The Man

The Cubers have a game called The Man. It’s our version of being “it” or “tag” or “man with the ball”. Unlike being it in a game of tag, there’s no pride in being The Man. It’s not something you can just pass off, and if you conspire to make someone else The Man, you have just dissed them in the most extreme way possible. People will complain about being The Man. They’ll say they’re tired of being The Man. Why can’t someone else be The Man?

So what is The Man? It’s simple. When you are The Man, you are the one that has either been sacrificed or decided to be Tweedle Dee and Stonehenge Mouth’s best friends. The Gimp had long been the reluctant king of being The Man. He had been duped into having lunch with Tweedle Dee, and because of their schedules even had to get a ride with him once when his car broke down. Somehow The Gimp had managed to avoid Stonehenge Mouth’s wrath, but the degree and frequency in which he got stuck with Tweedle Dee it didn’t really matter. But when Beardface joined the Cubers, things began to change.

Beardface is new to the Call Center, but not to the company. He’s a veteran who has worked in just about every facet of IT that the company covers or needs. Regardless, I felt the need to warn him about Tweedle Dee and Stonehenge Mouth. I figured since I was going to have to work at night with him, I should do him a solid and give him the heads up. He didn’t heed that warning, wondering how bad it could be. Two days later it nearly came to blows between Beardface and Stonehenge Mouth. He managed to find some sort of common ground with Tweedle Dee and took pity on him, but his attitude towards Stonehenge Mouth was one of severe and extreme hatred.

What really did it for Beardface was the fact that Stonehenge Mouth is Army, and he’s Marines. Now that alone isn’t enough to cause violence, but the fact that Stonehenge Mouth thinks it’s no end of fun to “joke” around about Marines being pussies or telling some of the more colorful military jokes (in which the branch of service is pretty much interchangeable, but no less insulting) with such verve and spite that I felt compelled to jump him and I had no pride to insult. The sad part is that Stonehenge Mouth thinks he’s being entertaining and he has a new friend. This has been a solid week of heckling from that scraggly alien looking redneck.

Beardface complained today about how quiet The Gimp is. He said he had tried to start conversations with him and he just didn’t say much more than agreeing or nodding. I whispered to Beardface to call him the man, and I obviously wasn’t quiet enough, because The Gimp jumped up and started going on in great length about how much it sucks to be The Man. It’s a game so nefarious that even the meek get animated. It’s nothing like Ninja Scare You. You don’t look forward to it. You don’t spend time planning your next time playing The Man, unless it’s how to avoid playing it. Maybe we need a new game.

I did the only thing I knew to do, go somewhere else. I spent most of the week hiding with the Sith Lord and Stalker Bait, who were Stonehenge Mouth’s targets early in the week when he was trying to start rumors about them. Sadly, I don’t think we’ve heard the end of their escapades. The sexual tension is mounting…

The Art of Nicking

Nicknames have been a prominent part of this tale from the beginning. It is not just an attempt at protecting the people I work with and keeping things anonymous, though that helps. Nicknames have been a way for me to tell stories about people no one knows in a way they’ll remember the character from one story to the next. It did not start intentionally; it was just easier to tell my friends about Girl That Looks Like A Boy than trying to get people to remember who she really was. However, once the nicknames became prevalent, they became expected and people began asking what their nicknames were. The problem was that I had different nicknames for people depending on who I was with. I felt awkward telling stories about The Cunt around my mom, so I had to come up with alternates, like Dirty Downunder or Damn Dirty Whore (which knowing women and their aversion to the c-word, these are much, much better). Another problem comes when someone asks their nickname and you don’t have anything nice for them.

The office does become a bit confusing at times when you mention Cubers by their nickname to someone who isn’t in on the joke. When Hot Legs, a cougar in another department who still has some moves to show off, asks who has been working on someone’s issue and you tell her The Gimp, she doesn’t know who your talking about, plus she wants to know who and what a gimp is. On the other hand, when your relationship with most customers is by phone and their knowledge of the others in the office are from your stories they don’t seem to know that when they’re talking to “Bob” they’re really talking to Nate Dogg. Especially when Nate Dogg doesn’t know, nor understand his nickname.

