And the Academy Award Goes to . . .

It has been an interesting week down under. Last week, we had a truly ghastly meeting of the board of directors, after which I almost gave notice. Then I remembered all the mouths I have to feed and swallowed the bile of rage. The weekend brought a car accident (not my fault, I hasten to add). Then on Tuesday, I got an extremely lenghty e-mail from the Devil.

My usual e-mail behavior where the Devil is involved is to refill the coffee cup, make sure my meds are up to date, and then read each paragraph slowly to unravel its core element. Once all the core elements are gleaned, I recombine them and try to discern some meaningful patterns. Sometimes it works. More often, I'm left with only the most cursory sense of meaning. However, as the Devil likes to visit me to verbally deliver the same messages, it usually works out in the end.

So, with my cup of steaming coffee ready to go, I read Tuesday's e-mail. I have no idea what most of it said. One sentence, though, has branded itself on my memory:

I have been informed that, owing to my efforts on behalf of our industry and concomitant good works overall, I have been given the annual BLAHBY award for excellence by the [Blah] Association.

What? The first time I read this line, I had a visceral reaction. Everything in my body from the sternum down clenched. I read the sentence several more times. No, it didn't change into something like: I have been permanently drummed out of the [Blah] Association for permanently mangling the English language, not to mention my concomitant and obvious idiocy. He was getting the highest award that the association that represents our industry gives. This is his second major award from the association, and he is the only person in the last thirty years to win both awards.

My head has been swimming ever since. This Devil is a truly horrible person. NO ONE who has ever worked for him likes or respects him. How is it possible to be so well-respected by outsiders? Why can no one see through his bullshit? (Sorry, I don't normally swear, but I am absolutely gobsmacked by this award thing.)

So, all week, I have been listening to him on his telephone, taking congratulatory calls from all the sycophants who voted for him to win this award (it was unanimous, by the way). And the best part? Because he won, he has decided to spring for the costs necessary for his key managers (yes, I am one of them) to attend the awards ceremony in New York. I cannot wait. I'm just hoping I can make it through the evening without throwing up.

And if I do, the next envelope that is opened will be the one announcing my award, for best actress in a thankless job. I'm not sure how much longer I can take it!

And today's secret word is . . .

That's right, Conky. We do have a secret word in Hell. Only it's not really "today's" word and it's not really just one word. There are several flavor of the month word, the ones that the Devil attempts to work into every sentence. Here are the words of choice at the moment:

Overall: Overall, when you consider all of the options, you can see that overall is a fine word for using basically as verbal punctuation, overall. It makes a fine comma, a creditable semi-colon, and (overall) really excellent terminal punctuation. At a recent hour-long meeting, I logged 73 overalls. And not one of them was denim.

The reality is (alternate: the actual reality is): If you want to show sincerity, make sure you preface your remarks with an indicator of their veracity. Nothing gives your statement more credibility than to say "Truthfully, officer," before whatever the true message is: "Truthfully, officer, I thought the other driver was a penguin." The reality is that a truthful person does not feel the need to signal his or her truthfulness. The actual reality is that any statement following the phrase "the reality is" is a lie.

Catchment: This is not a basin where water is stored. Every dictionary definition to the contrary, the reality is that this word means the demographic, morphological, or numerical makeup of a group of people. Even the venerable Oxford English Dictionary managed to mess this one up. Used in a sentence? "At the next conference on helix widgets, we don't really know whether the catchment will be mostly executives or product reps."

These are just a few of the words du jour. And every time I hear one, I want to scream real loud. Overall.

You wanted me to talk to you when?

The Voice of Reason and I had lunch recently, during which she tormented me with tales of the real world. Of course, the conversation eventually found its way back to the Devil. VOR reminded me of one story I had somehow managed to forget. That electroconvulsive therapy must be working after all. Anyway, from VOR, a trip down memory lane:

The Voice had been working with the Devil on developing our divisional budget for the next year and came across a problem with the figures she had gotten from one of the assistant vice presidents. She spoke to the Asst. VP, asking him to clarify the seemingly faulty figures. He gave her additional information, but the final figures still didn't gel.

So the Voice went to the Devil, and asked him whether he wanted her to investigate further or wanted to resolve the problem himself. Those of you who have read this blog can guess what the Devil's response was. He told the Voice that he needed more information from her before he could decide how to handle the discrepancy.

The Voice diligently did her additional research, and put together a packet of information for the Devil to review. She stuck a post-it note on the packet, reading "I'd like to discuss this with you when you have time." She put it on his desk right before she left for lunch.

The Devil was uncharacteristically silent that afternoon. The Voice heard nothing from him, and he didn't look at her or talk to her any time he passed her office all day. Then, right before she was supposed to leave to pick up her son for a soccer game, he sent her an e-mail asking her to stop by his office and speak with him.

