Napkin Eggs: Be Bold
Part 1
I found an egg in my coat pocket this morning and, for the first time in years of making them, I opened it.
Inside was a small folded rectangle of paper. The kind that comes in fortune cookies.
It said: “Be Bold.”
I don’t remember putting it there. I remember pocketing the fortune—that was months ago, at some BrandCo awards banquet where they handed them out between the decaf and closing remarks. I remember the hollow corporate optimism of it, the way everyone cracked theirs open like they were receiving personal guidance instead of mass-produced directives. I remember folding mine and sliding it into my pocket.
What I don’t remember is rolling it into an egg.
But here it is. Dense, compressed, carried around for months inside a wadded napkin sphere. A little time capsule of anxiety and corporate messaging, fused together into something I’ve been carrying without knowing what it was.
I make napkin eggs. Have for years. You know those little wadded balls of tissue that elderly women tuck between their legs at restaurants? The ones they leave behind on chairs when they stand up? Those are called grandma eggs. I make the napkin version. Sometimes the tissue version too, depending on what’s available. Same compulsion, different materials.
In corporate compliance, you spend a lot of time in meetings where you’re supposed to look calm while reviewing things that could sink the company. Policy violations, regulatory exposure, HR nightmares that haven’t gone public yet. My face stays neutral. My hands make eggs.
There’s another BrandCo dinner Friday night. Quarterly review thing. There will definitely be fortune cookies—there always are.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. The egg in my pocket with “Be Bold” inside wasn’t some weird one-off. It was just the first one I’d ever opened.
I make eggs constantly. Not just at meals—coffee meetings where I grab extra napkins from the condiment station, standups where I shouldn’t even have a napkin but somehow brought one from the kitchen, long calls where I’m sitting at my desk rolling paper towels into dense little spheres while talking about Q4 projections.
I pocket them all without thinking. They’re with me all day. I’ll make one at breakfast and it’s still there at dinner, riding around in my jacket like a compressed worry stone.
Every coat has eggs. Every pair of pants. I do laundry and find three in the left pocket, two in the right, one somehow wedged into the inner chest pocket of a blazer I haven’t worn in weeks.
There’s a bin next to the washer—a small plastic container where I deposit them before running a load. Otherwise they go through the wash and come out as damp, disintegrating lumps that leave white papery residue all over everything. The bin is usually half-full.
I’ve been making eggs for years and never once opened one. Just assumed they were empty. Evidence of fidgeting. Physical proof that I’d been nervous somewhere, now compressed and neutralized.
But if one has “Be Bold” inside it, how many others over the years of BrandCo dinners contained folded fortunes I’d tucked into my pockets? At least my garbage disintegrates with a message in it.
Last week there was a client dinner. Five senior VPs, three account managers, the usual performance of professional dining where everyone orders the second-least-expensive wine and pretends to enjoy talking about market positioning over salmon.
They brought out fortune cookies with dessert. Of course they did. BrandCo always does fortune cookies at these things—some VP probably thinks it’s a charming touch. Everyone cracked theirs open, read their generic directive in silence, and tucked the little paper slips into pockets or left them on plates.
I made an egg. Obviously.
But apparently so did they.
When we stood up to leave, I watched three VPs walk away from the table. Behind them: three identical napkin eggs, placed unconsciously next to their water glasses. Small, dense, deliberately compressed.
I stared at them longer than was probably normal. The server came by, started clearing plates, swept all three eggs onto his tray without even noticing what they were.
Evidence disposed of. Gone.
But I’d seen them. And now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Are their eggs like mine? Are they just harmless nervous tics? Are they making eggs for the same reason I make eggs—because their hands need something to do while their faces perform confidence? Do they also have egg bins?
Do they sometimes pocket their fortunes and then unconsciously roll them into napkins? Have they carried around “Be Bold” or “Innovate Daily” or whatever mass-produced wisdom BrandCo handed out that night?
I couldn’t ask. Obviously. “Hey Jim, noticed your napkin egg—are you also perpetually nervous, or do you compress your fortune cookie directive into a portable anxiety sphere?” is not a networking opener.
But what if it could be?
What if acknowledging the eggs—our eggs—creates some kind of moment? Instant rapport built on shared dysfunction. I’ve been in enough leadership seminars to know they’re obsessed with “authentic connection.” Maybe this is it. Maybe this is more real than bonding over golf or discovering you went to the same business school.
“Oh, you also compress things into portable spheres while performing competence? Me too.”
Immediate camaraderie. Mutual recognition. The corporate equivalent of finding out your VP also takes Lexapro, except visible. Tangible. Evidence-based.
This could be my networking differentiator. Other people have golf. I have eggs.
I’m going to do it. Friday night. The season launch dinner where we get to see this year’s BrandCo campaign with Bradley Cooper. I’m going to bring it up.
The anxiety started before I even arrived.
Not about bringing up the eggs—I was committed to that. The anxiety was just baseline. The kind that comes with any high-stakes corporate dinner where you’re supposed to look relaxed while sitting three tables away from Bradley Cooper.
I made my first egg during the salad course.