Not all nicknames are successful. A few people have had several nicknames that all failed before they got one that stuck, or I just gave up. A previous boss was initially nicknamed Loafers, which came from the fact that he always wore Penny Loafers to work. It ended up falling flat when it came to light that he was gay, and Loafers ended up sounding derogatory (as in “light in the loafers”, a euphemism for being gay). In the end, Loafers left the Call Center without having a nickname at all. The Gimp was one of the hardest people to nick a name. For the longest time he was so non-descript that nothing stuck. He came in, did his job, talked very little, did even less to stick out, and didn’t complain too much. Doesn’t Give A Shit Guy just wasn’t working. It wasn’t until he repeatedly jumped on the Tweedle Dee grenade and went to lunch with him and ended up walking out to the garage with him at the end of the day, despite have the same hatred for Tweedle Dee as everyone else that we realized what a sadist or living martyr he really was.

One of the side effects of writing these stories is that people who read it, the very few there are, all want a nickname like I give all the other people in my life. People don’t seem to realize or understand the amount of research, knowledge, and work goes into a single nickname. It’s proportionately similar to a car maker doing market tests before they give a new car name the go ahead. If you think Stratus was a horrible name, just imagine what the ones that got denied were. Regardless, the nicking of names has become an integral part of my life and will continue to be so. As long as there are Cubers, there will be nicknames. And as long as there are nicknames, there will be stories.

The Perils Of Moving - An Apology

I’ve started this little experiment in catharsis/therapy/entertainment with the intention of making it a regular and somewhat consistent publication. I don’t write anything in advance, as part of the challenge seems to be to create an “episode” on only current office events and memories, with as little embellishment as possible. Therefore, when I move from one apartment to another in what turned out to be a paradoxical frigid monsoon and got sick I missed writing and publishing Friday’s “episode”. I won’t say this will never happen again, I’ll just say that when it happens again, I will most likely be laid up in a blankety cocoon with a barricade of antihistamine, expectorant, and decongestant boxes, capped by a hazardous and toxic array of tissues that have dried into almost-origami shapes that resemble such ancient Chinese standards as snot cranes, booger flowers, and mucus sailboats. Despite my lucid, waking Nyquil dreams and my fever induced insomnia, I still feel the need to apologize. So, I apologize. Now go to bed, have sex, or click on over to Club Jenna and masturbate.

-The Trixter

‘Twas The Night Before The Night Before An Unspecified Holiday Of Some Sort

It’s like Christmas Eve in here. Or the last day of school before summer vacation. We’ve got a full staff, and nothing to do. We get about a call an hour per person. The company is all but shuttered and boarded up for Good Friday and only those sad workaholics who think a day off is the perfect time to come in and do some more work are calling. They have stupid questions like “How do I get that little box up there that tells me where this thing is?” or “Every time I try to log in it tells me no, can you fix it?” One would think all this free time would be great, but this is not so. All this free time means that bored Cubers will leave the safety of their dwellings and mingle.

Mingling in an office like the cube jungle here is terrible. It means that bored Cubers will want to talk to other Cubers about stuff that some of those Cubers don’t care one bit about. Tweedle Dee wants to talk about his recent “adventure” in running network cables through his parents’ house. Sith Lord wants to talk about something his brother’s friend’s ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend said. Stonehenge Mouth wants to talk about how much he hates something or another. I honestly stop listening the moment he walks up. My mouse screams in agony as I squeeze its life from it every time Stonehenge Mouth makes his way over, but I figure it’s better than hitting a coworker.

Something else that becomes apparent during long periods of downtime is how little my co-workers know about the computers supposedly support. Tweedle Dee had planned ahead for the downtime and brought in some movies to watch (the Matrix trilogy, ugh) only to find that his DVD drive doesn’t work. Instead of troubleshooting the issue like he’s paid to do, he instantly loses hope and starts looking around for a rescue. The Gimp spends the entire day trying to figure out how to override the company’s screensaver so he can have a series of revolving pictures of redneck and mullet to display. Even I actually took the time to try, and fail, to fix some ongoing issues with my own work computer. It’s one of those things where the mechanic’s car needs work, the plumber’s pipes leak, and the IT guy’s computer doesn’t work.