When she entered his office, he asked her to close the door (never a good sign). Then he proceeded to flay the skin off her. Gesturing at the packet of information on his desk, as if afraid to touch it, the Devil asked: "Why didn't you speak to me about this before now?" The Voice of Reason reminded the Devil that she had spoken to him about the underlying budgetary matter. The Devil responded: "No, this information," tapping the packet. "Why didn't you speak to me about this before now?" The Voice was quite confused. She explained to the Devil that: (1) she had alerted him about the budget issue; (2) he had asked her to further research the matter so he could make more informed decisions about it; (3) the packet on his desk ("this") was the research she had done; and (4) it had a post-it on it asking for a time to discuss it. How, she asked, could she possibly have spoken to him about it before she had?

The Devil spent the next thirty minutes explaining to the Voice why she was being insubordinate and how she could do her job better. At the end, he asked her the famous question we have all come to dread from these little sessions: "Now, what have you learned from this?"

The Voice, with a ten-year-old twenty minutes late for soccer, and a mortgage on a new house, swallowed her screaming until she made it to her car. Now when he asks her to research something, she sends him an e-mail asking him to set forth the parameters so she has it in writing. Ahh, the Devil's handiwork: turning a quality employee into an emotional wreck in under an hour.

The Portal to Hell

In a recent post, I mentioned the Devil's uncomfortable chair, and the ongoing yearlong mission for its replacement. Over the last six months, there has been another developing saga. It involves a door.

Hell can be a drafty abode and the Devil is a sensitive soul. Accordingly, when the portal to hell somehow failed, the Devil took the task of selecting a new door quite seriously. So seriously that the quest for a new door took over three months and involved more than twenty partial or complete days off work.

One Monday in mid-June, the receptionist (Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound) answered when the Devil called. Because it was the Devil, Cerberus used her (nearly) reasonable head, the one she saves just for him. Apparently, over the weekend, the portal to hell had been breached and rendered useless. The Devil was staying home to find a new door.

Weeks passed. In each one, there was at least one and frequently more than one, day off for door-related activities. Summer mellowed into autumn, autumn greyed into winter, and the pursuit of the door continued unabated. There was the selection, the purchase, the shipping, the delivery, the return, the shipping (part II), the redelivery, the fitting, the refitting, and finally, as icy Canadian winds brought the first snow--it was installed.

The time off was one thing. Worse--much worse--the Devil recounted each stage of the saga to anyone he could trap with the loving detail that Wagner brought to the Ring Cycle. Not since Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg has so much attention been paid to a door. If he was in the middle of one particular aspect of the Doorelungenleid when one joined a meeting, he would start all over again so no one missed anything. Hence, each of us heard the core story, with varying ancillary details, almost everyday he worked during the time of the door.

At one such meeting, after the door had been thoroughly vetted, until we were as glazed and unresponsive as climbers with acute mountain sickness, the conversation was mercifully turned to the annual holiday party. The Devil said that he and Barbie would be happy to host the event, and would even supply a deli tray, although they could not be as generous as in years past owing to the strain on the household budget occasioned by the door. In response, the Voice offered to host at her house. The offer was gratefully accepted by all. Only later did the Voice discover that she had incurred Satan's wrath by denying him the opportunity he had so looked forward to: showing us all the Door.

Abandon all hope, Ye who enter here.

Semaphoring

So, I'm sitting at my desk, working on one of the four assignments that Devil gave me when I arrived at work today. I was out yesterday, and he was making up for lost time. Anyway, one of the things he asked me to do was call and yell at someone. Oh, he didn't put it that way, but that's what it amounted to. And part of what I had to convey was that the person should feel even worse about being yelled at by me, because he wasn't important enough to be yelled at by the Devil. (See Levels.)

Anyway, I was on the telephone, yelling away, when I noticed a flurry of movement right at the outer edge of my field of vision. I looked up, and there was the Devil, engaged in a little behavior we call "semaphoring."

What happens is the Devil will shoot by my office door with nary a pause, flapping his arms wildly like a giant bird of prey. He looks like a poor soul deep in the throes of St. Vidas's dance. Sometimes he has a piece of paper, file folder, or newspaper article in his hand, to which he will gesture and point in a fashion he clearly believes is meaningful. Sometimes he does the pinky-thumb phone waggle near his ear, indicating that he wants you to call him when you complete what he takes as your personal call. If he's really agitated, he will stand in the doorway and have a sotto voce conversation with you, moving his mouth in an exaggerated way, gesturing like a charades grand champion to accentuate his indecipherable words.

