So Goddamn Pissed Off

Yesterday a police officer came to the office. No one knows why he came to the office. Hell, I think most people, isolated in their cubicles, didn't even know he was there. I only learned about it when I stopped to talk to Mike, one of the IT dudes, about how awesome it would be to use our office building for the backdrop of a nerdcore rap video. He was lukewarm on the idea, but his face lit up when he shot back an idea for a short zombie film.

"Now THAT could be interesting," I said.

"Did you see that cop in here?" he asked me, completely one-eightying the conversation.

"In the building or in this office?"

"Right here in the office. He walked right into Helen's office."

I looked toward Helen's office. Lord knows why because there was no cop in sight. Maybe I wanted to try to pick up some of the police officer's psychic aura.

I turned back to Mike. "Like during lunch or earlier this morning?"

"Dude, like ten minutes ago. How did you miss it?"

"Middle of a task . . . had the headphones on. I don't know."

I returned to my desk, and it got me thinking about another time we had a run-in with the law. Or well, almost had a run-in with the law.

This was way back in 2003. I'd maybe been with AII for three or four days at this point. It was most definitely my first week. The week before the 4th of July holiday.

Donald had just had an alarm system installed in the house, his house, which also doubled as our office. I worked on the first floor at the time. Donald sat in the messy den at the front of the house, which was directly behind me. Helen Fick, at the time, sat directly across the room from me to my left. And Tonya Cotten sat with her desk butted up to mine. We sat so close we could always tell what the other one had had for breakfast.

We were toiling away, doing whatever in the hell it was that we did back then, when suddenly the alarm system went berserk for no apparent reason whatsoever. Donald shouted something unintelligible, like "Wowfik!" or "Yadziktus!" or something else. I don't really remember, but I'm nearly certain it wasn't an actual word in our world.

He got up from his chair and double-timed it to the alarm's control panel, on the wall in the hallway. Everyone else, assuming the nightmare would be over soon, remained seated, fingers plugging ears.

But it didn't stop. No matter what combination of buttons Donald pressed, the alarm would not go off. So, he did what any rational human being would do in such a situation, he attempted to rip the control panel from the wall. When he found his human arms too weak to accomplish the task, he set about finding some sort of smashing instrument. It didn't take long before he found a perfectly suitable smashing instrument . . . the hammer.

He started wailing away on the side of the plastic panel with the hammer, continuing his unintelligible and, at this point, wet-mouthed tirade. Within a minute or so, he had the panel in his hands and the mind-shattering siren came to an abrupt halt. I remember seeing him hold the plastic panel in his hands. He looked at it, shrugged his shoulders and tossed it into an already overcrowded and messy hall closet.

Donald returned to his desk and put the hammer down, literally. He began to rub his temples and mutter under his breath, likely embarrassed at the emotional tirade he'd just paraded out in front of all of us.

Then, the phone rang. It was the security company. I have no idea what was said by the security personnel, but I can recall Donald's half of the conversation.

"Hello?!"

. . .

"Yes, everything is fine. Just this fucking alarm system goes off for no reason at all! This is the third fucking time it's done this since we had it installed!"

. . .

"No!"

. . .

"No!"

. . .

At this point, his face reached a color of red that can only be described as nuclear meltdown.

"I said no! If you send someone over here right now, there's going to be trouble! I mean it!"

He slammed the phone down and hopped out of his chair. He raced up the stairs, moving with a speed and agility I've not seen since in Donald Marx.

When he returned a couple minutes later, he was slapping a clip into a handgun. He tucked it into the back of his already too tight khaki shorts and paced the office. Then he pulled up a chair and sat just a few feet away from me.

Keep in mind, this is still within my first handful of days in the office. I have no real idea what kind of person Donald is. All I can think about is the sound of the clip being clicked into position and the way that pistol looked in his meaty hand. I start carefully eyeballing the office. There's a window directly to my right. Since it's the first floor, I could probably dive right through it and come out in pretty good shape. Maybe some deep tissue cuts from the glass. Maybe some bruises. Maybe a broken wrist or something. But I could live with that. These are the sacrifices we are willing to make when faced with our own mortality.

Better than being a hostage or a murder victim.

I started playing the whole thing out in my head. I needed a job. I couldn't just quit. But damn, who wants gun violence in the workplace? And what would my wife think when I told her, if I got a chance to tell her?

I started to imagine someone coming to the door and this whole thing snowballing into some weird hostage/workplace gunman news story. I imagined the house being surrounded by SWAT officers and news vans blocking traffic for blocks around.

Then, Tonya got up, grabbed her purse and left. She gave me a knowing look as if to say, "Let's get out of here while we can."

So I twisted up all the courage I had. Mind you, the gunman I called Bossman was sitting only a few feet from me and if he had it in his head to shoot something, I didn't want it to be my back as I was highstepping toward the door. So, yeah, my courage got twisted about as far as I could, and I followed Tonya out into the daylight. The bright, sweet daylight.