Slow days also seem to be when people test out new, completely untrue rumors. Like that Sith Lord and Stalker Bait are dating, obviously to Stalker Bait’s boyfriend’s chagrin. Or how about how me and Hot Sounding Girl On Phone #142 are having a long distance relationship and my last vacation was to go see her. Maybe it’s that Loafers, our previous manager, quit to move to the Virgin Islands where he has a boyfriend. Or how about Momma and The Professor are having an affair. Or that Serial Killer is a serial killer (that one’s mine, by the way.)

It’s a good thing that slow days of this magnitude only happen a few times a year. Just imagine how bad it was 2 years ago when half of the company’s employees were on a paid vacation for almost 3 months during a huge overhaul of one of the facilities. I can only hope I never see another drought like that. A new week is upon us though, and I can only imagine what new fun awaits.

Why We Work

With any job, the most common driving force for doing any sort of labor is money. Sure there are people who don’t know how to deal a life that doesn’t involve working. They still work for the money, otherwise they’d just volunteer. Money aside, what keeps someone at any place in particular and not just jumping from one ship to another like Frogger trying to get across the river is the little extras. The caliber of a places benefits, the amount of vacation, tuition reimbursement, and a host of others. The place I work is pretty generous. They pay well for the job we do, we get plenty of vacation days, and the insurance is top notch. Sometimes taking advantage of those perks can be difficult.

Take today for example. I’m off today trying to move from one apartment to another. I’ve got more vacation hours than I’ll probably use this year, so it’s not an issue of being able to take a day off. It’s not even really a matter of getting someone to fill my shift. It’s a matter of getting them to remember. I’ve had three bosses over the last 3 years and while they each have had unique management styles, it seems built in to the system that they all need constant reminders. Just about every time I’ve gone on vacation, for a day or a week, I have to not only request the time off and get it approved, but also have to make sure they find someone to fill in or turn in favors. If it’s something planned in advance I have to remind them two weeks before, the week before, and then usually a day or two before in case they’ve forgotten again. They usually have. On top of that, more times than night I get a phone call the first day of the vacation with someone asking me if I’m planning on showing up. I tell them no and hang up.

Another perk where I work is a tuition reimbursement program where they pay a certain percentage/flat rate of your tuition if you’re going to school for something related to the industry we work in. This is nice, however it becomes difficult when The Shill gets involved and actively tries to sabotage your attempt to put in the paper work. According to The Shill there is only one form you have to fill out for reimbursement. However when you only send in the one form he tells you to send, you later get a phone call from corporate office telling you they didn’t receive all the paper work. What follows is a 12 round boxing match where The Shill will argue with not only you but also with corporate office that there is only one form. Eventually you will get all the forms filled out and sent to The Shill for his signature. Which he won’t give. Not for any particular reason, he just doesn’t seem terribly interested in doing it. After an informal poll of Cubers in the office who have taken advantage of this service shows that less than half have gotten there money after going the full 12 rounds with The Shill.

I’ve found that while the little extras do make working in the Cube Jungle a little easier, it still boils down to the fact that they pay me too much for what I do. Otherwise I doubt I’d put up with people like Shitpants McPooperton, Stonehenge Mouth, or Serialkiller. One die I’ll break out, but until then the chronicles of The Cubers continues.

Stonehenge Mouth

Imagine if you will the stereotypical alien. You know the kind, the grey little guys that they spent years looking for on The X-Files. Now imagine that alien is a little taller than your average shorty spaceman, about 5’ 8” or so. Now imagine that instead of teeth, that alien had a mouth full of ancient and mystical stones in his mouth. Now imagine that was balding with a milk stain of a mustache, and had a whiny, nasal, southern voice much like Gomer Pyle from the Andy Griffith show. Now imagine that this weird redneck-alien hybrid had the personality of a needy, nosy 5 year old and a grumpy, constantly whining old man. Now let me introduce you to this test tube reject, meet Stonehenge Mouth.