This morning, I did what I always do, which is indicate that I understood his communication by nodding then look away immediately. Then, when the call is over, I wait for him to come by again. Here's how that goes:

Devil: minion, are you busy?
Me: Why no, Devil, I was just completing the second of the many tasks you dumped on me when I arrived this morning. Here, let me move the award I won from the Chamber of Commerce so you have a place to put your coffee cup.
Devil: (indignantly) Why didn't you call me when you got off the phone?
Me: (sweetly) Oh, is that what you wanted? I thought there was a bee in the office (the Devil is allergic to bees).
Devil: No, I wanted to discuss something with you. Come on back to my office when you have a chance. [In hell, "when you have a chance" means "now."]
Me: (teeth clenched) Sure, I'll be right there.

Semaphoring is similar to another of the Devil's ways. If two or more of us are talking, and the Devil suspects that we're talking about him (he ALWAYS suspects we're talking about him), he will do a little something we call "sharking." Sharking involves cruising slowly back and forth past the conversation area. He'll find innumerable reasons to float back and forth. Sometimes we torment him by falling silent as soon as he comes within earshot and then laughing as he floats back down the hallway.

Semaphoring and sharking: two of the methods the Devil has developed to substitute for actual communication.

Levels

The Devil is obsessed with levels. This is kind of ironic, as people sometimes refer to circles, or levels, of Hell. Maybe not as ironic as a black fly in my Chardonnay but . . .

Anyway, the Devil asked me to return a telephone call to a reporter the other day. Hey, why am I complaining? It should make me happy that the Devil trusts me to return a call of this nature, right? However, the truth is that the Devil wanted me to call because he wanted to send a message. Here's how our conversation went:

Devil: Minion, are you busy now? (A completely rhetorical question as: (1) he must have been able to discern that I was, in fact, busy; and (2) it wouldn't matter anyway because whatever I was doing would be less important than the task he had in mind.)
Me: Not at all, Devil. Let me just move all these big law books and files out of the way so you can set down that message slip you’re carrying.
Devil: Good. I'd like you to return this call (as he hands me the message slip).
Me: Oh, it's Reporter Guy. Do you know what he's calling about?
Devil: I think he's calling about the letter we wrote last week. That's why I'd like you to return the call.
Me: Because I signed it?
Devil: No, because I don't think it's time to elevate this matter to my level yet.

Translation: Reporter Guy wants to write a story that his editor will put on the front page of the local section. I don't want to cooperate. So by having Minion return the call, I am sending the message that I disdain Reporter Guy and his newspaper. Also, when people read Minion's quotes in the paper, they'll know this isn't a very important matter for our company. If it were, why would we let Minion comment on it?

Another example: Late yesterday, after the receptionist and all of our support staff had left for the day, the telephone rang in our division. The Devil answered it. The caller asked for someone on staff. The Devil said to the caller: "She's gone for the day." The caller said (probably assuming this was a perfectly normal question) "Could you transfer me to her voice mail?"

This made the Devil angry. How could this caller assume that he, the Devil, knew how to transfer a call to voicemail? This was a clerical function, beneath the Devil's level. So the Devil says (I'm not making this up): "I don't know if you realize it, but you've reached the Division Director here, and I just don't think I can transfer you."

The caller (no doubt awed that he had reached the Division Director there) asked the Devil to take a written message. The Devil hemmed and hawed, scrabbled around for paper and pencil, told the caller that the Division Director was not accustomed to taking messages (heh-heh), and finally told the poor guy to ring back and wait for the automated answering system to take his call.

The Devil has found his niche, and he's making sure that no one else is ever elevated to his level.

The Devil's Throne

In a recent post Sweeping for Bugs, I mentioned the Devil's new chair. This reminded me of the story connected with the new chair:

About eighteen months ago, the Devil injured his back. It's a mystery how said injury occurred, as the Devil doesn't manage to accomplish much at work and, presumably, even less at home. Perhaps there is more effort involved in ordering around relatives. Suffice it to say, however, that the Devil sustained a back injury.

During the morning of his first day back at work, the Devil became convinced that his office chair was exacerbating the injury. He tried adjusting it upward, and backward, tried moving the arm heights, tried tilting the seat in a variety of ways, but could not alleviate the pain. Finally, he concluded that there would have to be a new office chair.

Normally, when someone in our office gets a new chair, it's someone else's grungy old cast-off chair. Occasionally, when a crappy chair breaks, one can talk to the office manager and be put on a list for the next time chairs are ordered in bulk. If you're around when the chairs are delivered, you get to pick the color you want: black or grey.

