My Job

I work in the equivalent of Tod Browning's "Freaks". For real. Here's the deal: I say all the time that you can't make this stuff up, that if my friends and I went to a TV producer with a pitch for a new office TV show and all we did was exactly describe the people at my office they would never believe it. "Oh, hell no" they'd say, and "nobody is actually this bad". Dude, you have no idea.

Let's start with Thong Boy. See, we give them code names, well, for obvious reasons, of course, but it's also really mean. And that's good. See the title of this blog for explanation of that. Anyway, here's the deal: Thong Boy wears a thong. Just like Stoop Kid sits on his stoop. What? You've never watched "Hey Arnold"? Loser. Anyway, Thong Boy is probably about 50-55 years old and unless you havent' made the connection, the fact that he wears a thong and that we know it because he said so one day at a luncheon (don't even start me) is like one of the creepiest, ickiest pieces of information you can know about a stoop-shouldered, balding, baggy pantsed (in a creepy old man way, you know what I mean) wierdo. It's right up there with "I'm having to wear adult diapers these days". We got one of them, too, but that's the topic of another post.

Thong Boy sits on a funky pillow because he has a bad back. The pillow is covered by a pillow case that, to my observation, has never, ever been removed and washed. Did you get that? Thong Boy sits his funky ass on a pillow (the kind the rest of us lay our HEADS on for Christ sake) all day, every day. Freak. He carries it with him to the cafeteria and sits his funky ass on it down there while he stares out the window, presumably to regain his equilibrium because: Thong Boy is also Nature Boy. He farts in his cubicle (into said pillow, for sure) and he walks around the building all the time, presumably to get fresh air, but in our cubicle farm life I'm always happy as hell when he's on one of his jaunts 'cause you know, he's gone; always a good thing.

So Thong Boy drinks lots and lots of water, I guess because it's supposed to be good for you, who knows, maybe he's also got kidney issues. But he's too fucking cheap to actually BUY some water, so he's got these two-year-old, empty, glass green-tea bottles that he just keeps refilling (at no cost to himself) from the purified water dispenser in the front office that THEY pay for but for some godforsaken reason nobody has ever stopped him and said" Yo, you cheap-ass motherfucker! How about actually contributing a few bucks to the water fund considering you guzzle it down like a freaking' water buffalo." People in offices are WAY too polite in my opinion.

So, because of where we are situated in the cubicle lane, Thong Boy's endless water refills take him past my cubicle, on average, five or six times a day. I can hear him starting his water refill journey: the old, filthy empty bottles clink together annoyingly as he gathers them up, and they continue clinking as he slowly shuffles by, stoop-shouldered, his face always screwed up in the same, infuriating, slightly confused expression. He passes by my cubicle and I grit my teeth because I know that in a few moments he'll be coming back, old-ass bottles filled with water. Cheap bastard.

So what if, one day, I just reached out a foot as he was passing by with his filled bottles and tripped the dork? I can't tell you how many times I've gone over this scenario in my mind: the sight of him losing his footing, the idiotic expression switching on a dime to that one that says: "Oh shit, I'm going down and when I hit the floor, man am I fucked." But the best part would be those old-ass bottles as they go flying through the air (this part I actually imagine in slo-mo), the water spraying everywhere, but mostly on him, and the sounds they make as they hit the floor followed immediately by the thud of him landing on them and maybe, just maybe, cracking one of those suckers all to hell. A shard in the eye? The ear? Sever a fingertip? If that wouldn't keep his sorry ass out of the office for at least a month, then nothing would. Hell, maybe he'd put in his retirement papers. A bitch can dream.