The consensus around the office about Cindy is that she’s like a retriever: sweet but dumb. Some of us are questioning that lately. We agree she’s not the brightest bulb on our string, but she’s also not very nice.

Cindy is the most hateful person we know. Not that she acts rudely to others; she is literally full of hate. She hates welfare even though she receives some. She hates bikes on BART even though she has never personally been inconvenienced or insulted by the presence of one. She hates yellow mustard and people who don’t speak English well, and all sorts of neighborhoods in which she’s never set a foot.

She even hates Clinique. She used their products till about a year ago, and now she blames her face wrinkles on the company. She will not attribute the lines to her sunbathing mania or the chain smoking; she argues that since her mother tanned and smoked, and she takes after her mother, the lines around her 45 year-old eyes and mouth must be from cosmetics.

Mostly she is boring. Cindy is so inarticulate that even the quickest of us have difficulty figuring out the point of her conversation, and when we do get it, it’s usually really old news or a fundamentalist opinion, or maybe eye-glassing tears over an Internet animal video. She’s a sucker for an elephant flick.

There are lots of tears. She cries easily. It’s impossible to say anything negative to her without causing her tear ducts to dilate and spill. The woman is naturally fair so her cheeks and lids blush as the glisten increases, and it doesn’t even matter if you go in prepared with “Now Cindy, you’re not going to like what I’m about to say…” – no matter what you do, she will cry and her tears will distract you both.

We often wonder how she keeps the job. She can’t seem to maintain focus so she doesn’t even file correctly. If you give her two items to mail there’s a good chance she’ll confuse the envelopes. And it’s not like she’s not old enough to be an age discrimination threat. She’s white and was raised middle class. She may be ignorant but she has high school and college degrees.

She’s not bad looking. She isn’t fat, although she’s self-conscious about her appearance and always wears an oversized shirt or blanket-like wrap so no one knows the exact shape of her torso. She tends to hold her hand before her mouth when she talks, as if she were chewing something, and that makes us notice her bitten fingernails. Her features are okay and she gets her hair cut and colored regularly.

Cindy says she needs an eye job (she’s right – her upper lids sag like they’re 20 years older than she is). She talks about her baggy eyes regularly, and she has suggested surgical double dates (not!) with several of us. So nobody in the office understood her recent dismay when her mother offered to pay for the blepharoplasty as a birthday gift. But Cindy sobbed with agony. She said her mom was clearly giving her a message about how bad she looks. Go figure.