In the Devil's hands, a chair purchase is a serious thing. First of all, money is no object. Even though the company has laid people off in the recent past, nothing as trivial as cost should stand between the Devil and the most comfortable therapeutic office chair available. The Devil spent a good week doing on-line research and reading Today's Chair magazine. Finally, he selected about seven chairs he thought might work. But before he committed his hard-earned chair budget to any one chair, he needed to try them out. Here's how that went:

Devil: Are you busy, minion?
Minion: Why no, Devil, just trying to get these figures you wanted by the end of the day together. Why don't you let me move the ledger books so you can put your feet up.
Devil: I need you to order me a chair. Here's the name of the store (handing me a slip of paper). Tell them I want to try it out. Two weeks should be enough.
Minion: Oookay. Do they do free trials?
Devil: They will for me. Tell them who I am.
Minion: Right. Okay. Umm, what kind of chair is it, anyway?
Devil: It's the Arrow Chair. It was designed by Nolan Miller.
-- Long Silence --
Minion: Nolan Miller?
Devil: Yep, Nolan Miller. Tell them I want it for two weeks, okay?

So, I'm thinking, does he know that Nolan Miller was the fashion designer whose work was featured on "Dynasty"? Does this Arrow chair have shoulder pads and a peplum on the back? Is it mud resistant, for the inevitable "rolling-in-the-fishpond" cat fight? Or could the Devil possibly mean the Aeron Chair, designed by Herman Miller.

I ordered the chair, and they did agree to a free trial, even without my having to name drop the no-name I work for. And no one in the office corrected the Devil about the name, because hearing him call it the Arrow chair, and attribute it to Nolan Miller was just too damn funny. He talked about it a lot, too. Seems the Arrow chair wasn't quite the Devil's cup of tea.

We ordered six or seven other chairs for the Devil's sitting pleasure. None measured up to his exacting standards. So, one by one, we sent them back. This went on (the ordering, the free trials, the returns) for about six months. Then one day, the Voice of Reason forwarded an e-mail to me. The Devil had asked her to order him another chair to try out. Here is the text of his e-mail to her:

When you get in, I would like you to order a different chair instead of the one I currently have which is not comfortable and concomitantly is too uncomfortable for me because of my back injury and the length of my legs and the fact that I have to sit in it and use it for other purposes. Call the Nolan Miller people and see if I can try out that Arrow chair.

We laughed and laughed. And the whole thing started all over again. The Devil is a hard task master, and he needs a soft throne. Perhaps the shoulder pads will help.

Mwah mwah, mwah-wah-wah-wah

Today, I have been pondering on words. Have you ever repeated a word over and over again in your head until it loses all meaning? Try it. Pick a word—any common, everyday word will do. How about “cupcake”? A cupcake, a luscious chocolate cupcake, covered with shiny, fudgy ganache. Mmmm.

Of course, the word cupcake isn’t a cupcake. It’s just an alphabetic symbol for cupcake. The word could be anything—it could be cowpie. If we, as English speakers, were told from the beginning that the word “cowpie” meant a delicious fudgy dessert (ewww), that’s what it would mean.

Okay, now just repeat the word over and over again. Cupcake, cupcake, cupcake. Say it out loud, whisper it, shout it, chant it silently in your head. Pretty soon, it’s just a combination of meaningless sounds. It’s the adults in a Peanuts cartoon who all say the same thing: “Mwah mwah, mwah-wah-wah-wah.” The mental picture of a tasty treat that matched “cupcake”? Gone with the wind.

I know what you’re thinking. “Okay, minion,” you’re thinking, “so what does this have to do with your idiot boss?” I’m getting to that.

The Voice of Reason stumbled into my office late last week looking dazed and seeking succor. I ushered her to a chair and gave her a nice cool drink. After sipping delicately, and dabbing her brow with a linen handkerchief, she felt enough like herself that she could speak.

“minion,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I think I just had an out of body experience. No, that’s not the right phrase. It was a waking hallucination. Is that possible?”

I asked her if she had been taking LSD or smoking pot. She insisted that her urine would pass the most stringent drug test (administered randomly under the Devil’s new intolerance policy). Given her sober-as-a-judgeness (well, more sober than Paula Abdul, anyway), I told her that a waking hallucination seemed kind of unlikely. I also asked her to describe what had occurred.

She told me that she was trapped in the Devil’s office, listening to a lecture about paper in the fax machine. The lecture was entering its second millenium when (dramatic chords) something happened.

Suddenly, she couldn’t hear the Devil’s words. The drone continued, but the words were indistinguishable. Oh, his lips were still moving, but instead of symbols encoded with meaning, there was just—sound. But that’s not all.

She realized that she could see the words coming out of the Devil’s mouth. One after another. Eighty-word-long sentences with each new word tumbling over the last. Some of the words were italicized; some were bolded or underlined, some were in fun fonts. Regardless, they just kept coming.