By the time they brought out dessert, I had two in my left pocket and was working on a third.
The fortune cookies arrived on small white plates, one per person, arranged carefully by the servers. I watched the waiter working the leadership section—older guy, very deliberate, placing each cookie with precision. He set down a cookie for someone I didn’t recognize, moved to Karen Voss, VP of Finance, two seats over, paused, then swapped her cookie with one from his tray. Picked hers back up, placed the new one.
Huh.
I cracked mine open. The fortune said: “Success Follows Focus.”
Generic. Forgettable. I pocketed it and kept watching.
Three VPs at the table, all people I’d seen make eggs before. They opened their cookies, read their fortunes in silence, and—sure enough—started the fidgeting. Napkins being folded, compressed, rolled between fingers.
Then I saw it.
Jim Kowalski, VP of Operations, stood up first, heading toward the bar. Left his egg on the table. Normal white cocktail napkin, standard compression.
But Karen—who’d been sitting two seats over—reached across while standing up to shake someone’s hand, and in one smooth motion, placed a different egg next to where Jim had been sitting.
This egg was red.
Every cocktail napkin at this event was white. The dinner napkins were white. There were no red napkins anywhere in this ballroom.
So where did the red egg come from?
I stared at it sitting there next to the white egg. Two eggs. Different colors. One person’s spot.
Jim returned from the bar, glanced down at the table, and in the same unconscious pocket-transfer I’d done a thousand times, picked up both eggs and slipped them into his jacket.
I watched his hand. Two eggs went in. One white, one red.
He didn’t look at them. Didn’t acknowledge them. Just pocketed both and sat back down like nothing happened.
What the fuck.
I needed to move. Stand up. Do something before I spiraled.
This was it. My moment. The egg conversation I’d been planning.
I stood up, napkin egg number three going automatically into my right pocket, and walked over to where Jim and two other VPs—Karen and Derek Chen, VP of Marketing—were standing near the dessert table.
“Hey, weird question,” I started. “Anyone else do the napkin egg thing, or is that just me being neurotic?”
Dead silence.
All three of them looked at me. Not the warm recognition I’d imagined. Not the relieved laughter. Just... looking.
“The what?” Jim said.
“The—you know. The napkin. Rolling it into a ball. An egg.” I was already losing it. “I noticed you all do it too, and I thought maybe—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Flat. Final.
But I’d watched him. Watched him pocket two eggs five minutes ago.
“No, I just—I saw—” I gestured vaguely at the table. “The napkins. You compress them. It’s fine, I do it too, I just thought it was funny that we all—”
Derek cut in. “Are you feeling alright?”
“I’m fine, I just—” I could feel it all falling apart. The eye contact was wrong. The tone was wrong. They weren’t confused, they were... something else. Careful.
“I make them too,” I tried again, pulling one of my eggs out of my pocket like evidence. Held it up. “See? Napkin egg. I thought maybe it was a common thing, like a stress response or—”
Derek tilted his head slightly. “You work in Compliance, right?”
“Yeah, but that’s not—I’m not—”
Why did he ask that? What did Compliance have to do with napkin eggs?
“I just noticed we all seem to do this thing with napkins and I thought it would be a good icebreaker.” I could hear how insane it sounded as it came out. “Other people bond over golf. I thought maybe we could bond over... eggs.”
Another beat of silence.
“That’s... unique,” Jim said, in a tone that suggested it was not a compliment.
He shifted slightly, and I watched his hand move to his jacket pocket. Not reaching in. Just... touching it. Confirming something was still there.
“I should—I’m going to—” I gestured vaguely toward the bathrooms. “Sorry. Forget I said anything.”
I walked away before anyone could respond.
I didn’t sleep well over the weekend.
Every time I closed my eyes I saw Jim’s hand touching his jacket pocket. Karen’s face when I pulled out my egg like some kind of deranged show-and-tell. Derek asking if I worked in Compliance like it was the most relevant detail about me.
I’d replayed the conversation a hundred times, trying to find the moment where I could have salvaged it. Where I could have made it funny instead of weird, casual instead of invasive.
There wasn’t one.
I’d walked up to three senior executives at a high-profile event and essentially announced I’d been cataloging their nervous habits. “Hey, I’ve been watching you compress napkins, want to bond over our shared anxiety?”
Saturday I went through my jacket pockets and found seven eggs. Sunday I found four more in my coat from Friday night that I didn’t even remember making. The egg bin was overflowing. Physical evidence of how anxious I’d been, now compounded by how anxious I was about having been anxious.
Monday morning I got to my desk early, hoping to avoid anyone who’d been at the dinner. Kept my head down in the kitchen while making coffee. Took the long route back to my desk to avoid passing by the VP offices.
My coffee was still too hot to drink when I noticed it.
A fortune cookie. Sitting in the center of my desk.
Not on a plate. Not in a wrapper. Just... there. Placed deliberately where I’d see it immediately.
I stared at it for a long moment before picking it up.
Maybe it was a joke. Someone’s idea of a funny callback to Friday night.
I cracked it open.
The fortune said: “Back Off.”
To be continued in Napkin Eggs Part 2…