Stonehenge Mouth gets his name from the ancient druidic ruins that lie in his mouth. His teeth resemble what can only be referred to as roughly chiseled stones. The man has somehow grown up and made it through 7 years in the military without ever having gotten within his vast spitting distance of a dentist. On top of this he has the rich and mealy breath of some Deep South swamp where generations of Louisiana mobsters have dropped off bodies for as long as anyone can remember. What makes all this worse is he likes to get in close, in your face, and talk so that you smell the smoke of 10,000 cigarettes and the decomposing bodies wafting off those rocks he calls teeth.

Now appearances alone are no reason to hate someone, so don’t think I’m that shallow. The man’s personality meets, if not exceeds, the dread that the sight of him creates. Stonehenge Mouth is a man that has seen the world. He’s been to Germany, Japan, Iraq, and all over the US in his time with the Army. For a man who has seen the wonders the world has to offer, he’s incredibly bitter about it all. He never has anything good to say about any of the places he’s been. When speaking about Germany he complains about being fined for cutting down a tree in a protected forest where he was charged not just for that tree, but a certain amount of generations of trees that the tree he cut down would have seeded. (I have no idea if this is true) When talking about Okinawa, Japan he complains about how he was treated like an outcast and a foreigner (go figure, a man of one culture in a land of another culture feeling like an outsider). Talks about Iraq inevitably lead to hateful remarks in which “rag head” is the nicest fit to print.

I had the misfortune of being the first person Stonehenge Mouth tried to make friends with. I was the one who ended up doing a lot of his training, which he felt made a bond. In one of his friendly banters in which I “jokingly” insulted the technical institute he bought his degree from he put his hands around my neck and pretended to choke me. But he has small hands and I have no neck, so he ended up actually lightly strangling me. It wasn’t enough to keep me from breathing, but it didn’t negate the fact that he was strangling me. When I told him to get his hands of me he just laughed. I got louder and told him to get his fucking hands of me. He got scared and he started squeezing harder, repeating over and over “I’m just playing, man! I’m just playing!” with a look of terror in his face. I finally had to stand up and push him back, sending him to the ground, to get him to let go. The whole time, he kept apologizing and saying he was just playing.

The bad thing about being choked on accident by an idiot is the person wants to try and make it up to you by being an even better friend. If a vile, moronic jackass can be a friend at all. Since that choking incident early in his time in the Cubes he has tried to take an interest in me and my life that borders on stalking. He gets more excited about my vacations than I do. If I mention a girl I’ve been dating or talking to he wants to know everything about her. If I get a personal call on my cell he wants to know who it is. If I have a particularly difficult call (whether it’s a difficult person or a difficult problem) he wants to make sports commentary on it like he was the one working on it. He’s one of the newest people in the Call Center and he makes comments about how things have always been this way or that, even though he hasn’t been there long enough to know what it’s always been anything at all.

This week is Stonehenge Mouth’s first week back after a month and a half off after Quintuple Bypass surgery. So obviously a lot of attention has been paid to him in regards to his recovery and he’s eating up the adoration. Whether the same sinister man lies beneath that goodwill of a second (actually it’s his 5^th heart surgery) lease on life, or if his close call with finding the limits of mortality brings a new found humbleness to the dark heart of a man is yet to be seen. This definitely won’t be the last time we heard about him though.

Taking It Easy

I work the night shift at the Cube Farm, which allows for a lot of freedom that the day shift just doesn’t have. The helpdesk starts the day with 12-15 analysts and dwindles down to no more than two at a time come the evening. The desk jockeys, engineers, and big wigs leave and we get bored. That’s when the remote controlled airplanes, Nerf guns, stealth games, and random farm animal noises come out. While the day shift is pretty solid from clock in to clock out, we have a lot of down time in between the hectic bursts of ass hattery from less than genius users with a barely intelligible grasp of the English language.

