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I live in the Bluest State In The Union, and my conservative friends and I often joke about having to resort to a secret handshake.

I get this all the time at work, because I am not vocal about my politics at work unless someone solicits an honest opinion directly, or I know they are a conservative.

Gee, what a concept...keeping your politics and religion out of the workplace, who’d have thunk it?

Funny thing about Leftists and some Liberals...they assume, in groups up here, that everyone thinks like they do.

When you are in a group, they will sometimes say things that nearly make you bite through your tongue, and assume you are “one of them”. About the most I will say usually (in a calm, measured voice) is a simple “I feel quite differently about these types of things than you folks do.”

And they often get the hint and clam up. They don’t really want to discuss it...they often just want to stroke each other.

I did have a hilarious (to me) work episode back in 2008 when Sarah Palin was on the ticket.

I worked at the time with a woman (since retired) who is a complete Liberal. (not a Leftist...I avoid them like the plague) I had worked with her closely for many years, and we knew each other well and occasionally socialized. I knew she was a Liberal, and she knew I was a conservative, but we had become good friends in our close work collaboration. She taught me all I know about extensive, in depth, effective software testing in medical applications. She was quite talented, and she and another talented woman had written an entire Electronic Medical Record with scheduling, order entry, resulting, and billing back in the Seventies which ran on a mainframe with dumb terminals with light pens. Very much ahead of her time. She was very, VERY sharp.

We occasionally would have dinner together (often when working a large project) and though we didn’t talk politics often, she was the kind of person who would say “I know you are a conservative-what are your thoughts on...” and she would let me speak without interrupting me. After one particularly thorny thing she asked my political opinion on and I laid out for her my reasons, all she could say in response was “Well, you have certainly thought that through...I can’t poke any holes in that.” That meant a lot, coming from someone like her a 40 year employee whose job at the end WAS to poke holes in EVERYTHING she could think of when she was testing software.

Well, she and I were testing a new system, and when we did these tests, we had to create fake test patients in the test system. When I was looking at some examples, I saw that many of them (which she created for me) had fake tests on a patient “Alaska, Sarah”. She wouldn’t have put a fake “Palin, Sarah” in there, but her reference was clear, and I grinned. She liked to name groups of patients in themes, and for this round of testing, she was using States as the last name.

That was a bone she good naturedly threw to me as an inside joke, and I found some enjoyment in it.

However, I wasn’t the only one privy to the patients, other people had to handle them in the course of their testing, and one day when I was in her office, this other woman (A wiry lantern faced Irish woman nearing retirement) who worked with her came storming in and loudly complained “What is this about this Sarah Alaska patient? I am sick of seeing her name appearing, and don’t want to see it anymore!”

Before the other woman I was working with could respond, I said with a slow grin “Well...I don’t know. I kind of like seeing that name, and wouldn’t mind seeing more of it in the years ahead!”

She gaped at me, her mouth opening and closing wordlessly like a landed fish and then backing slowly away managed to stutter out “You...you...you’re...you’re one of THEM!”