A Sense of Irony

The Setup

I share an office with eight other people (nine including myself) and seven of the people in this room prefer to work with the lights off. We have big windows and it’s nice to just work in natural light. A lot of us find it easier to focus but there are two people that are very adamant that the light be turned on.

Today one of them was gone and seven of us where sitting in here working with the lights off happily when our co-worker who wants the lights on, we’ll call her “Sarah”, walked in the room and immediately turned the lights on.

I stealthily remarked via IM to another colleague that it was pretty rude to walk into a room and change it without any regard to the people already in there.

Trying to teach a lesson

To try to demonstrate to Sarah why this might be rude I left the room and when I came back in I turned off the lights. Sarah looked back at me and I stopped and said “Oh, I’m sorry, whenever I walk into a room I automatically adjust it to my personal preference regardless of what the people in the room might want.”

I was afraid that my sarcasm might come off as way too mean when I don’t bare any animosity for Sarah (I quite like her actually). Fortunately for me Sarah lacks a sense of irony and responded thusly: “Oh I see, you’re saying you’re really self-centered and you don’t think of others. Hows that working in your marriage?”

All I could do was laugh, it would be funnier though if she understood the joke was on her. Irony, it seems is lost on this one.