Just for the Spite of It

From an unnamed production office for an undisclosed television show in an address-withheld building in LA where the elevators are shockingly slow...

Something that S and I share is a true and meaningful passion for doing things out of spite.  In college when we had an obnoxious and also pale roommate who wished that she could be tan, S, with a freakish ability to tan quickly, set out to sun herself daily.  She had no deep personal desire to be more bronze, but if she could bother our roommate in the process of doing something pretty easy, then so she would.  For spite.  As for me, I have ordered food for spite, turned up the volume for spite, dressed fancy for spite, and pretended I was dumb for spite.  And those are just some of the more sophisticated approaches.  If something requires little effort, and turns out a medium spiteful reward, then that's usually where you can find me.

So you'd think that I'd be on board with this:

This is roughly half of the tapes currently taking up space in my office.  There are also as many DVD's.  My immediate boss ordered them to spite someone across the building- whom I believe she's never met- when that person couldn't accommodate my boss' request to get all this media in another way.  So it's not that we need these tapes, but boy did they make someone who has other things to do kind of annoyed.

Here's the problem, though, with this endeavor: You know who had to fill out about a bascrillion forms to get these tapes and DVD's?  Can you guess who has to walk across the building to pick up huge stacks of them and then carry those stacks back across the building?  And whose office are the crowding up again?  The answer to all of those questions is, "Definitely not my boss."  And some- small as it often is/should be- personal effort going into making someone else's life harder or less pleasant seems that it should be required, doesn't it?  If I had an office full of people to do my spiteful bidding, I could certainly get more of it done, but where's the pride?  Where's the joy?  Where's the sacrificial accidental sunburn or indigestion or blistered feet to balance the- hopefully bigger- problem you caused for someone else?  I mean, there have to be rules.  Otherwise it's just mean.  And lazy.  And yes if it were someone other than my immediate boss I wouldn't care one bit.  So spite that.