Do you all know that bit from Office Space about “The Mondays”?
(Here’s a link for those of you who have never seen the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AB9zPfXqQQ.)
I’ve been thinking of that scene a lot today.
To be clear, I have a neutral opinion on Mondays. For that matter, I don’t hold grudges against any arbitrarily-named days of the week. Still, I can’t help but feel like the chimps have been grappling with a case of “The Mondays” for a few days now. This morning began with more of the chimpanzee drama that J.B. recently described in Friday’s blog post: Grooming. Although everyone seemed to be contributing to the chaos in one way or another, Terry remained at the center of the maelstrom which continued to churn up the social waters throughout the day.
To paraphrase one of J.B.’s passages: chimps simply cannot keep going “full throttle” for long before someone calms down and starts putting the pieces back together again. In today’s case, the chimps eventually stopped screaming long enough to catch their breath. Within minutes, they had begun to groom each other in a collective act of reconciliation that lasted for quite some time. Chimps may have physical altercations more frequently than free-living humans do, but their ability to put that animosity behind them and quickly reach a bipartisan solution makes up for it.
I didn’t manage to record much of the action with a camera, but I did take some photos during the peaceful moments between the storms.
