It started with Tootsie Pops....
Well, actually I think it started with a hard candy assortment...
No..the actual fact is, it began on Administrative Professionals' Day, when my team gave me a bouquet which consisted of a ceramic pot stuffed with cellophane and butterscotch candies and a balloon(let) imprinted with "Happy Administrative Assistant Day" which is a lot to put on a balloon if you think about it.
When I finished scarfing down the butterscotches a few weeks later, I emptied the ceramic pot and set it on my file cabinet thinking it might be a good place to put odds and ends or maybe a plant...
My team had other ideas..."You've got to re-fill that you know..." they'd say. Or..."That pot is still empty?!"
So I broke down and on my lunch hour purchased a humble hard candy assortment and dutifully filled the pot. I got a few takers. And on it went for some months, until one day when I got tired of the assortment and on a whim grabbed a bag of Tootsie Pops to supplement the usual offerings of peppermints, butterscotches, lemon drops, cinnamon disks, etc. Using the hard candy as a base, like potting soil, I propped up the lollies in the pot and waited to see what would happen.
What happened changed my life, re-shaped my thinking, and taught me things I never expected.
At first, only a handful of people noticed them. But it was the way they'd notice them...For some reason, when people see Tootsie Pops, they tend to get a wistful grin on their faces, their eyes light up, and maybe because they are considered to be a more premium lollipop, they tend to ask before they take one, "Okay if I have one?"
I would always answer, "Sure, but you don't have to ask?" That's what they are there for!" Then again, the grin...Maybe Tootsies take people back to their childhood? I'm not sure, but I've rarely seen smiles like I see when someone is unwrapping a Tootsie pop.
The circle widened to my supervisor, who famously eschews most things consisting of white flour and sugar, calling doughnuts and cupcakes 'death cakes', while ominously warning, "that stuff'll kill ya!" thus violating the most ubiquitous rule of office life, "If you bring the doughnuts they will come". Yet he has a weakness for blueberry tootsies, and time and again after lunch, I would catch him indulging in a post-prandial snack, up to his eyeballs in paperwork and yakking on the phone with the tell-tale white stick clenched between his teeth.
The other Monday, he sheepishly handed me a bag of Tootsies, saying gruffly, "I was out at Big Lots the other day and these were on sale" Hmmm...Big Lots has sales? This however has made me the object of legend, a former team member who worked closely with said supervisor for years, upon hearing that her former Non-Company co-worker actually brought in a bag of candy, implied that it was roughly the equivalent of the late Yasser Arafat sitting down for a coffee klatch with Benjamin Netanyahu.
I was to discover this again and again though, that Tootsies cut across boundaries, people just like them regardless of religion, creed, political leanings, sex, class, economic status. Word spread, people from other departments began showing up at my file cabinet to grab a lollipop, indulge in informal chit-chat, jokes began to fly, and I started to really get to know my co-workers. A lot of in-bred prejudices fall away when you realize that people are people, that even the guy you inwardly reviled for having the Obama 2012 sticker on his car, at the end of the day is just a guy who likes a grape tootsie.
As I walked down the halls, people I hadn't known previously, would call out, "Hi, Jill" or smile, ...that's the girl with the Tootsie Pops. I think the Tootsies were the moment I began to be a part of Non-Company, no longer just a long-standing temp.
Today was the day it gelled, as I was walking down the corridor on my way out to the parking lot at lunch, a project manager, waved me down, and handed me a five-dollar bill saying, "Hey, here's my contribution to the Tootsie Pop Fund, I eat a lot of those suckers!" In Non-Company parlance, for someone to actually contribute to a fund without being asked for donations is roughly on par with the Berlin Wall coming down, or at least that's what my incredulous teammate told me when I gleefully waved my five-dollar donation at him.
Like most Americans, I've been frustrated with this protracted government shut-down and I couldn't help thinking with all of this acrimony on the House and Senate floor that maybe if someone could just bring in a glass jar full of Tootsies, surely there is some kind of file cabinet somewhere on the floor of Congress, and set it down, maybe a similar thing could happen. Maybe John Boehner and Harry Reid would discover that despite their differences, they are just two blokes who happen to love the orange-flavored Tootsies. Eric Cantor and Nancy Pelosi might discover that beyond their very disparate ideologies, they both love the pomegranate and think the grape a bit passe'. Maybe for once they'd look beyond parties and just start talking, hanging around the file cabinet, sucking on Tootsie Pops, sharing a joke or two.
Maybe what we really need is the wise old owl, telling us that he couldn't get to the center of the Tootsie Pop without biting, that the world may never know how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll Center of a Tootsie Pop, but that we should never stop trying...
The worst thing for the world right now is it looks like America has stopped trying...
Instead of infighting... perhaps what we really need is to ask Tootsie Roll Industries to air freight a couple of cases of Pops to Congress..
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