One Sleepless Wrestle: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
I’ve actually been working. Ok, not really. I did, however, create a project for myself that has kept me in a secure room, alone, for a couple of months, so I haven’t had much interaction with the office staff from Amazing Glass of Burning and Awesome Shoes of Power.
Until today.
But first let me back up a bit. Remember Steve (or whatever I made his name to be last time)? He of looking like a doughnut? Well a few months ago we were having an unseasonably warm day and the heat couldn’t be turned off. Steve breaks out some fans. Good job, Steve! Now, it not good enough to feel like our Savior Jesus, Steve decides he should be in charge and exercise his position and goes around demanding people help him with the fans so that he can supervise their placement. Bad job, Steve! Do it yourself, Steve!
I’m sitting at my desk with my feet on it, looking intently at the screen (I’d opened a .pdf with a bunch of gibberish just for this occasion). Steve stands in front of me, challenging: “Come on.” A directive, not a request. I stare at the screen for a few moments, furrowing my brow as though I’m concentrating and just don’t quite understand then reach into the desk for a pencil (feet still on it, challenging) and use it to point at the screen. Steve is unsure what to do. He desperately needs to increase his esteem by ordering people to do mundane ridiculous things, but he also desperately needs to not look like an idiot by 1: trying to understand what it is I am looking at and 2: pissing off the big boss by taking me away from something that is obviously important.
“mmm”
“What?” Steve asks.
I ignore him and scribble something down. Steve’s mind is in a panic not knowing what to do.
“Well when you get done with that come help us with these fans.”
“When I get done with this a group of monkeys would have evolved, placed the fans, decided they weren’t good enough and developed an AC system that we could operate from in here, rather than from 4 buildings away, then written an Opera. I mean come on, there are three other people in there waiting, we have three fans, what, exactly, is it you want me to do other than move because you said so? I readily admit they are idiots and you could probably use my help, but right now I am importantly busy and I need to understand this code for the (highly secretive project the mere mention of which supersedes all other work and allows me to walk about unfettered. For the record I cannot understand computer code. At all.).”
“Smartass, get your feet off the desk.”
I raise my feet a couple of inches, still staring at the screens gibberish.
“Smartass,” Steve says, and smacks my feet off the desk, spinning me around in my chair, which makes me hit the wall, knocking down my Airborne graduation picture that I hung up there to piss Steve off in the first place (He has dozens of photos of his exploits on his wall. I put up one, from when I was 18, to counter).
It hits the floor, but doesn’t break.
“Dude. Not cool” I say.
“Dude. Not cool putting your feet on the desk.”
“Dude. I can’t concentrate in this stupid chair because I can’t relax in it because if I sit in it it pesters my sciatica and hemorrhoids that I have chronic cases of because of all my motorcycle riding.” (I say this because he was a medic and any mention of an ailment will get him off any other topic. Plus I think he has hemorrhoids and is embarrassed about them. So it is the ONE ailment that will make his head explode: he is DYING to talk medical stuff, but won’t discuss butt problems. I, for the record, am afflicted with neither ailment.).
“Oh, sorry. Still you can’t put your feet on the desk.”
“Well it didn’t break, but now I need a cigarette. Plus I think those guys have the fans up.” I go to push past him and walk out, but pause and carefully place a kiss on my own photo and rehang it on the wall, making careful sure it is straight, then turn and say to Steve:
“Damn son, I am one motherfucking good looking dude.”
Then I walk out. He mumbles something about my being retarded.
Coming back in a bit later (maybe an hour?) I see the fans are up, Matt is quiet, everyone is quiet (Oh, the fans are a pain because all the plugs in here are hidden in awkward places behind all kinds of stupid shelving so it’s not just a matter of plugging them in and being done. Shit has to be moved.)
“What in the hell is this? This shit’s going to fall.” I say aloud.
No response.
“Steve!”
“What?”
(I love instituting yelling matches over the top of cubicle walls, except when anyone else does it, then I yell at them to e-mail or pick up the phone.)
