I Finally Beat A Bully

Jaime was six feet tall and weighed nearly three hundred pounds. She had long arms and baseball mitt sized hands that dwarfed my own — my hands are nine inches long when fully extended. She was a big woman with a big personality, easy to smile on good days, jovial and mercurial, and professed her devotion for her faith whenever possible. I am the big man — six feet two inches and two hundred fifty pounds. I like to think of myself as the anchor, meaning that my mood doesn’t vary from day to day.

Jaime and I were larger than normal sized bookends to a group of five client services representatives. She was the red and I was the green — these colors are representative of our personality profiles. I sit in the cubicle a few feet to the left of the entryway and Jaime sat below the window facing south Denver. Three normal sized female co-workers occupied the cubicles in between. Everyone got on well as long as Jaime was certain that we were treating her with the respect that she deserved.

The area in which we are situated measures fourteen feet by seven feet, barely enough room to accommodate five human beings with separate personalities and accompanying baggage. If any one of us arrived at the job upset or irritated, the crossness would waft of that person like smoke from a campfire. Then it hangs over the entire department like a storm cloud, infecting everyone and everything. It…