Fun Committee. Our VP was having a baby with his partner, and somehow, the baby shower was scheduled on Halloween Day (on top of the carving contest, the department decorating contest, and the costume contest, because why not). The decorations went up around the beginning of the month, and no one paid much attention to what they were at the time, but I am sure they included some spooky severed zombie hands, some eyeballs, some bats, vampires, maybe a witch on a broom or something. All perfectly appropriate for a standard middle school, which was a good description of our department on any given Tuesday.

One of the Fun Committee’s more hapless members, Amanda, decided to combine themes — spooky baby shower. She was the sort who throws herself into decorating and bought probably $20 worth of bunting, plastic printed sheeting, garland and such from Walgreens as well as bringing in the little pumpkins and some models she’d made at home — a trebuchet (I was flinging Mike-and-Ikes from it, at people, probably) and a Ferris Wheel with baby candy pumpkins sitting in the seats.

Only, that didn’t sit well with everyone. One of our more forceful personalities, Natasha, had flipped out on Amanda, saying that she was cursing the baby even before it was born and bringing the devil into our department. Amanda had responded maturely by ripping it all down, and declaring that she would never, ever decorate again, for ANYTHING, and and then refused to attend the shower at all. Somehow, I got brought in by 3 different parties to mediate, including Natasha herself, Natasha and Amanda’s boss “Sr. Importante,’ and the advocate for our Diversity Council who thought we had a diversity issue on our hands not respecting everyone’s beliefs–like our right to celebrate Halloween as we saw fit.

I sat down with Natasha to hear more and learned more about her deeply religious but a little fringe-y beliefs, and that the reason that people are dying in the world today, and incidentally also the reason our software had defects and that our projects were running over time, was that we had invited Satan into our lives with our decorations, which featured some skeletons and zombies, and also by our selfish acts. And also that her blood sugar had been spiking which is why it all came out. I did think to ask her why, if it had been up all month, we had to wait to hear about it until she was having a medical episode, and why she didn’t raise it at the time, but she did not have a solid answer for this. I told her that she needed to apologize to Amanda for the way she conveyed the message (Natasha had a solid 20 years on Amanda in life and in the workplace, and Natasha knew she’d been a total jerk about the whole thing by the time she told me about it, and multiple people, including Diversity Council lady had seen it firsthand)

Later in November the Fun Committee met and I suggested we just dissolve and let one of the several other committees for fun across the organization handle the organization of events, and everyone including Amanda and Natasha looked like I had grown an extra head. And the VP in question was so far into the clouds that he never even heard that it happened until we were planning the retirement party for Natasha a few years later.

They still have a Fun Committee, but I have refused to be part of the planning for a long while now.