We decided to take an early lunch. It was only a little after ten, but we thought an early lunch was certainly better than getting shot in a standoff with the police.

When we returned some hours later, the situation was resolved. Helen Fick had answered the door when the security man came to the house, and she'd sent him away, ensuring him that everything was okay. Then, she'd berated Donald for his behavior for the better part of the time we were gone. Donald came downstairs shortly after we got back, and he had sheet creases in his cheek, which told us he'd been napping.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have gotten my pistol out. I really shouldn't have done that."

He started to scratch his arm furiously.

"It's just I was so goddamn pissed off!"

And here I am seven years later.

The Medicis Couldn't Take a Joke

A couple days ago, Donald stopped by my desk to talk to me a bit more about miming. He was a bit saddened to see that I'd taken one of the many and various screens and turned it into a temporary wall around my cubicle. I could see in his eyes that he knew that meant our days of discussing the art of mime, an art form he outwardly detested but that I suspected secretly held a special place in his heart. He also relished the ingenuity of finding something in the environment and turning it to good use.

"Jesus Christ," he says, scratching his forearm and mussing the little bit of hair on his mostly bald head. "This is fucking brilliant! Why didn't I think of that? We have so many of these screens just laying around . . . I mean, they were right here all the goddamn time!"

The conversation then somehow rolled downhill like farm boys in a tractor tire to wind up in an elaborate one-man show in which Donald pretended to be an enemy of the ancient Florentine Medici family. He told joke after horrible improvised joke about how the Medicis just can't take a joke and don't like to be publicly humiliated. I caught myself looking at him and thinking, "Where the hell am I?!" It really made no sense whatsoever, but I laughed and laughed anyway because that's what I do when my I feel that awkward inside.

A short while later, I tried to steer him back onto a somewhat relevant subject, and I mentioned a project that I and a co-worker are working on.

"How's it coming along?" he asked.

"We're ahead of schedule. Should be done early to middle of next week."

"Good God! Shit! You guys are fast! I really didn't screw up when I hired the two of you!"

And the implication was as clear as the windows we'd all thought about jumping out of at one time or another . . . he was finally acknowledging just how many shitheads he'd hired to work at AII.

Metamfiezomaiophobia, or Something Akin to It

Today I was sitting at my desk, toiling away when Donald Marx (my boss) straggled out of his office, scratching his arm and picking at a scab. He looked around and saw me. I sit in the middle of the big open space in the office, so I'm kind of a sitting duck. Plus, I made the mistake of eye contact.

"Jack," he asks. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, like a nervous little kid. His eyes dart back and forth.

"Yes, Donald," I say, removing my headphones.

"Why do you think everyone hates mimes?"

Out of left field, you may think. But I've gotten used to this type of random conversation over the ears. I pretend like I'm mulling it over carefully before expounding, "I don't know, Donald."

And then he smiles and says, "I guess it's just because they're so goddamn annoying."

I half-laugh. "I suppose so," I say.

"I mean, I can really see how that would get under your skin, all that miming."

He does his best impression of a mime and the infamous "I'm inside an invisible box" mime because I guess if you think miming is annoying, the best thing to do is a lame imitation of a mime.

"Yeah . . ."

Don't know if I've told you this yet, but Helen, a co-worker of mine, is also Donald's girlfriend. So, she's not really a co-worker so much as a co-boss, but she's still technically a co-worker so I guess we're kind of equals although most of the time I think we're supposed to think of her as an extension of the boss, and to top it all off, she has one hell of a temper, so yeah . . . it's kind of messy.

So, right about the time our mime conversation is running fully out of gas, and Donald has just about run out of mime impressions, Helen storms out of her office in her holey tye-dyed shirt, black knee-length shorts, and flip-flops, her hair looking like it was styled by a hurricane and her face beet red. She stops and glares at Donald for a few seconds. He rolls his eyes at me before he turns and scurries off a few steps behind her, and they exit the office.

Failed Logo Campaigns and More

Thurston Wallace Cornelius Edgewood the Third was hired to develop an implementation manual for one of our products. He was hired over eight years ago, and still to this day has not delivered a document, or even a draft. He is not what you'd consider a "closer." The man cannot complete a project to save his life. I've been with AII since 2003, and I have yet to see Thurston complete even one project. Not complete a project on time, but complete it at all! It's gotten so bad that I've started to wonder if he has psychological issues with finishing things.

He is an older gentleman, gray bushy hair and beard, and I've heard Donald say before that he hired Thurston to be our "wise, old sage" or our sounding board for ideas, which has pretty much meant that Thurston has been given free reign to just sit back and come up with crazy ideas or to sit and listen to our crazy ideas, which I prefer to keep to a minimum.

He comes to work any time after 11 AM, and he seems to spend most of his time thinking of crazy things we can do as a company. One of my favorites was when he proposed that we start taking Helen's (that being Helen Fick) parrot to our conferences with us. The very same parrot who damaged my hearing seven years ago with his incessant high-decibel squawking. The very same parrot who shits more than a herd of cattle. The very same parrot who bites wayward fingers.