“Dude, this fan is totally going to fall.”
“Which FAN?” Steve’s booming voice is getting louder and louder.
“This one! THIS ONE ON TOP OF THE CASE FOLDERS NEXT TO MY DESK!”
Steve comes waddling over.
“Dude, seriously. You guys put this on top of the case folders, and you’ve got the cord stretched to its limit to behind a pole. People have to get to these case folders. Martha (I forget what I called the secretary in the previous stories, names changed, duh) has to get here and you know how fat and unwieldy she is.”
“Shhhh, she can hear you.”
“Not over the din of these fans she can’t!” I yell. “Seriously?” I say, twanging the cord, watching the fan pull closer to the edge of the 7′ case folder shelving, “Whose bright idea was this?”
“That’s the only place it can go and hit the conference table area and still plug in without being too close and blowing papers all over the table and there’s a meeting today.”
“Cancel it.”
“Can’t.”
“Yes you can. It’s our meeting. Say it’s a shithole sweatbox in here and you’re canceling the meeting.”
Nothing.
“Seriously, do it.”
Nothing.
“Fine, but if this fan falls off then I’m going to laugh my ass off RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MEETING. Clearly you have never heard of the tension/torsion effect. Do you know how much stored energy is in this cord right now? I mean with it stretched to the outlet, and stretched to the fan perched, not very well mind you, on that shelf, a fly could fart on it and that would add enough energy to topple the entire thing.”
“You’re making that up.”
“No, why do you think piano strings and guitar strings and all that make noise when you hit them? Because you are releasing the stored energy in the vehicle of sound waves…”
“Just watch the fan during the meeting.”
“Oh, I’ll watch it alright.”
A few hours pass, and the meeting rolls around.
Of course they’re all govvies and all complain about the heat like we didn’t realize if was fucking hot in here until they came in and informed us. We just like the fans to keep the bugs out.
I’m not involved in this meeting, but I am close to the fan. In fact it’s about 4 feet from me. I let the meeting get good and started. Luckily no one can really see me from where they are sitting.
I shoot a rubber band at the cord, but miss. “Damn.” I then fold up a piece of paper into a missile and shoot it with the rubber band, and this time I hit the cord, but apparently the fan is a bit too heavy, and the top of the shelving just not slick enough. This will require something else entirely.
On top of the shelving are some foam-core poster boards that I’ve been meaning to take home. Inside my desk is a 24″ ruler, some string, and other desk stuff. I’m going fishing.
I rig up the string to the ruler, then a huge binder clip to the other end of the string, with the goal of hooking it on the other end of the foam core, pulling it off the shelf, where it will hit the fan, and make everyone piss their pants from the noise.
I get it in three tries.
Fan comes down, I jump up like I’m all “what the fuck was that?” Half the table of do-nothings are out of their seats, Matt is calmly turned around in his chair giving me a “fuck you” I’m shrugging at him (at the same time moving over there to clean up the mess because I’m concerned that the meeting was interrupted from this horrible fuck up (sarcasm, people, I was trying to get my fishing apparatus out of sight).
Everyone calm, he goes on blubbering about how hot it is and how we need fans and does this for 10 minutes or so.
Which brings me to today.
See? When the fan fell, all on its own, to the ground, it broke. The cover broke off of it. Now being a govt office we damned sure aren’t supposed to use it anymore. It is, as they say, INOP and should be discarded. Fuck that, fix the AC and maybe we’ll consider giving up one of the fans. Besides, in the months since then it has come in very handy when I’m bored. Take one fan without a cover, aim it in the general vicinity of the people you want to annoy, then throw things into the blades. Trust me on this one.
Today it’s 85 degrees IN THE OFFICE. And, given the fan crash incident of a few months ago, fans aren’t to be put on top of shelves, because, duh, they fall. Steve came up with that order all on his own, too.
Except it’s really f’ing hot, and unless I want to move a 500lb case file cabinet (I don’t) I will be without a fan over here, unless….
