looking back, maybe I should have stuck it up his ass

Reminding me of another office prank...

I was working on this declassification project for a three letter agency. We were designing a system to scan in all classified documents 25 years or older (EO12958) and make them available to the public. This is the project where I met Rita.

I worked with the team that did the initial survey of the archives. We uncovered approximately 60 million pages of material that needed to be scanned, reviewed, tagged with key words, etc. Our project, it was clear, was woefully underfunded. So we were sitting in a room one day trying to figure out how to create a slide to show how much paper 60 million pages consisted of, with the idea of presenting it to congress to get more cash.

There were a bunch of dumb ideas floating around the table, when I sarcastically said "60 million pages has got to be as tall as the washington monument!" That ended up being our slide (60 million pages = about 27 washington monuments when stacked up). We got more money.

Then the gov got shut down because Clinton refused to sign a bill to keep the gov going because the bill had something in it he didn't like. We were out of work, unpaid, for 2 weeks. We didn't get back pay for those two weeks even though almost everyone on the team had worked through the shut down. Then there were staff cuts. Just when it seemed the morale of the team couldn't get any worse, some bureaucrat decided to give us all "awards". Normally an award is a slap on the ass, free lunch, and a check. This ass pipe instead gave us each a 6 inch replica of the washington monument, with one side having a thermometer glued to it.

Everyone was pissed we had worked so hard and not gotten money. One of the guys on the team, Gordon, turned to me after he was given his monument and said "stick this in my ass and take my temperature".

Instead, I thought it would be funny to glue the monument on the ceiling tile above Gordon's desk. I waited for two days, but he didn't notice it was missing, much less that it was now suspended above his head. So I started taking more stuff off of his desk and gluing it to the ceiling. I glued his stapler, scissors, staple remover, pencils, pens, paperclips and finally his coffee mug. He didn't notice.

Then, at 3 o'clock one morning, my manager got a call because the alarm in our SCIF had gone off. It was triggered by the motion detector. They went all through the SCIF but couldn't find anyone. So the SCIF was on high alert. It was a HUGE security deal. I rolled in around 7 am to find all this happening. Then Gordon came in, and moments after going into his office came out and said "You are in so much fucking trouble".

It turned out the washington monument had finally, due to its weight, detached from the ceiling tile. The tip of it was embedded in the soft wood of Gordon's desk. There was no doubt that the fall was what set off the alarm. He started screaming at me that it could have fallen on his head, and then looked up and saw everything else I had glued to the ceiling, and started yelling more. My manager came in at that point and got to see my little ceiling art project.

I received a security violation (the only one I've ever gotten), had to write a letter of apology to Gordon, and was yelled at by my manager for two solid hours. I wasn't worried about getting fired, as I was the only female engineer on the project, but I realized my life for the next few months would not be pleasant.

All glue was eventually banned from the SCIF because first Gordon launched a return attack by gluing my chair to the top of my desk, and then I glued a banana to his desk, and then one day when it snowed and I was working late he and another engineer completely buried my car in snow, so I glued the shovel I used to get my car out across Gordon's desk.

I miss that place. And that group of people.