In his defense, he came up with this idea after seeing one of our competitors at a conference with a pig in a bed. This pig, by the way, was morbidly obese and mostly just sat in the bed looking sad and sleeping away his misery. But it had people talking, and Thurston's mind started churning . . . and voila! An idea was born.

Recently, Thurston has taken to using his time at work to peruse clip art to find neat new logos and slogans for us. Because who doesn't want company logos made from low quality clip art? Too bad they're all horribly inappropriate. For example, one of his latest is a picture of a bomb with the fuse burning, and it says something like, "Unleash the Power of AII" or "AII is the Bomb!" or something to that effect. Not exactly what you'd look for in a strong ad campaign.

Another one features an oil well that is spewing oil unchecked, with the tag line, "Tap into your TRUE Potential with AII!" I just feel that in these post-Gulf oil spill days, spewing oil is maybe not the best vehicle for carrying your product forward.

But here may be the best part. Thurston is also working on some sort of homebrew solar heater. Apparently, you paint a bunch of aluminum cans black, affix them together into an array, fill them with water, and then hook up some sort of electrical kit you can buy online. So this means Thurston is collecting aluminum cans. Which means, any aluminum cans you place in the recycle bin, will inevitably be fished out by Thurston and stored in his office for an undetermined amount of time. Some of the cans in his office have been there for months or even years. Is it any wonder that Thurston's office has had problems with ants in the past?

The AII Refrigerator

At this point, we need the Center for Disease Control to send a containment unit before we can attempt a cleaning of that dreadful white box. It is literally stuffed full. I took a canned beverage to work one day last week and had a very difficult time finding a space big enough to set it down inside. I haven't spent a lot of time searching through the refrigerator, mostly because I'm afraid of stirring the growing beast. John says whatever it is is becoming, "self-aware."

First Day: Stay Away from the Water

Well, not really my first day. I've worked for this same company for almost ten years now. First I worked in the office, which wasn't this office. Then, I moved away and worked from home for six years. And now . . . well, now I'm back in the office, the new office, in a building that looks like a spaceship.

I'm not kidding.

In my time away, the company has grown. Back when I worked in the office, there were seven of us, plus the cranky old co-owner who lives off in some far, far away land and only a few of us have ever met him. Seriously, in ten years of working here, only a very select few of us have ever met the man who co-owns the business. We know him only through phone conversations. And every time he makes a good faith effort to come to the office to meet all of us, he mysteriously crashes his car on the way to the city.

At any rate, some folks have left and some new folks have been added. Returning to the office Tuesday, I met five people I've never seen before in my life. A couple of them met me with complete kindness and enthusiasm . . . others with a sort of cold (calculating?) distance. But that's the way it's become with this office. Always a rift somewhere. Always people on opposite sides of growing chasms.

So, I'm getting the tour of the office from a good-hearted lad who answers our phones and does some sales presentations named John Willingham. We enter the break room/conference room, and he says, "Oooh, check this out!"

He spins, flings open the freezer door to reveal an absolute mess of freezer-burned items in the freezer. He fingers through the miscellany, asking himself if someone has recently cleaned it out. Then, he finds what he's been looking for and pulls it out for me to see.

It's a package of chicken breasts. Frozen. Purchased on July 10, 2008. The chicken is nearing its two year anniversary as a member of our team. The chicken has over a year's seniority on two of the new employees. But here's the real kicker . . . there's not a stovetop or an oven or even a firepit anywhere in the vicinity. Why would anyone store their frozen chicken in the work freezer for over two years? Why would they bring it to the office in the first place? These are all questions, I'm sure, that lead us to the greater mysteries of our esteemed workplace.

So, with a nervous chuckle, John tosses the chicken back into that rat's nest of a freezer and turns, pointing seriously to the water cooler. "Whatever you do," he warns, "DO NOT drink the water in this."

I eyeball it. Everything seems fine. "Why?" I ask. You'll find there are more why questions at Associated Industries Incorporated (AII from here on out) than a full season of Lost.

"Sometimes," John says in a low, almost disconcerting whisper, like a campfire storyteller reeling you in for the big scare, "we find algae growing in the tank."

"Ugh," I say, exasperated.

"And you know what gets done about it?" he asks further.

I shrug my shoulders, searching the murky depths of that water reservoir for signs of life.

"Thurston (that being Thurston Wallace Cornelius Edgewood the Third, a bumbling older gentleman co-worker of ours) dumps the water and then wipes it clean with that," he says pointing to a disgusting yellow towel hanging from a hook on the wall next to the water cooler.

"With that?"

"With that," John says. "And you know, I've been here almost two years and that towel has never been moved from that hook except to wipe out the tank."

"You mean it never gets washed?"

"That's exactly what I mean." He squints his eyes at me in a knowing way, and we both laugh. "So . . . unless you're looking for a case of botulism, I'd stay away from the water."