Permission Not Granted

It turns out that when my supervisor, Elizabeth, said, “You can be irritating,” she wasn’t giving me her permission. That took me a couple of days to figure out—well, more like a week if I’m honest, but I like to round down when it comes to personal shortcomings.

Now, in my defense, the tone she used was misleading. A firm-but-smiling, schoolmarm tone that could’ve gone either way.

I thought it was one of those playful acknowledgments—like when someone says, “You’re a handful,” and you respond with, “Yes, but I’m your handful,” and they laugh and toss a pen at your head.

But no. It was not one of those moments.

See, I had been testing the limits of workplace patience. Nothing drastic.

I wasn’t showing up in flip-flops or replacing the coffee with decaf–I’m not a monster, but I had been entertaining myself by rearranging her sticky notes when she wasn’t looking.

I’d take the yellow ones and mix them in with the pink ones. Alphabetize them by word count.

One time, I even swapped her “Call John at 3” note with “Buy more goat cheese,” just to see if she’d notice. Spoiler: She did.

Anyway, she caught me mid-stick one afternoon, holding a pink note like it was a classified file, and that’s when she said it. “Tom, you can be irritating.”

And I, ever the optimist, replied, “I can be irritating? Excellent! Just wanted to make sure I still had it.”

She didn’t laugh. Not even a smirk. That’s when it hit me—I had mistaken a declaration of fact for a green light.

So I did what any halfway self-aware grown man would do–I remained low for a bit. Stopped with the sticky notes, cut back on the sarcastic commentary, and tried to channel my energy into more constructive outlets.

Like labeling the break room condiments. Did you know there’s an ongoing debate over whether the ketchup belongs on the top shelf or the door of the fridge?

I do now. I’ve seen the emails.

After a while, Elizabeth started smiling at me again. Not the “I’m documenting this for HR” smile, but the genuine kind—the one that says, “You’re still a handful, but at least you’re a quieter one now.”

I never brought up the sticky notes again, and neither did she. It became an unspoken truce, the kind that keeps the office running smoothly and our coffee pot filled.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere—something about reading between the lines, or maybe about how permission and tolerance are not the same thing. But if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that life has a funny way of teaching you these lessons twice–once with words, and again with silence.

And if nothing else, at least I now know that when someone says, “You can be irritating,” the correct response is not, “Thank you.”