Real Kato Blog: My Precious

There is one primary reason I stay until the end of our company holiday parties: to bask in the schadenfreude of someone else's embarrassment.

Schadenfreude is one of my favorite words. It's a great high-falutin' term to throw around, and it's also such a gleefully malicious concept. For those of you who are not in the Germanic-phrase-tossing literati, the term means "taking satisfaction in the misfortunes of others."

Here's a quintessential schadenfreude moment from "Seinfeld", in the episode where Newman is planning a millennium party. Jerry says, "Oh, that's interesting, because as everyone knows, since there was no year zero, the millennium doesn't begin until the year two thousand and one... which would make your party one year late, and thus, quite lame. OHHHHHHHHH." The satisfaction with which Jerry says OHHHHHHHHH is one of the primary pleasures I seek in life.

I got a taste of that earlier this year, in an incident regarding a certain curmudgeonly and insufferably arrogant manager I used to work with. Her husband was arrested in an FBI raid for engaging in child pornography. While of course I felt bad for the poor naked kids locked up in their basement, I couldn't help but be tickled by the fact that this woman, who had made a career out of her superiority complex and her patronizing attitude, couldn't possibly make anyone feel inferior ever again.

At our company holiday party two years ago, we felt fancy enough to get a carved ice sculpture with our logo carved into it. At the end of the evening, we planned to carry the sculpture outside to let it melt. As four of us got ready to carry it out, one of our marketing guys stepped in and said, "You WIMPS. I can't believe it takes four of you to carry that. Get out of the way; I'll take it out myself."

He took about three steps before the sculpture slipped out of his hands and shattered into a thousand pieces on the tile floor.

OHHHHHHHHH.

At the end of this year's party, people were gathering up leftover food to take home. One of our managers had a plate of mini-eclairs, and he was guarding it as if it were the One Plate Of Eclairs To Rule Them All. When people approached him, he scowled and turned away. But for some reason, our vice president decided to come up behind him and give him a giant bear hug, causing the plate of mini-eclairs to go flying. There was this slow-motion moment as the mini-eclairs went plop on the floor, and the manager was saying "noooooooo"... it was just too much. I burst out laughing.

Personally, if they had been my mini-eclairs, I would have invoked the five-second rule and started stuffing as many of them in my face as I could. But that's just me. Hey, if George Constanza can eat eclairs out of the garbage, I can eat them off the floor.

Now, I'm sure that manager might have laughed with glee had he seen me get rear-ended on my drive home from the party. I suppose you might say I got my just desserts.

(Groan.)

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