Back before a bit of a shakeup, there was a dedicated night shift boss, Tivo, whose night was pretty much just crunching numbers, running reports, and doing quality assurance work that the day shift lead didn’t have time to do. That led to a lot of long, eerily quiet times. The obvious answer was Ninja Scare You. Ninja Scare You is when one or the other person on the shift suddenly disappears or goes off somewhere on the pretense of dropping deuces or getting honey buns out of the Wheel of Death. At some point one person realizes the other is gone, or has been gone a long time and the paranoia starts. You don’t want to look like a pussy, but you also want to try and get a heads up if someone is sneaking around. At about the point you give up or dismiss your fears, someone pops up from behind, or grabs you legs from under your desk and screams “Ninja Scare You!” And all is good in the land. There’s also a variation in which you wait until your replacement comes in and hide and shoot them with the Nerf gun from your office sniper spot. Because of the open design of the building, a streamlined, angular, German modern work of art, you can actually shoot someone walking in the office from the floor above. Add the fact that all the lights in the building, other than those in the Call Center offices, are off leaves tons of places to hide.

Cube Combat is another favorite pastime. This is simply the war games that every boy and probably a fair share of girls played as kids. Each person gets a Nerf gun and as much ammo as they can carry and stalk around the office. I am a bit of an early late nighter, so there are still most of the day shift in when I arrive, and I like to give them some of the Combat love. I do have some etiquette though. I always make sure my target isn’t on the phone, that the bosses aren’t looking, and get them before they see it coming. Style points are gained by various tricks. Arc shots are high shots that go long and drop on the target. Ricochets are self explanatory; bounce the darts of their monitor, aim at the duct work and bing their head or shoot low and between their monitors so it bounces up into their face. The most satisfying is to shoot a suction cup dart up at the ceiling or lights so that it sticks there for a minute or two, especially if they’re not at their desk when you shoot, and wait till it falls down on their head (it’s hard to observe proper etiquette with this method, but war is hell).

No late night office party is complete without remote control vehicles. The small Air Hogs indoor planes are best because they resist the strong ventilation system, but little Pico helicopters will do in a pinch. In other offices RC cars are probably fine, but after a particularly ingenious stunt they were banned. Tivo, my former boss, was a particularly special woman. She had an innumerable number of childhood traumas that have led to fully developed adult phobias. Along with her fear of power tools, laser pointers, and convulsive reaction to the sound of silverware on dishes, she has a very heightened and very real fear of ghosts. One night, after extensive planning, I introduced the RC Ghost Whisperer. It was late and I was leaving, however I had a surprise planned for Tivo. I snuck up to the 2^nd floor and hid where I could see the office below and pulled out an RC controller. Responding at the other end was a small RC pickup with a small walkie talkie strapped to it. With Zen patience I waited until I should have been long gone and it was crypt quiet and then rolled the truck into a corner and started making soft noises. I could tell she was curious because she kept looking around. Then I would slowly and quietly move the truck around and start again, getting a littler louder and making more and more sinister noises. After about 30 minutes I could tell she was getting very nervous so I decided to go for gold. I drove the truck under the back of her desk and started whispering her name and when she stood up to look for the noise I moved the truck, still talking and then screamed out from the second floor “Ninja Scare You!” Tivo screamed for 3 solid minutes. I firmly believe she had a tiny, 3 minute break down. After that, RC cars were banned.

There are lots of things to fill out downtime that aren’t quite as eccentric. We also watch a lot of TV shows online, take trivia quizzes, shop online, and yes we even write blogs. But if you can’t have a little fun at the expense of others sanity, then what’s the point of going to work at all? Sure, getting paid is fine and dandy, by chipping away at a persons mental competency is its own golden reward. Monday, expect mine to have a gaping hole in it, as my sanity nemesis returns. Monday you will learn the tale of Stonehenge Mouth.

