November 14, 2007

You know your boss went to Catholic School when.....

Barb had a cute post on how to know that your child goes to Catholic school. That reminded me of something that happened many moons ago, before husband and child, when I was a member of the "paying workforce."

I worked in the corporate office of a family owned company. My boss, who is still a good friend some twenty-four years later, had given me a project to do. Upon completion, I put together a packet of information (remember, that was at a time when PC's were just making it into the work place and the Internet was something used to catch fish between two boats and we had to do things the old fashioned way - on paper with a pen or pencil). As I was putting together a cover sheet with some notes for him I had the "bright" idea to head the paper as I had done many times in my Catholic school career. So at the top of the paper, I made the following notation: +JMJ+, along with our name, the date, the subject and the name of the school. Of course, I made up the school name using the company name. I knew he had gone to Catholic school as on holy days, he and I and one other person in the office would attend noon mass at OLPH. I left the paper work on his desk, as he was out of the office and waited patiently for him to return.

About an hour or so later, he returned to his desk and within a few minutes I heard the howl of laughter emanate from his office. This was followed by footsteps and his smiling face in the doorway of my office as he held up the paper and laughed. He, too, had to head his papers the same way and hadn't thought about it for ages. We shared a few of our "finer" moments from school and stories of our "favorite" nuns before returning to work. I was glad that even though it was the corporate office, it was a small one and there weren't many people in it. Because there were only one other person in the office who were Catholic and would have gotten the meaning of +JMJ+.