In what doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever dated or worked with him, Brooklyn-based marketing manager Clay Middleton has made it abundantly clear that he’s not interested in labels – taking yet another coworker’s tupperware out of the communal fridge and polishing off its contents.
“Why do we as a society feel the need to put a label on everything?” Clay asked reporters. “Relationships, political affiliation, Margie’s leftover chicken parm in the fridge, whether someone’s a good or bad person for eating Margie’s tupperware of leftover chicken parm that was in the fridge… it just doesn’t serve anyone.”
Clay’s coworker Margie rejected this sentiment entirely, insisting that labeling her lunch would usually serve to stop other people from eating it, and that Clay’s disrespectful behavior was the issue here, not the use of labels. She added that this type of behavior wasn’t surprising coming from someone who publicly identifies as “Moderate” on their dating profile.
However, in spite of his coworker’s comments, Clay maintained his position, claiming that labels are “meaningless” to him.
“Life is full of complexities, not everything is black and white,” he said. “You can only vote Republican and still call yourself a Moderate, you can eat Dave’s yogurt labeled ‘DAVE’S DON’T TOUCH’ and not have to face the public humiliation of being called out in the break room.”
He continued, “Labels only serve to make us resent each other. Would anyone have cared if I’d eaten a delicious chicken caesar wrap out of an unlabeled tupperware container? No! People only care because it had a sticky note on it that read ‘This is Carrie’s. Please, please, please don’t eat this, it’s the only thing I brought for lunch and I didn’t have time for breakfast. Clay, please, I’m talking to you.’ And that’s on Carrie for having such a toxic, binary way of thinking.”
Clay then went on to talk about how we are all made up of the same stardust, temporal beings destined to be returned to the universe, so how could anyone really say if that shrimp scampi he ate last week really “belonged” to Maya, adding that if she really intended to have it for lunch, she would’ve eaten it before noon.
At press time, getting called into HR had completely changed Clay’s tune on labels – apparently “marketing manager” and “former marketing manager” mean two very different things to him, and his boss is incontrovertibly a “complete asshole.”