Flapping

Whenever I walk into the office for the first time of the day it’s like a meet and greet with a minor celebrity that people really only pay attention to because there’s no one more famous to gawk at. I’m not necessarily that awesome, I’m just as awesome as it gets at that particular moment. For a group of people in a common field, we really have very little in common, so we latch on to whatever small morsel of continuity we can find. With Kliffy B it’s music. Kliffy B is a comprehensive dictionary of bands, origins, iterations and members. Mention The Cult singer Ian Astbury and he will take you through a journey from Southern Death Cult, to Death Cult, to just The Cult.

The Hippie likes to share obscure jokes and whatever latest link he’s found on the internet. He regularly takes breaks from the phones solely to look up something new to share with those around him. It’s a generous notion, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s totally dissing everyone around him by not taking any phone calls. Then it’s on Doesn’t Give a Shit Guy (aka The Gimp). The Gimp really has no interest in being anyone’s friend, but also isn’t going to slight you just because you want to take a few minutes to chat. It doesn’t matter if you’re his most favorite person, or mortal enemy, he’s up for the abuse no matter what. He’ll tell you anything, if you just ask. The only problem is that no one knows what to ask, so no one really has anything in common with him. But no parade down the wide avenues of the Call Center is complete without some bizarre, pointless, or confusing remark from Tweedle Dee.

Tweedle Dee does what I like to call flapping. It’s a networking term that describes when a connection constantly goes up and down (or switching from one state to another repeatedly). How does Tweedle Dee flap? Sometimes it’s quite literal, in that he is sitting down and actually flapping one of his arms while resting it on the top of his head (a hard visual, I know). Mostly it refers to the tendency he has to constantly start and stop talking, repeating words or just flat out stuttering. Here is an actual example of a comment from Tweedle Dee when I came in today. “Ok so ok so….so you know, ok. So. Ok so you know that lady? Ok?” This goes on for about a minute or two and is usually interrupted by the phone ringing, which means he rarely finishes a story. I imagine switches and circuits in his brain constantly flipping, or flapping, back and forth making connections with unused portions of his mind, and then just as quickly losing them.

I’ve lately been trying not to dislike Tweedle Dee, which is hard to do because he does so many things to make the average person dislike him. He tries so hard to fit in though, that I’ve begun to feel sorry, and thus try to be a better person and help him out. The problem is he doesn’t know when to let go. A few days ago Beardface had found a list of obscure and ridiculous laws that were on the books in various states. This provided about an hour of amusement, and then we all moved on. Tweedle Dee took this morsel, like so many others at the Help Desk do, and tried to use it to relate to everyone. What followed were emails and IM’s of laws that not only had we already read about, but that he got wrong and misspelled to the point of needing a decoder ring to figure out what he was trying to say. That flapping that he does when he talks carries over to when he writes. It’s funny and sad to see him type “Ok, so, okokkk. So”.

There’s also something about Tweedle Dee that just makes the brain slam into your skull because it’s slammed on breaks in bewilderment. There’s a Word document on Tweedle Dee’s desktop that he updates every day. He works diligently on it anytime he has a few moments to spare. Unlike me, who writes these little singe serving narratives on the job, he has a counting list. Yes, that kind of counting list…1,2,3,4,5,6 and so on. Currently he has, one number at a time, counted up to 13,455. The sad part is that you can watch him type, and he has to make corrections. Not simple “oops I pressed the wrong key” corrections. They’re “oops, I counted wrong and have to fix my error” corrections. At first we, the collective minds of Sith Lord, Beardface, Stalker Bait, and myself, thought it was just an exercise in learning the locations of the numbers on the keypad better. The horrifying reality comes when you look at the document, backdoored into after hours when Mr. Dee has left, is that it says “Counting List For Tweedle Dum”. No…it doesn’t really say Tweedle Dum, but I can’t in good conscience put his fiancées real name. He has made a cheat sheet for his trailer park educated, bumpkin wife to be. The fiancée that he has boasted is an aspiring poet. The fiancée who spells “nephew” and “niece” as “newpher” and “neece”.