She said the torrent of words began to fill the empty air space in the office. Letters were knotted together like the legs of a dead spider. She watched in a kind of fascinated horror as words began to lean against the walls, black snowdrifts of vowels and consonants, new letters causing the old to shift and slide in a language avalanche.

Finally, she said, there was a pause. Without the influx of additional words, the air between herself and the Devil cleared sufficiently that she could see him again. The view was partially obscured by some of the Devil’s last few words floating in the air: “debacle” and “one fell swope.” [Note: This is how he says it. “Swope.” Not “swoop.”]

The Voice of Reason was feeling anything but reasonable. She waved her hand in what she hoped was a casual manner, trying to gain a few seconds to think. Then she saw, and actually understood, his last three words: “Don’t you agree?” She was gripped with horror: Agree with what?

Sitting in my office, regaining her shattered composure, the Voice of Reason says she has no idea what she had said in response to the Devil’s question. All she knew at that time was that she was trapped in the apex of Hell, and twenty minutes of the Devil’s words were nothing more than letters. She could still vaguely perceive them melting into the plush saxony that covers the Devil’s floor. Whatever she said, it was sufficient to merit her release from his office. (Of course, it could have been the whimpering. She’s pretty sure there was whimpering.)

I comforted the Voice as best I could. Ultimately, she was able to repair to her own office to lick her wounds.

In the end, it was a sobering experience for both of us, because it was confirmed that , in the Devil's hands, words can be wounding. It really makes me wonder, though. When Eve stood by that tree, gazing at the tempting crimson fruit, did the Devil's words really persuade her to eat the apple? Or did they just overwhelm her, confuse her, lose their meaning, until all she could hear was "mwah mwah, mwah-wah-wah-wah"?

Sweeping for Bugs

Because we are the key managers for our company, we are lucky enough to have a maintenance team assigned to our floor. Any time we have a problem, all the Voice of Reason has to do is call the building manager and our crack maintenance team will report in a flash. Unless it's lunchtime, break time, coffeebreak time, or daytime, in which case it takes them a touch longer.

So, yesterday, the Devil noticed that the ceiling tiles in his office were disturbed. Never mind how or why he noticed this. My own theory is that he was startled awake so suddenly he didn't have a chance to return his new desk chair to the upright position and had to scan the ceiling to pretend he was leaning back in it for a good reason. As a result of his ceiling scan, he noted that two of the ceiling tiles were slightly askew.

Having sat in his office on many, many occasions, desparately searching for anything to look at other than his combover, I can tell you that these ceiling tiles have been askew for some time. It never occurred to me that the off kilter tiles indicated anything more than the typical shoddy work of our maintenance team. But to the Devil, the ceiling tile situation means: INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE!

Now, you may recall from an earlier post (Emergency!!!! There's a spoon in the sink.) that the Devil normally calls the Voice of Reason in situations where there are actual or perceived emergencies. In this case, though, the Devil did not do so. Instead, he contacted the building manager directly to ask that the maintenance guys report immediately to look into the ceiling tile snafu. There are several theories circulating about why he bypassed his normal route. The most popular is that he suspected the Voice of Reason was somehow involved in the INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE.

So, after about 45 minutes, the maintenance team showed up in response to the Devil's summons. I should probably mention that the maintenance team is composed of three guys: the tall one, the fat one, and the talker. They always travel in a pack. Regardless of the purpose of the maintenance call (leaking pipe, bugs in the kitchen, industrial espionage), the team arrives together. If there is an action to be taken, they take it together. Let's say, for example, that there is a big bug in the bathroom. All three of them will arrive. All three of them will consult. All three of them will remove the bug. We call them Larry (talker), Darryl (tall one), and Darryl (fat one).

The Devil tells Larry that the tiles are askew. Larry, Darryl, and Darryl look at the tiles. They consult and appear to reach a conclusion. Then Larry communicates that the tiles are, indeed, "fucked up." They move, as if to fix the tiles, only to be stopped by the Devil. Why are they stopped? Because he wants them to call in experts to (and I quote) "sweep the perimeter for bugs."

To Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, this is confusing. After all, we found them perfectly capable of sweeping for bugs in the kitchen and the bathroom. Why call in an exterminator now? After at least twenty minutes of discussion, the Devil is able to explain that he isn't concerned about six-legged freaks. No, what he wants is for someone from the Justice Department to come over and use high tech equipment to scan his office for sophisticated listening devices.

In the end, saner minds prevailed. While the Devil was debating the issue, the Voice of Reason went into his office and straightened the ceiling tiles. By the time the Devil got back, he couldn't remember which ones had been dislodged. So we managed to avoid a visit from the feds, at least for today.