Unless I tie some string to the ceiling, and attach the fan to the string, and then I can plug it on on the opposite wall (fans, also, can’t sit on the floor for safety reasons (the government pays people to come up with these ideas, mind you)). And, since Steve isn’t here to ask, I’m going to assume that hanging a fan from the ceiling is not the same as putting a fan on the shelf. I’ll conveniently ignore the fact that the fan has no cover and will hang at face height. I mean if you walk into a fan, you kind of deserve to have your face mangled, agreed?
So the other contractors want NO part of this, so I spend half the morning coming up with an ingenious way to get the fan rigged. I even have a pulley system, with the string wrapped around the handle of the pencil sharpener (Amazing Glass of Burning) that’s attached to my desk so I can raise and lower it as it suits me.
It works! Except that it really starts to twist so I need to somehow weight it at the bottom so I go over there, reach out to grab both sides of it to turn it back and
PBBBBBBTTTTPPPPPTTTTTPPPPPPTTTT
Thumb goes right into the plastic blades, blood spurts out onto the wall and on my shirt, and up my opposite arm.
“MOTHERFUCKER” I yell.
Two of the secretaries and a contractor jump up and ask me what’s wrong.
“This! I put my damned thumb in this goddamned fan.” (I should note that the secretaries hadn’t seen the hanging fan yet and didn’t have enough brains to know whether they should address it, address me, or call the President).
Bloods not spurting, but it’s oozing and dripping. I walk across the room to the file cabinet to get the First Aid kit. Three people say “Didn’t know we had that.” I mumble “because you’re idiots and don’t pay attention” noting full well the irony of my saying that.
So I go to start doctoring myself up, trying to cut gauze with one hand with blood oozing out of a split cuticle and missing thumb tip. Martha (the old, clueless, motherly one who didn’t know what Google was, and who left a hand-scrawled note on my desk asking whether I was working on some program or not last night at 5:20 because it frozed (yes, frozed. Frozed. F.r.o.z.e.d. up on her) (for the record, no, I was not working. The only people who work at 5:20 are suckers, I was drinking beer. For two, if you are wondering if I am indeed working on a program from home and it is affecting you back in the office, wouldn’t the bright idea be to e-mail me the question, rather than hand scrawling it on an envelope and sitting it on my desk where I won’t get it until the goddamned morning?) is trying to help and offers to cut the gauze when she sees this cyst thing I have on my forearm. It’s just some calcium deposit that I should get cut out, but it doesn’t bother me and the last time I asked a doctor about it he said it would be an in and out thing and I asked if I could keep it when it was out and he said no, and so I decided against it.
“That’s my twin.”
Her eyes bug out. Her eyes always bug out when she doesn’t understand something or thinks it’s incredulous. It’s her first way of asking “Come again?” If you wait a moment she will actually use words:
“What!?” (See? I told you.)
“It’s my twin. I have a twin growing in my arm, except it’s not really growing.”
“No way!” she says, disgusted and incredulous.
“No, seriously. It’s an unformed twin. I mean it’s just a mass of cells and it isn’t bothering anything and I’ve had it since I was born. I can’t believe you never noticed it before. It’s kind of cool, actually. I have a little brother right under the skin of my arm.”
She’s gone from black to green.
“Want to touch it?” I say, and grab the cyst, pulling it up.
Martha’s breakfast hits the desk.
“Oh gross!” I say. “What if some small piece of puke got in my cut! I can get a disease!” and run out, ostensibly shaken, but really I just wanted to laugh my fucking ass off and have a smoke.
Which I did. Now I am going to go home because it’s a beautiful day and I have an old motorcycle to ride.
Here’s some art of my morning (sorry, it’s a collage rather than a few different pictures of scenes, I have a cut fucking thumb and some bits of puke on me).
Send to a Friend
hey, this post is real long and wordy, should i bother to read it?
June 19, 2008 at 11:36 am