white elephant

Well, I've gotten no less than 10 complaints today about my sad Forest story, so here's one that's a little on the lighter side.

After September 11th I rotated back to the east coast from San Fran. I wasn't happy about it. I arrived in November and didn't even have a winter jacket.

To make matters worse, I ended up working with a three letter agency other than the one I was expecting to return to. My new employer was staffed with people that I quickly dubbed wall scrapers. They were all pasty white, and when I would walk down the halls they would mash themselves against the wall until I past. That agency employs mostly math and engineering types, all fucking socially retarded.

I was working in this grim little SCIF with a guy who had been fired from another company for trying to kill his manager with a copper head (that is a story for another time). Then this guy Bob started coming by to talk to me.

Bob was a retired coastie, a ginger kid, and a midget (sort of, he was 4'11"). But, he was really nice to me and invited me out to happy hours so I could meet people (though, they were all military types so nothing ever came of any of his attempts to play matchmaker). Bob was also an epic story teller, and if you could suspend the concept of truth his stories were amusing. At least the first 40 times he told them. The endings occasionally changed to give the story a new spin.

Anyway, his cousin, or some other relative like that, was supposedly married to the lead singer of Depeche Mode. And, it turned out, Depeche Mode was his favorite group ever. Because of this he had pictures of them all over his cube. One day he brought in a close up of what ever the lead singer's name is in to work. He said his cousin had sent it.

Around that time it was becoming the Christmas season. We were scheduled to have a white elephant party to celebrate (this was my employer's way of trying to make up for us having to work Christmas day - not that I personally cared). We had to buy a joke gift that was $10 or less, and then we were to pile them up and each person got to pick a gift.

So, I decided to buy a picture frame. Then, I stole Bob's Depeche Mode picture, put it in the frame, and wrapped it for the party. Bob was absolutely hysterical over the loss of his picture. For two weeks after I stole it I would find him going through people's drawers in the SCIF (a huge no no in that environment) trying to find his picture. I told him I thought that I had seen the janitor throwing it away. Then other people joined in on the joke, and we tortured him mercilessly, even causing him to one day move the big, disgusting refrigerator in the break room to see if it had fallen back there.

A week before the party I drew a stick figure picture of a guy playing the guitar, just like his Depeche Mode picture. I put it up in the same spot where the picture I had stolen had been. Then I went by his cube and was like "Oh, you found your picture". He started ranting and raving that he actually hadn't found his picture, and that he suspected someone was playing a joke. I squinted at the picture and said "are you sure that isn't the one you had?" He was like "THAT is a stick figure drawing. My picture was a PHOTO. Don't you remember?"

Other people stopped by his cube because he had posted a bunch of signs all over the SCIF demanding his picture be returned. They all said the drawing looked a lot like the picture he had lost, and couldn't he possibly be mistaken.

The day of the white elephant party I arranged with a woman that had just joined our project, Debbie, to pick my gift. She opened it up and was like "Oh, nice, a picture frame." When she turned it around to show to everyone Bob starting yelling "THAT'S MY DEPECHE MODE PICTURE!" Debbie was like "No Bob, that's just a picture that they put standard in all frames." His head was about to explode, and I couldn't take it anymore, so I started laughing. At first he was pissed at me, but then he laughed, and likely is still telling the story, only his version is probably even longer than mine.