Anyway, I'm too short to dislodge ceiling tiles. And they make these teeny, tiny listening devices that you can hide in the most ordinary objects. Like new desk chairs.

The Consultant

As I was sitting at my desk today, working on God knows what drivel with no purpose or meaning, I was visited by The Consultant. Even before she arrived in my doorway, I knew she was in the vicinity, because I could hear her voice from several offices away. It's one of those voices that you hear with the hairs on the back of your neck rather than your ears. You sense it in the air, like moisture on a humid day. You smell it, like a skunk someone hit three blocks away. It's there, palpable, like heat, even though you can't actually see it.

Anyway, that voice--that voice tap-danced on the edge of my conscious mind as The Consultant explained the inner workings of the computer system to our MIS Director. I could hear her voice rising and falling, and I could hear the MIS Director repeatedly asking The Consultant to leave. Did she? Oh, no. The Consultant knows her work and is committed to doing it.

We're lucky to have The Consultant. We hired her to be a word processor. Little did we know that she had hidden depths of knowledge and expertise. Turns out The Consultant knows a lot about a lot. In fact, for any given topic, work assignment, dispute, profession, or assignment at our company, The Consultant is guaranteed to know more about the matter than any other employee. Regardless of that employee's training, experience, or level of education.

Take the computer network. The Consultant knows when it isn't working at optimal levels. Not only does she have ideas about how to get the most from the network, she has the skills to implement her ideas. Many times, our hardworking MIS Director has to spend hours of her expensive time, at the expense to the company of many hundreds of dollars in time, to unimplement the Consultant's ideas. The Consultant was unable to do the job herself, as she had forgotten which buttons she pushed. She was, however, able to hover around the real computer expert as she fixed the mistakes, offering helpful hints.

Another example is employee relations. The Consultant takes it upon herself to identify unsafe working conditions (the water fountain is leaking and the accumulating water might lead to black mold), employee underutilization (the receptionist has extra time when the phone isn't ringing, and could assist with some of The Consultant's actual assigned duties), and potential job actions (the Pit of Despair has been taking longer breaks than he should, which is leading to disgruntlement among the rest of the staff). In each of these, and innumerable other instances, The Consultant not only identified the problem, but took the necessary steps to rectify it, with nary a thought to how management might want to handle the issue.

My personal favorite, though, is when The Consultant gets to fill in for my secretary. Just the thought fills me with dread. Here are just some of the reasons why:

(1) The Consultant is required to answer my section's telephone and she is very hard of hearing;
(2) The Consultant likes to arrange meetings, and put them on my calendar, and then not tell me; and
(3) The Consultant uses her temporary position on my staff to order things for us, without consulting me, our budget, or our needs. If she can't find the supplies she thinks she needs (tape recorder, file folders, desk chair, computer monitor), she orders more. Last year, she ordered 20,000 of those metal butterfly clips. We have used about 100.

One time, while she was acting as my temporary secretary, The Consultant decided that she didn't know how to use the copier. So she called the copier company, arranged for a trainer to come and give an onsite training to her (at our cost), and then got the trainer to explain how to set the password function on the machine. As a result, when my real secretary returned from her vacation, none of us could use the copier. We thought it was broken. The Consultant, who by then had returned to her usual office, didn't bother to inform anyone about the fact that she had set a password on the machine. When we finally figured it out (one professional repair person and several hundred dollars later), she couldn't remember the password she had set.

So, as I sat at my desk, awaiting the impending and inevitable arrival of The Consultant, I contemplated how lucky we are to hae her on staff. In this age of outsourcing and off-shore labor, it's nice to have expertise in-house. Now, if only her transfer to the Duluth office would come through . . .

The Pit of Despair

I spent today with the Pit of Despair. Note I say "with" rather than "in." That's because, here in Hell, the Pit of Despair is a person.

One of my coworkers continually believes that everything that occurs in Hell is about him, and that all of us are conspiring to ruin his life. He found a rough draft copy of the letter we wrote yesterday (see "Let's Write a Letter") in the "to be shredded" box. [He must have mislaid his keys in there, and come across the letter while he was looking for them.] The Pit of Despair spent the whole day today moping around because the letter confirms that the Devil is a demon from Hell sent to rob him of all happiness.

Now, to some extent, this conviction is hard to refute. The Pit of Despair is correct in that the Devil is a demon sent from Hell. However, while The Devil does a fine job robbing us all of what little happiness we might otherwise find in our workdays, he's not nearly discriminating enough to focus on just one of us. Why should he limit his scope in such a way?