While Tweedle Dee is the bumbling, but good natured, idiot who just wants a friend, Tweedle Dum is the illiterate, Poet Laureate of the trailer park who needs a cheat sheet for counting. His flapping, of all the varieties he exhibits, is quite hard to forgive, which makes trying to be his friend a trying task. Yet for all his goofs and faults, he is by no means the antagonist of this heroic office tale. That title currently belongs to Stonehenge Mouth, who after a 2 months hiatus due to quintuple bypass surgery will be returning very soon. And let me tell you, there will be blood…

The Napoleonic Wars

Napoleon is a little man with a big superiority complex. Thus, the nickname Napoleon. As I've mentioned before, he's at the bottom of upper management. He's the main liaison between our IT department and the rest of the company, and like most IT management he is a complete tech fucktard (see also fuckwit, fucknut, fuckstain, etc…). There have been countless times when Napoleon will send in an e-mail stating he's having trouble, and the only thing that is in the email is a screenshot of whatever was on his screen at the time he got the error. There are never any details of what the problem is. The most it will say is "Fix this." What the hell this is, is anyone's guess.

Napoleon doesn't really work in our office, or even in the same state, but he spends about a week or two every couple of months making everyone uncomfortable when he comes in to town. He'll take over a desk, whether or not someone else uses it, turn it around so that it faces out (90 degrees off from what all the other desks are) and setup camp like it was a tiny hotel room. One time he visited, he commandeered a desk near a conference room that was in heavy use at the time and people kept taking his chair. Instead of just finding another chair, he sent out an email to everyone demanding that they stop taking his chair and requested a cable lock to secure his chair when he was away. The obvious solution to this was to wait until after hours and cable lock his chair to the rafters so that it hung ominously, like some kind of mod threat. The emails that followed this office equivalent of the horse head in your bed were less than cordial. I'm often quite relieved that I never shared my plan with anyone else; the pressure to snitch was high.

There's always been something peculiar about Napoleon that only comes across in person and I think that, along with the fact that he's a complete douche, is a big reason while there's no Lady Napoleon. The man has this uncanny ability to turn some of the most innocuous statements into phrases of sleaze that rival the worst 70's porno. Napoleon was in the office last week, and managed to turn an innocent phrase like "Don't forget your suitcase" into something that sounded like it was borderline sexual harassment. He kept saying it to one of our 4 bosses because she was going out of town to visit headquarters, but each time he said it, it sounded more and more suggestive, and yet it meant absolutely nothing.

Napoleon is one of those people that you always wonder what they do and how they have a job. Despite the fact that it's known he's management of some sort, we never know what exactly he does. Alan Alda (not the real one, but a former co-worker) would call him a Jerkass in his New Yorker accent. His temper and constant need to prove himself, has lead to random shouts, such as loudly proclaiming he's got the keys to the kingdom, or sending vague messages asking when "this" is going to get fixed, even if we never knew "that" was broken. The only thing missing from Napoleon's story is an exile to the Isle of Alba, but for now I have to find piece of mind in the fact that he has to work in New Jersey. And now, Napoleon has left the building.

Prarie Dogging

Cubers have a lot in common with prairie dogs. They're both very social animals, with a strict pecking order, and have an established warning system to alert others of danger. The biggest similarity is their tendency to pop up from their holes to survey what is going on around them. If someone sounds like they're having fun or might be dispensing savory gossip, a Cuber or two will pop their heads up above their divider and try to poke in on the conversation. Some Cubers try to be discreet about their prairie dogging. Tweedle Dee for example tries to act like he's just standing up to stretch, like one more minute of having his ass plastered in his chair will make him explode in a fit or stagnant rage. He stands up, stretches his arms a bit, and "nonchalantly" stares around until he figures out where the talk is coming from. The bad thing is that this is the most graceful part of his participation. Once he actually tries to include himself in the conversation, he bumbles through it with awkward comments that have no bearing or make no sense, and eventually ends up killing the conversation.

Serial Killer on the other hand, doesn't even pretend. He stands up and leans over the edge of his cube, the dividers being only chest high, and surveys over the jungle like a lion looking over his pride. His creepy stares raze the cube landscape like lasers until he finds his target. Even if the conversation is happening rows away, he just stands there, staring, and listening, even commenting, shouting from a distance. This makes gossiping awkward because the person being bashed is usually within shouting distance as well.

