My Previous Postation

The title of my last blog post was prosaic. I should have used the title The Roastation. I used to work (oddly enough, for a very button-down office of a very conservative company) with a florid, foul-mouthed, fiftyish woman who used to add the suffix -ation to just about any word (invariably preceded by the definite article), resulting in such neologisms as the cuteation (to describe a co-worker's infant daughter) or the the smokeation (to describe a cigarette break).

Anyway, this co-worker was in the throes of menopause, so she would constantly complain about the hot flashation, and she'd call into question the ambient temperature of the office, "I'm doing the roastation in here!" Well, I was doing the roastation on Saturday.

In a hilarious quirk of fate, this coworker was handling a Workers' Compensation case in which a female Emergency Medical Technician had allegedly hurt her back while lifting a patient. My coworker ordered a routine surveillance to ascertain if she were working- the investigators followed the claimant to a nudie bar, and determined that she was working as a dancer. To obtain evidence to defend against the claim, my coworker ordered a videotape, which the investigators obtained by entering the club with a pinhole camera in a duffel bag (I know the owner of the company well, and asked him subsequently if his employees fought over which of them would handle this case).

My coworker, while reviewing the tape in a conference room, yelled in a voice loud enough to be audible throughout the entire office, "OH MY GOD! SHE'S DOING THE TRAPEEZEATION!!!" Needless to say, the entire office staff filed into the conference room. To this day, many of us suspect that, after the hearing, during which the claimant dropped the case (all the defense attorney had to say was, "We have tape of your client working."), the tape was appropriated by one of the managers, a hard-up divorced man whose perceived resemblance to
Inspector Gadget earned him the nickname (appropriately enough, if suspicions were correct) "Go Go".