This Guy

I take the long way around every morning so I don't have to pass too close to him on the way to my desk. But as I round the corner a good distance away, the tone of my day is set by whether I see his fuzzy, oversized head floating above the wall of his cubicle. It takes all of my self-control not to pull a Matrix maneuver - leaping into the air, popping open one of the ceiling panels, grabbing one of the fluorescent light bulbs from its socket and whacking him with this makeshift weapon across the head.

Let me take a moment to describe that head - rumor has it, he cuts his own hair with one of those do it yourself home haircut products, so there is not much of it, but what is there, looks prickly and coarse, and I am almost certain it would easily pop a balloon if one was to brush against his head. His forehead and face always seem to have a red tint, making his head look like a beet and a coconut hybrid.

I might as well describe the rest of his appearance. I am not going to hold his looks against him but I want to paint a picture so you can appreciate the full effect.

He is heavy. I am guessing over 300 pounds but also tall. He looks like one of those classic cartoon characters with a huge doughy physique from the knees up but below the knees his body is tapered to a point, as if the cartoonist couldn't draw feet, so he gave up and concentrated on what he could do well. Even though he is oversized, he inexplicably moves quickly and stealthily like a cat. He can be next to you before you know it and trap you in a web of his conversation. The contradiction in his size and mobility has caused me to imagine a nightmare work place scenario in which he attempts to force me into early retirement with extreme prejudice.

But first, to get an even better visualization of this guy, think of the John Candy character Del Griffith from
Planes Trains and Automobiles, but remove the likeability and sympathy factors from the equation and add every annoying work place character from Saturday Night Live like Rob Schneider's Copy Guy ("Making Copies"), but subtract the humor, and then add Odd Job, the James Bond villain, and you will get an idea of his size, hairstyle, build, and potential dark side. This is kind of ironic, since it is this guy's presence that makes my job odd in the first place.

This morning, like every other morning, I am able to practice self-control and leave the fluorescent bulb where it belongs. I slink down my row adjacent to his to avoid the obligatory conversation he tries to force with anyone that passes within twenty yards of him.

This guy is a conversation vampire, a dialogue rapist. He feeds off social interaction with other people whether they want it or not. He has absolutely no social etiquette. He can't pick up on the most obvious signs that most people raised in civilization and even many animals learn naturally before they are released out into the world on their own. You know, the most basic signals that say "leave me alone" (closed body language, lack of eye contact, short, uninteresting, uncommitted responses to his attempted conversation, pantomiming suicide).

He just does not get that that maybe everyone else is not as transfixed with what he has to say as he is. It's not just the conversations or the contact that he initiates. He has a bad habit of butting into private conversations, inserting himself into the conversations of others without invitation. This has earned him one of his many nicknames - 2 Cent (like the rapper 50 Cent) - but in this guy's case it is refers to his habit of adding his two cents to every conversation whether it is solicited or related to the topic or not.

I am sure everyone works with someone like this to a point, but this guy takes the prize. He craves human contact to such a degree that he has no problem talking about his own embarrassing ailments to his co-workers just for conversation subject matter. In all seriousness, he has shamelessly shared tales of his own painful uncontrollable gastrological problems, swollen body parts (not the good kind), and hemorrhoids. When he is not self diagnosing publicly, he is pelting his co-workers with puns any chance he gets, and like most puns, they are never funny, but he is so proud of himself whenever he lets one fly.

A co-worker was relating a story about his own honeymoon in a state that just happened to be hit by major wildfires, and t his guy thought it would be funny to say, "That must have been one hot honeymoon." Or, there was the time during a meeting, his glasses slipped off of his sweaty nose and as he fumbled clumsily for them he said, "Sorry, I didn't mean to make a spectacle of myself." I mean when you start adding props to your puns, you are inching over into Carrot Top territory.

Unfortunately, many of his co-workers, which by default are also my co-workers, don't know how to react to his lame puns so they usually respond with nervous laughter, which only encourages him to continue. And continue he does, at any opportunity he will seize on someone's words and extract a pun, which is why one of his other nicknames is RaPUNzel. When someone does have the decency to tell him to stop, he claims he can't help it; that they just pop into his head, and he says them. I am guessing, in addition to all of his publicized embarrassing physical maladies, he also suffers from a low-grade form of Tourette syndrome that is manifested in pun form.

This brings me back to my nightmare work place scenario. Because of his contradiction in size and mobility, I fear that if he ever goes postal at work, I will not get it at the end of a gun, but instead he will sneak up behind me and crush me in a bear hug (hopefully not a bare hug). His meaty, clammy arms coiled around me, his stubby fingers jabbing between my ribs as his grip tightens, squeezing the life out of me. In this scenario, I envision him pounding his chest and releasing an earth shaking, chest beating, operatic victory roar that sets off car alarms several stories below. When I say operatic, I literally mean opera. This guy, always enamored with his own voice, will take this opportunity to sing a few versus of a song from the distant past and will probably try to simultaneously PUNish me - breaking into Journey's Lovin' Touchin' and Squeezin' in an over the top opera style until I crumple like a paper bag at his feet. The last thing I hear will be my co-workers nervously laughing at this guy's musical victory pun so that they won't be next.

I tell myself I am being paranoid and this nightmare scenario is the result of an overactive imagination. One of the fluorescent bulbs above my cubicle flickers and winks out. I call the custodian to have the bulb replaced. I make a mental note to ask him to leave the used bulb behind when he replaces it with a new one. I tell him one of my kids needs it for a science project. But after he leaves, I hide it under my desk, within reach. You never know, I may have to protect my co-workers and myself some day from this guy and enlighten him with a little extreme prejudice of my own. Then, maybe I will take a page from his book and PUNish him further by giving my own over the top operatic rendition of Blinded by the Light.

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