AnonymousCoworker

In my office there are about 8 different plants. I don’t even know what half of them are. They just sit there, and I water them, and they keep growing, so I keep watering them, and so on. Then people see that I have plants that keep growing, so people keep giving me plants. And I don’t mind; I actually enjoy seeing so much greenery in my office. The thing is, the only reason I have any plants in my office is because of my stupid, dumb-dumb head brother.

(cue aside to end all asides)

See, for a period of time Mokie was in undergrad and living at school, my older brother had moved out, and I was also in undergrad, but living at home. When Mokie moved into the dorm, he essentially scooped up all the clothes that had been accumulating on his side of the room since the beginning of high-school (yes, we shared a room) and just left the rest of the mess sitting there. As far as I can tell, he never cleaned up his half of the room during the entirety of high-school, and certainly never made an effort to clean up when he first moved into the dorms. A few months later he comes back, dumped his crap on the floor during the school break and started the process all over again when school resumed. A few years ago Mokie moved out for good, and he’d still not cleaned his room. Meaning his side of the room went uncleaned for over 8 years. This is the type of person my younger brother is. Remember this when he insults me in the comments later.

So anyway, at some point in the process my mom gave Mokie a plant to take to school, and maybe he took it, or not, but in the end it wound up on his dresser, the plant’s slowly dying leaves just adding to the 8 year strata of mess that archaeologists would one day title “The Filthyslobezzoic Era”. So on the way to work one morning (yes, I was still living at home) I grabbed the plant and took it to work with me. I plunked it down on a table and nursed it back to health, and it’s still thriving today (and by “nursed” I mean, “gave it water from time to time”). Of the other plants I inherited, the only other one that came from my parent’s house was a pot of ivy. The ivy had a few brown vines six or seven inches long sticking out of the top of the soil, and one or two green vines with a few pale leaves clinging on. Now that ivy is overtaking my office. The longest sections are over 9 feet, and the ivy has a death grip on my inbox. I wouldn’t be able to extricate it if I tried.

(end aside)

So the ivy kind of grows where it wants to, and while it is growing the leaves on the terminal seven or 10 inches of the vine usually go from green to brown to white and vacillate between the three colors, but still continue to grow. You may understand, then, my shock when I came in to find that the cleaning ladies had chopped off about two feet of two of the longest vines.

What the fuck!?

So here’s my dilemma:

a) On the one hand, it’s just a fucking plant, and I should get over it.

b) On the other hand, what fucking right of it is theirs to decide they can chop my fucking plant up whenever they want to?

I mean, fuck, every time I look over and see my ivy sitting there with two shredded vines (the ends were clearly ripped off, and not cut) I get pissed off. To me, it’s as if somebody stole one of my pens. Yeah, in the long run, it’s just a pen, but it was my fucking pen.

What would you do? Would punching them in the face be considered an “overreaction”?