I squealed on a coworker once. This happened when I worked at a UPS hub in Commerce City. (Yes, we have a Commerce City in Colorado. It's an industrial wasteland with a zoning board staffed by Scrooge McDuck's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. It's hilarious -- right here we have an oil refinery, and over there we have a diesel repair shop, and right between them we have a solitary one-story house with flower beds in the front yard. You should stop by sometime. Bring your own oxygen.)

Anyway, I was working at this UPS hub in a clerical capacity, which means that I spent ninety percent of my time staring off into space and the other ten percent of my time trying not to look as though I was just staring off into space. The coworker's name was Jimmy. Jimmy was a brash and confident young man, which is to say that we had nothing in common. I found him annoying because he didn't see himself as a total disgusting failure for working a pissant job at UPS. I further found him annoying because he regularly succeeded in convincing women to sleep with him.

One day, my boss Don called me aside. Don was a small, neat man in his thirties who wore fashionable eyewear and funky thick-soled Doc Martens. He was married and had a couple of kids, and I'm pretty sure he had a crush on me. He was Jimmy's boss too.

"Kilgore," said Don, "does Jimmy spend a lot of time in the office?"

Don had come to the right guy. I spent all of my time in the office, because that was my job. Jimmy was a supervisor of some kind -- his job was to walk around and make sure the people who were measuring and weighing parcels weren't, like, pissing in the corner or something.

"Yeah, Jimmy's in the office quite a bit," I said. This was true.

"Is he doing work in there?" asked Don, "Or is he just messing around, or..."

"He mostly messes around," I said. "He's on his cell phone a lot, talking to his girlfriend or whoever, or just, you know, sitting back with his feet on the desk." This was also true.

"How much time would you say he spends in there?" Don asked.

I considered. "I guess he's in there about half the time," I said. This was, if anything, an underestimation.

"Thank you, Kilgore," Don said.

Don and I went back into the office and I went back to pretending to not be just staring off into space. Soon Jimmy came into the office.

"Jimmy, can I speak to you for a minute?" said Don.

He and Jimmy left the room for a few minutes. When they came back in, Jimmy looked pissed off. I pretended to not be just staring off into space in a different direction. Jimmy was at work the next day, so I guessed he hadn't get fired. He didn't spend much time in the office from then on, though.

My next paycheck had a $200 bonus on it.

"Are you sure it wasn't thirty pieces of silver?" you are saying. "Isn't this the part of the story where you throw the money back in the temple and hang yourself from a tree?"

Fuck you.

+posted by Lawrence @ 1/04/2004 10:47:00 PM