Exotic yet ordinary

Yesterday was our monthly All Staff meeting, which should really be called the unnecessarily-long-could-have-certified-the-entire-county-in-the-time-it-took-for-you-to-discuss-your-mail-All-the-ever-loving-live-long-day-Staff. But, hey, whatever. At some point between the mail, and the director openly admitting that she had never played rock, paper, scissors (by the way, who makes it through childhood without playing rock, paper, scissors at least ONCE? who?) and the last bite of apple pie was eaten at the overly patriotic staff luncheon (that I missed out on - diet), a few of my co-workers had huddled together to organize a homegrown version of The Biggest Loser – you know, that reality TV show where contestants are housed at some ranch with shiny exercise equipment and two teams are formed and the teams get trainers and everyone is hoping like hell that they can pull their weight by losing lots and lots and lots of it so they won’t get kicked off (kinda sounds like a Survivor fat camp)? Yeah, like that, just without the cameras, the audience, the trainers, and those giant screens to display everyone’s weight (though, oooh!, now that I think about it, we DO have those dry-erase boards in the conference room!) Oh, and the cash prize is significantly smaller. Instead of $250,000 for the biggest loser, the best we can hope for is upwards of $300. But, otherwise, JUST like that.

Anyway, they’ve suckered me into this. I think. Maybe. I mean, I’m dieting anyway. Might as well make a bit of bank for my efforts. The other girls are all especially eager for me to pay and play because they're convinced that after losing (nearly) twenty pounds I have hit a plateau, surely. And that may be true. But, now there is money involved, money that may finally convince me to get off my ass and finally, um, exercise. Either way, next month it’s on. One by one, the few, the brave, the dieting will step onto a scale (brought from home so it will be all official and scientific-like), grimace as their weight is recorded, grimace some more as they fork over the first of four $10 fork-overs for the prize pool, and then diet like crazy over the next four months in the hopes that the scales will show that SHE is the biggest loser. The biggest loser with all our money.