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My Problem With Very Religious People
Having a personal relationship with the Supreme Being has side-effects — like becoming supremely arrogant.
I remember her as our team’s overly cheery secretary-assistant back when I was working in a pre-Internet IT department in the late 1980s. It was my first experience in the corporate world, and I was desperately unhappy on this job. I found out I wasn’t the only one.
The secretary was older than me — everyone was — and I was chatting with her one day when she said with a smile that “well, the world is going to end soon” and then went on to talk about some office-related mundanity.
Years later as the world continued to muddle on, I learned about born-again Christians. There were a lot of ‘em in the corporate corridors I wandered through and so the smiling secretary was really not that unusual for an evangelical.
I completely understood her sentiments. She and I were stuck in a sterile and lifeless NJ suburb, spending our days working in orange office cubes on a project involving accounting software that no one fully understood, and taking breaks at the cafeteria where we drank hydrochloric coffee and choked-down greasy lunches.
It was a time before espresso cafes and decent Thai food, when the only thing open in our town after 7 PM was a Krauszer’s mini-mart. It was a…