Even when the conversation isn't gossip, it often seems to be isolated to small groups, usually no larger than three. It may not be secret, and it may not even be provocative, but they cling to it like a stingy kid being asked to share his candy. Sometimes it's simply because the person trying to play along is universally disliked, and who wants someone they hate crashing their party? Most of the time, it's just a matter of cliques being formed, and the rule of cliques is that you don't cross pollinate. Unless you're me, who is a member of no particular clique, and considered to be the Switzerland of the Call Center. Sadly, I have no finely crafted watches or knives. All I bring are my Nerf guns.

When Cubers are on alert, looking out for evil management like Napoleon and The Shill, they are vigilant, and even compassionate. They will warn any and all with a quick nodding glance in the direction of danger, an IM to warn who's in the building, or even jumping in front of the oncoming truck and making conversation with the enemy to raise awareness and buy time for those who need to scurry, scatter, or hide what they're doing. Napoleon is aptly named. He's short, has a bad temper, and constantly feels like he has to prove his superiority through meaningless displays of "power". He's at the bottom of the upper management chain, and rarely lowers himself below his station to deal with the peasants. The Shill on the other hand, who is at the top of the middle management pyramid, believes himself to be a man of the people, when in fact, he is nothing more than a corporate shill, sucking whatever company cock is placed in front of him. He thinks he has a good report with everyone, when we all secretly hate his guts. At least Napoleon provides us with some amusement through his minor skirmishes.

Yes, the Cubers are a lot like prairie dogs. Popping up like some sort of gossiping Whack-A-Mole, banding together in our little groups, even putting aside our differences to protect the family, runts and rejects alike. In fact, the Napoleonic Alert Network has just gone off, and I don't think this is a drill.

Meet The Cubers

Cubers are to the office what lifers are to prison. They are the most adjusted, and terminal, residents of the office. They are the long-term cube monkeys that inhabit the confines of the cube jungle. The office is their life and they're never leaving, at least not willingly. These are not stories about people using CD drives as cup holders or looking for the "Any" key on the keyboard. These are stories about the motley crew of a help desk. These are stories about the Cubers.

You can usually tell what kind of day most of the Cubers are having by how many paper coffee cups are in their trashcans or stacked on their desk. If The Hippie has a full pyramid by the time I come in, a few hours after him, I know I'm in for a rough day. If Serial Killer is already anxiously flipping poker chips I know I need to take a deep breath before diving in the deep end. If The Gimp is already chugging Red Bull and Tums I know to go ahead and pee and get some water before I log in.

Every Cuber has their own habit, just like every Cuber has their own nickname. I am the king that knights each member of the team. I am the one that dubs them Sith Lord, Nate Dogg, and Executioner. Some of the nicknames are purely descriptive, like The Hippie. He's an old timer at the help desk whose hobbies include smoking pot, driving and fixing VW Buses, and listening to The Dead.

Some nicknames are inside jokes, like Stalker Bait. The sole woman at the call center, whose only weakness is that she happens to be a cute girl working in an office of geeky, awkward, sexually frustrated men. I could see three of my coworkers falling in love the moment she walked in. They all got this creepy pregnant glow and were tripping over their dicks to make a clumsy pass at her. There's an ongoing bet as to who will break first, Stalker Bait, or her Stalkers.

Other names are descriptive, and can be an inside joke as well, but aren't exactly flattering. They're as much a way to call someone and describe someone as they are to help vent frustration. My favorite is Shitpants McPooperton. He's a 50 something cranky man who lives in the past as much as in the bathroom. He's a slacker, a liar, and foul man in general.

I'm the Trixter. As the creed and ethics of nicking names goes, I didn't come up with my own nickname. I'm named as much for being a literal trickster, as I am the crappy 80's band, whose song Give It to Me Good was stuck in my head, and subsequently whistled whenever I walked around, for weeks.

These are just a few of the characters you will come to know, love, hate, or just not give a shit about. These are the Cubers. These are their stories.