normalizing onions

About once a week, I'm typing at my computer at work when someone comes up behind me and asks, "What's that?" And each and every time, I think to myself, "what's what?," look up, and find someone pointing at... an onion.

Then I'll either laugh or sigh, depending on the day, and explain. There's a raw onion on the divider between my desk and my cubicle-mate's because one of our co-workers put it there. The onion is supposed to keep us from getting sick. Supposedly, any black spots on the skin are sickness that the onion has absorbed from us.

On one of my first days in my new office after off-site training, I heard a very strange conversation over the cubicle walls. "Bernie, can you smell the onion?" Lots of loud laughter, and then two or three more times, "Can you smell the onion?" I had no idea what was going on, and was far too shy to peer around the wall and find out.

Then, a couple of weeks later, my cube-mate and I were both having a bad allergy day. After we had each sneezed a few times, a co-worker came over with two onions, declared "You need these," and set them down on the divider between our desks. She explained, we failed to object, and there the onions sat.

One of them apparently absorbed a ton of sickness from us, because it got kind of gross and had to be thrown away. The other continues to sit on our divider, remarkably unchanged, three months later. I've taken to staring at it while I'm thinking, and my cube-mate has put up a sign: "Don't know the answer? Ask the onion!"

What's strange about the onion at this point isn't that it's sitting there, but that I don't find it strange that it's sitting there. Where I used to be embarrassed that there was an onion on my desk, now I'm embarrassed that it takes me a second to realize why someone's asking me why there's an onion there.