It was one of those rare moments when the workplace cracked open.
A sympathy card was left in our midst, passed around in honor of the woman we’ve long referred to as Darth Trainer—so named for her ominous presence, her unearned title, and the trail of untrained employees she’s left in her wake. The card was for her brother-in-law, who had passed away quietly, anonymously—until I realized: oh. That brother-in-law.
He was married to her. The Bird Lady. The Manual Charger. The gatekeeper of the triplicate sheets and six-digit medication codes. The one who once decorated her cubicle with plastic ivy and feathered birds that stared, unblinking, over her binder of sacred billing rituals.
Some of the Zoomers hovered over the sympathy card like it was a bomb.
“What do I write?”
“How do I even sign this?”
“With a pen,” someone answered, flatly, perfectly.
We were all in stitches. The card became less a ritual and more a scene.
I offered, “You could say, ‘Sorry for your loss.’”
“Really?” the deadpan Zoomer asked, doubtful.
“Yes,” I replied. “It’s both despicable and correct.”
“Do I lack sympathy?” another asked.
“No,” I said, “you likely have real sympathy—just not the performative kind that’s being demanded here.”
Laughter rolled through the space. It wasn’t cold. It was honest. One of those brief workplace moments when the mask slips, and everyone admits this system is absurd, but we’re all still trying to be human inside it.
But the Zoomers didn’t know the full story. How could they?
They didn’t know about the Bird Lady’s covenant with bureaucracy.
They didn’t know how I, at 25, would occasionally “forget” to write the charge code on the triplicate carbon sheets—knowing full well she had the exact same binder I did. She would return the papers with “Needs charge code” written in red pen, as if this were a sacred commandment.
They didn’t know how those sheets sometimes sat in my inbox for months while I attended to my actual job. The world didn’t end. Billing continued. The hospital survived.
They didn’t know about the time I lightly clipped her cubicle wall with a med cart, and the next day, an all-staff email appeared:
“I endeavor to respect company privacy at all times and hope others will do the same. Unfortunately, someone damaged my cubicle yesterday in an episode of carelessness…”
No name. No direct accusation. Just corporate poetry at its passive-aggressive peak.
But here’s the part that matters, the part I want you to remember: she once had a hysterectomy, and her husband—this same husband we were now writing a card for—still expected dinner on the table. Every night. Without fail.
Because that’s what men like him were taught to expect. And women like her were taught to endure. She didn’t get a sympathy card. She got a casserole a obligation. She decorated her cubicle with ivy and silent sneers. The binder never changed.
The Zoomers laughed, and they were beautiful in their distance. They brought lightness and deadpan clarity. But they didn’t live that story. They didn’t carry those invisible histories in their inboxes. We did.
So when that card came around, we signed it. Some sincerely, some with irony, one with memory.
I thought of you.
I knew you’d laugh.