To the Pit of Despair, the Devil is just the most recent in a long line of people who want nothing more than to make him miserable. Had the Pit of Despair been involved in the Let's Write a Letter game, one could understand his disgruntlement. However, POD had not. The letter did not concern the Pit of Despair, didn't involve his area of responsibility, or his job in any way. So how could it have been written to ruin his life? Here's the transcript of our conversation on this point:

Pit of Despair: So, did you see that letter the Devil wrote yesterday?
Me: Why, yes, I ended up signing it before it was mailed. Horrible, wasn't it? Hey, how come you got a copy?
Pit of Despair: I fished a draft out of the shred box.
Me: Of course you did. Was this before or after it was shredded? (The Pit of Despair would think nothing of spending an entire day matching up and taping together a document that had already been shredded. I know this because I have seen the taped-up results.)
Pit of Despair: I wish I'd had the copy before my therapy session this morning. It would have proved what I've been saying all along.
Me: And what is that, POD?
Pit of Despair: That the Devil is trying to destroy me. It's just like when my second grade teacher yelled at me because she said that you should use liquid to put out fires, and I pointed out that gasoline was a liquid. She was trying to ruin my life.
Me: Oh, no. We're not having the "gasoline-is-a-liquid" conversation again. Get out of my office and take some Prozac.

And it's not just the gasoline-is-a-liquid story. It could be the story about how he went to a breakfast meeting at the Chairman of the Board's office and the COB didn't ask him to sit at the table or offer him a cup of coffee. Or the one about the fifth grade teacher who marked his geography test wrong because he correctly identified the body of water off the east coast of Florida as Biscayne Bay and she was looking for the answer "Atlantic Ocean." Or the snooty barista who completely ignored him when he was next in line at the Java Hut. He's got a million of them. And ALL of them feature people who are trying to ruin his life.

Dealing with the Pit of Despair is like dealing with the Dementors in the Harry Potter series. The difference is, instead of reliving the worst moment of your own life, you have to relive one of the worst moments of his.

The Juggle, The Butt-Check, and The Scratch

Today at the office, the Devil was in rare form. You see, he has a whole menu of disgusting tics and habits, which appear on a regular basis. Depending on the day and the situation, the Devil may (or may not) exhibit all of the following:
1. Ear picking: Something shaped like a probe will be inserted into the inner cavity of the Devil's ear and swept around a few times. It might be the Devil's finger or a foreign object (usually a pen cap), but the sweep is always followed by a thorough inspection of the picking instrument for anything that may be clinging to it. Then he dusts it off onto the floor of whatever room he is in.
2. Nose pulling: The Devil pushes his wire-rimmed glasses back up to his forehead, and massages the bridge of his nose. For several minutes. Does he have a headache? Is he trying to loosen the crud in his sinuses? Does he have a particularly hard and painful boogie up there? Who can tell?
3. Reading Room: The Devil will take a piece of mail or a newspaper to the "reading room" with him. He'll stay in there for a REALLY long time. Other men in the office refuse to go into the reading room while he's there, and for fifteen to twenty minutes thereafter. Then he tries to pass the document he was reading on to you. (Psst: It's not really a reading room. It's the potty.)
4. The Scratch: The Devil (who is quite tall) will lean back casually against your door while he is standing in the door frame talking to you. Then the Devil will shimmy up and down. Here's what he's doing: He has hitched himself up high enough so he can lodge the door knob (your door knob, which you have to use to open your office door) into the crack of his butt, and is using it to scratch an itch. Seriously.
5. The Juggle (alternately known as The Jiggle): I have had boyfriends explain this to me--apparently, sometimes, things get a little mixed up down below. Skin sticks to skin, which may cause some chafing, and one or another of the boys may even try to escape. Now, when this happens to most men (at least, the ones who aren't in their own homes), they make covert adjustments in the restroom or behind a closed office door. Not the Devil. Oh, no. The Devil just grabs whatever piece of clothing is nearest the offending body part, and juggles (or jiggles) vigorously. If that doesn't work, he goes right for the offending body part itself.
6. The Butt-Check: Sometimes the Devil becomes concerned that his butt has fallen off and slipped away down a pant leg. At least, it seems like that must be his concern. What he does is he reaches back and grabs a big handful. Then he'll stand there, blissfully reassured that his butt cheek is still attached, and chat away. By the way, in case you were wondering, it's usually the left butt cheek.
Today's smorgasbord? The juggle, the butt-check, and the scratch. I may never touch my door knob again.

EMERGENCY!!! (There's a spoon in the sink.)

The Devil found himself in the middle of an EMERGENCY!!!! situation today. He was in the kitchen, preparing to reheat his leftovers for lunch, when he noticed (dramatic chord) a spoon in the sink. Immediately, he launched into EMERGENCY!!!! response mode.

The Devil calls the Voice of Reason, to tell her that there is a spoon in the sink. After making his announcement, the Devil pauses, no doubt waiting for the Voice to gasp in shock. When she doesn't, the Devil says "Did you hear me? I said there was a spoon in the sink."

