There’s a strange thought that goes through my head sometimes. It’s one of those “what if” sort of stoner thoughts that I tend to get when someone else is telling me a really long, pointless story and my eyes glaze over and my mind wanders.
The thought is this: when I’m gathered around a table with a dozen other people and we’re discussing something relatively mundane, what would happen if I were to slowly undress, crawl naked to the center of the table, and start masturbating? What sort of expressions would I see on the others’ faces? What would ultimately happen to me? Would I get carted off? Or would everyone else simply leave the room and vow never to speak of the incident again?
I mention it because that very thought came to me moments ago as my colleagues and I sat around the conference table interviewing a potential employee. The same thought used to run through my head at Christmas and Thanksgiving as my brothers and I listened to my father and grandparents gossip about people we’d never met. Of course, back then I knew why I never followed through with the idea: the look of shock/horror/anger on my grandmother’s face would have killed me (if my father’s bare hands didn’t do the trick). But what is it, exactly, that keeps me–or anyone–from doing it now? Personally, I think it would have been pretty amusing if I’d done it today–a much better means of evaluating the guy’s performance than the standard interview questions everyone else was asking.
Societal norms are funny and arbitrary.
Just a thought.
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