(08) pillow mints

When I first started working at my current office, the receptionist kept dishes filled with assorted Brach's hard candy in the lobby for guests, and in the copy area for office staff. And we picked through them to find our favorites, as you do, until we had nothing but the boring stuff left, pounds of it, and the office manager, our firm-lipped mother figure, refused to let J order more until they were all gone, and so we struggled our way through them, heroically taking one for the team every now and then, but really it was like a real-life demonstration of Zeno's Paradox, consumption of candy halved and halved again and then again, stretching to the infinite. And just when we became convinced that in, like, 2015, we'd still be there with a single sticky six-year-old ice-blue mint mocking us every day, the office manager, who is entirely capable of orchestrating a concession so that it feels like a loss to the opposition, ordered the rest of the hard candy thrown out, and we were never going to buy it again, and whatever she chose, we were going to eat it and like it, or so help her God.

She chose about 50 pounds of wrapped pillow mints, and while L is accustomed to getting her way in all things, I don't think even she anticipated the resounding success of pillow mints. Here is something you may or may not have known: everyone loves pillow mints. (Or maybe it's just everyone in our office; maybe my data are just hopelessly skewed.) We whip through those babies. It is a proven mathematical impossibility that you can't spend more than 30 seconds in our copy room without taking one.

I myself had three today.