The Voice (who has heard about these pesky spoons before) asks the Devil whether he removed the spoon from the sink. "No," he says, "I didn't put it there." The Voice's instinctive response, which she squelches, is to say "I didn't put it there either, so why are you telling me?" Instead, she asks what the Devil wants her to do. "See that it is removed."

Now, the Voice of Reason is a reasonable person. It is not in her nature to call out the inquisitorial squad for a spoon. So rather than e-mailing everyone on staff and insisting that the spoon culprit reclaim the errant flatware, or calling CSI to come out and fingerprint the spoon, the Voice goes back to the kitchen and removes the spoon from the sink. The Devil, who is sitting at a table near the sink, ignores her.

You would think, after the following activity had repeated itself several hundred times, the Devil would just remove the spoon himself. But that would mean no EMERGENCY!!!! And without drama, it's just no fun being the Prince of Darkness.

Coming soon: EMERGENCY!!!! There's an piece of paper in the fax machine.

The Voice of Reason

I had lunch recently with my favorite person in the office, the Voice of Reason. The Devil inflicts his worst punishments on the Voice of Reason. He squeezes her so hard that a lesser woman would splinter. But the Voice of Reason is too clever. She's a jelly fish, and just oozes out of his fist, ready to fight another day.

Like a jelly fish, the Voice also has stingers. Or perhaps zingers is a better description. She can say things to the Devil that sound respectful and subservient (his favorite demeanor) but are really insults.

The Voice of Reason has an honors degree in management. The Devil prides himself on his inate management skills ("There are some things you just can't learn in college.") The Voice is well-repected by all of her former bosses. The Devil frequently implies that she is stupid. The Voice asked the Devil for permission to attend a two-year certificate program in finance, in lieu of the raise the Devil promised and couldn't deliver (we needed the money for his raise). The Devil acceded (reluctantly) to her request, but schedules deadlines, projects, and meetings for the days the Voice is supposed to be in class.

The Devil continually tells the Voice he can't rely on her. Meanwhile, the only person on staff the Devil thinks is reliable (a man) has called in sick on Monday nine times in the last six months. (Well, I suppose that is reliable, or at least predictable.)

The Voice and I went to lunch to talk about work. We ended up laughing, because what other reaction is there? Are we complicit in the treatment we get at the Devil's hands? Sure, to the extent we still work for him. The Devil is a terrible boss, but he makes a fabulous blog.

Ewww.

This actually happened:

Before he became my boss, the Devil was just an annoying gadfly. He liked to buzz around, listening in on conversations, dipping into other people's meetings, and offering unsolicited (and unwelcome) comments. Back in those halcyon days, I had a real boss. She could express herself without using phrases like "the actual reality is," and she was both fun and a great leader.

One morning, Glinda the Good Boss and I were having a private conversation in her office. We were going over my work so she could offer her critique--okay, I was telling her about a dream I had had the previous night involving another coworker whose overall sex appeal is nothing short of cataclysmic. We'll call him Johnny Depp.

So, I was telling Glinda about this really hot Johnny Depp dream, and suddenly we both noticed movement through the tiny slit of a crack that her door was open. It's the Devil--er, the gadfly. He was "waiting for a good moment to interrupt (heh-heh)," he says when confronted about his blatant nosiness.

All of this is annoying, yes, but not really Devilish. But then . . .

I was working in my office late that evening when the gadfly stopped by. I was annoyed to see him smiling his smarmy, gadfly smile. Then he sidled into my office, and closed the door. My annoyance evaporated, and was replaced by growing discomfort. The gadfly parked himself on the edge of my desk and proceeded to tell me that he won't let the fact that I was having (ahem) sexy dreams about him (him!) affect our working relationship and that I shouldn't feel embarassed about it. After all, it's only natural, we spend a great deal of time together, and it's not the first time this has happened to him.

Okay, so, that's gross, I thought. Johnny Depp, he's not. He's fifteen years older than I am, has an unattractive receding hairline (think Dennis Franz, not Chris Meloni), and baked-bean teeth. Also, he has the really distrubing habit of picking at his ears and then looking at his fingernails. So I told him that he had misunderstood what he heard. He smiled, and nodded, and I knew he thought I was just trying to save face by lying. Then the vacuum cleaner guy knocked on the door, and I took the opportunity to escape without insisting that the gadfly was wrong.

The most galling part of all of this is that I KNOW he remembers, and has told the story about how I had a crush on him. Still, it could be worse. Sometimes, I wake up in a cold sweat, wondering what would have happened if the vacuuming guy hadn't chosen that moment to knock on my door. Attaboy.