Hands off the rubber ducks

This month at work has been a busy one, with new lesson manuals to edit, planning meetings to attend, birthday parties to organize, birthday cake to eat, pink rubber ducks to fight over, etc. Okay, so we didn't actually fight over the pink rubber ducks. But the new management policy regarding pink ducks remains somewhat of a sore spot with employees. We editors feel it most keenly.


Every October the company celebrates Breast Cancer Awareness month with various "pink" fundraising activities, one of which involves several pink rubber ducks floating in a tub of water. You pay a dollar per duck, and each duck has a number on the bottom corresponding to a bag of goodies that you win. Most of the bags have things like candy and Lotto tickets, but some have bigger prizes, except not the bags that I pick.


In the past we were able to keep the pink ducks in our cubicles for the entire day of the fundraiser, which we editors got excited about, because we are all women and the pink ducks are cute and we are highly susceptible to cute. We lined them up on the top edges of our adjoining cubes, arranging them in various cute postures, as much as a stiff rubber animal can be made to assume various cute postures. The ducks made us extremely and ridiculously happy, and of course they did not interfere with our concentration on our work in ANY way ("Do you think my duck would look better facing this way?" "Maybe we should alternate the light and dark pinks").


But for the past couple of years, since some departments including our own moved to a different building, we are no longer able to take the pink ducks with us and keep them in our cubes. "Ducks must remain in the building at all times" is the new motto, lest they not come back and the company must spend approximately 66 cents per duck to replace them. So now we must surrender them immediately, and they are dropped unceremoniously, and unloved, into a bucket to be put into storage until the next fundraiser. Appeals for custody, even temporary, have been denied.


Someday, we vow, we are going to liberate those pink ducks and give them a proper, loving home, which would of course be in our cubes. Until then, we wait and dream of having our pink ducks back, and maybe even dressing them up...