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…