Fred Flintstone was never my idol. He is obnoxious and always wears the same clothes. But I did enjoy the show. So much so that I used to burst into bawling as a child when I saw the opening credits and mistake them for the closing. I bring up this cartoon classic because a certain image keeps popping into my head -- that of Fred with his gargantuan foot bent backwards and stuck firmly in his mouth.

It happened to me twice last week.

The first time was at work. In one of those hurly-burly moments near the end of the day where everyone becomes a decapitated chicken, one coworker was truly whirling dervishical. Sweat shot from his brow as he grabbed agendas, Xeroxes, folders and a set of keys while chanting "Jerry’s waiting...I have to get to this meeting, Jerry’s waiting...Jerry’s waiting." Wit that I sometimes fathom I am, I blurted in a spur-of-the-moment, off-the-cuff kinda way: "To hell with Jerry!"

"I heard that," came a stern voice from the waiting room (which is conveniently partitioned off so we cannot see who’s there). Yes, the voice belonged to Jerry.

Again at the gym I experienced this foot-in-mouth phenomenon. I was in the women’s locker room, about to get undressed when I looked over and saw A MAN! sitting on the bench chatting with a woman. Blood boiled up, shooting to the top of my skull as I barked in a horrified tone: "This is a WOMEN’S locker room!"

The chatting pair turned to me, confused. The "man" looked especially perplexed as he said to me in the sweetest, FEMALE voice: "So what’s the problem?"

As I turned vermilion and mumbled something about the crack of dawn and not yet having my coffee, flashes of the Kink’s song "Lola" came to mind -- except it was all backwards.

Describing how I feel after such whammies, another image from "The Flintstones" comes to mind. The shot where Fred opens the door to his ultra-messy hall closet and gets bonked in the head by the bowling ball that pummels from the shelf.

So what did I learn from these incidents? The two most obvious things are a.) baggy sweatsuits really DO look unisex and b.) Jerry hates me. But I was also give a firm review in a subject, for me, that needs firm reviewing: restraint of tongue and pen.

Both are rife with difficulty. Restraint of pen is a little easier in things like articles when you have editors to spot-check. But e-mail is another story. Sometimes things get sent in the heat of the moment and once you hit "send" through cyber space it’s all over. At times I regret the curt nature with which I tend to respond when annoyed -- even if it’s not at the person to whom I am jotting off a note. I sometimes also wonder if Dan in Florida will ever write me back.

There is also the dire danger of "Win Pop" or instant messages throughout the workplace. I was once quite perturbed at a coworker so I jotted off a derogatory remark about him to another worker’s computer. Except I sent it to the wrong computer.

I don’t even remember what I wrote -- something about the guy being childish (which is quite ironic since passing "nasty little notes" is not too mature in its own right). What I do remember distinctly is my performance after I realized my error, as did most of the office for quite some time. When it dawned on me that the message stating that Milo was annoying was streaming over to MILO’S COMPUTER, I panicked and broke into a I’m-about-to-get-murdered screech.

As the office jumped to the rafters (I think someone even fell off his chair), I quickly pretended a HUGE roach had fallen from the sky and smacked into the middle of my keyboard (which had happened at a previous job). I spent the next few minutes pretending to "look" for the roach then quickly slipped outside, still shaking from the whole ordeal.