Windshield wipers for googly eyes

"What do you know about emotional intelligence?," the trainer asked us bright and early. 153 probably wasn't the answer she was trawling for, but it's pretty close to the Dewey decimal shelf location for Daniel Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence. Stephen Covey is upstairs too, just a few library shelves over at 158.

"Would you eat anything with eyes?," a coworker asked. I had a flashback to rainbow trout dinners in Estes Park. No, I would not eat the eyes, but grilled trout was served with the head as proof of freshness. And grilled rainbow trout with a loaded baked potato is very fine dining.

So, while setting out the brunchy-munchy emotional food for the team-building session the devil made me set a few googly eyes on the apples, strawberries, and cheese cubes. It was not my intent to cause a coworker to choke to death on a googly eye, but I could put that into my never-to-be written mystery, first in a compelling new series, as we say in the book review biz. I was expecting a different coworker to have a severe reaction to the non-GMO crunchy peanut butter on the apple slices, and maybe swell up like a Macy's parade balloon before suffocating.

Forgot to factor my unfamiliarity with the venue kitchenette when planning these Deaths by Departmental Meetings. My fiction is no pulp, like the OJ.

Thirteen hours of survey data, strategic planning, goals and objectives, signage text, visions and mission statements, personal strength and weaknesses, drought-tolerant landscape design, and an emotional intelligence trainer using her index fingers to be pretend teeny windshield wipers in front of her eyes could drive a usually sane person to open the Hatch.

So thank heaven for those Hatch chile cheddar cheese cubes from Market Street, and for the coworker who knew where the coffee was stored--right next to the bodies in the freezer!

Okay, no bodies. No apple corer/divider in the kitchenette drawer, either.

Just balloons and funnels drawn on the white board with scented markers. The balloons were the emotional (big and stretchy) and rational (little and rigid) containers in our brains reached by stimuli that have made it through our funnels and filters.

What behavior change or action did I take following the emotional intelligence team-building training session? I went right home and filed an apartment maintenance request for a change of furnace filter. The super installed a new thermostat, but left the dirty filter in place.

That's okay, because I can use my index fingers like teeny windshield wipers to clean dirty stimuli filters. I can reset my new emotional thermostat.

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder