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parking lot surreality
Friday, May 21 1999
As I was returning from lunch with Dave and Eric the database developer boys, we spied a most surreal site. Aaron, the "class clown" who was fired on Monday, was sitting on the edge of the parking lot, right next to one of two police cruisers. We walked over to him to find out what was up.
(I'd heard a rumour that last night some sort of altercation had happened between Aaron and the Grand Pooh Bah. Now there were police cars. There was a story here and I wanted to know what it was.)
The story Aaron told was that last night, while he was out of his apartment on an errand to check his snail mail, a three-man contingent consisting of the Grand Pooh Bah, the Director of Web Development (my boss), and the Director of Engineering pulled up in a car. A scuffle ensued during which the Grand Pooh Bah seized Aaron's keys, stormed into his apartment, and seized a computer belonging to his housemate, the pimp-daddy wannabe. The contingent then departed with the computer, claiming they needed to extract "company secrets" therefrom. They also took Aaron's keys, rendering him transportation-challenged. "To tell you the truth," said Aaron, "I think [name of the Grand Pooh Bah] is losing it."
Aaron was here today with the police to demand the return of his keys and his roommate's computer. Though he could have pressed charges for felony grand larceny, he claimed he didn't want to destroy the company, he just wanted to settle accounts.
About this time two cops emerged from the building escorting none other than the Grand Pooh Bah and one of the new networker boys carrying the disputed computer. We didn't hang around to see this matter resolved, all we could think was, "how surreal." Upstairs, we briefly discussed what we'd seen with both the Director of Web Development (my boss) and the older, more established of the two "VPs of Marketing," the very man who had ordered Aaron's firing. But there's more to tell than this.
It seems that Aaron runs his own personal mailing list, and it serves in a capacity not too different from this web site. Aaron uses the list to entertain list members and, it seems, to vent. Let me rewind to Thursday of last week. That was the day I was in a particularly bad funk and responded to a global email concerning videotaping for a promotional intro to the upcoming Elizabeth Dole cybercast. In that response, I'd sarcastically pointed out that no people responsible for creative production of our website were scheduled to be interviewed. Aaron, serving the familiar role of class clown, had responded with a few ill-considered emails of his own, culminating with his receiving an email from his boss, one of the two "VPs of Marketing," telling him to quit being the class clown and either close some deals or be out of a job come the end of May. Irritated, Aaron turned to his mailing list, asking rhetorically in the form of a multiple-choice question how he should handle this situation. One of the choices he proposed was to tell this particular "VP of Marketing" (an older, somewhat distinguished gentleman from the American South) that he'd "fucked his wife." Somehow, and no one seems to quite know how, a copy of this list message was forwarded back to that particular "VPs of Marketing." In the typical company manner, Aaron was unexpectedly fired that Monday. The oddest news embedded in this story is that I, in a funk about the future of my copy-over robot, had created the circumstances that led to Aaron's firing. But wait, there's more.
Last night, in all his post-firing glory, Aaron came to the office to "work things out" (whatever that means). He ended up in a shouting match with The Grand Pooh Bah himself, with plenty of obscenities being hurled about. The confrontation ended with Aaron threatening to "destroy the company" with the disclosure of some sort of "company secrets" he had hiding back home on his computer. This, I take it, was what led to the incident at Aaron's apartment.
In the evening, most of us in the engineering department were slipping out just prior to yet another installment of "Energy," our weekly motivational ritual. We had our own motivational plans, to head over to the nearest Gordon Biersch franchise to choke down some McMicrobrews in that crowded, friendly, professional Schteveish atmosphere my colleagues so love. Thankfully, today there was more to discuss than just what babes within our line of sight were hot. As I was about to turn the corner to go down the back stairs, I was yelling, "Hey, let's slip out the back way!" just as the Grand Pooh Bah was emerging from a nearby restroom. Busted, but who cares?
In the outdoor patio area of Gordon Biersch, Kevin, Al, Dave, Eric and I-ning the network guy all hung out discussing the surreal things that had gone down today. Suddenly Aaron, who lives nearby, showed up. He was carrying a manilla folder with recognizable company stuff in it: a phone list, a few documents, but nothing big. Evidently he'd scheduled some sort of reconciliatory meeting with the Grand Pooh Bah. Aaron's attitude was glumly upbeat, if you can imagine that. He even said he had another job lined up, but that it was "back east."
Eventually the Grand Pooh Bah showed up and the two rivals disappeared into a nearby McMexican restaurant. The thing that I found most troubling in all of this was that the Grand Pooh Bah, presumably an important guy with a busy schedule, was spending so much time dicking around with a relative nobody like Aaron.
Inside the crowded brewery, the boys refocused their energy on the more interesting task of chatting up the unattached girlies. For awhile Al seemed to be making progress with a cute brunette nurse, but then she suddenly split. That left us in the midst of a couple blond girls, all but one of whom lay outside the acceptable age range. My colleagues, with the possible exception of Kevin, didn't seem to know what to do with these girls, so I broke the ice on my own, walking up to the cutest of the blond girls and using the following line:
"So, what's it like being blond in the 90s?"
I'm not much of a scam-master so this might well have been the first time I ever used a pickup line. Ironically, of course, I had no intention of actually picking up this girl. I was just having fun at a bar. Perhaps it was the self-confidence associated with this mindset that made the line so effective. Judging from the girl's reaction, the line worked as well as pickup lines ever do. I could see over her shoulder that Al was impressed, and that was pretty much the satisfaction I was looking for. Just to be fair, I told the girl (also named Kim) up front that I have a girlfriend and that, in amongst such traits such as beauty and intelligence, my girlfriend is "extremely jealous."
Kim came, more beers were drunk, and somehow, for once, I mostly avoided making a fool of myself. I took care to pay attention to Kim [REDACTED]. And for her part, Kim was being her typically wild & crazy drunken self, even taking the opportunity to flash one of her titties.
I don't remember much of the rest of the evening except for a scene of gender-role-affirming sex after we'd made it home. In keeping with my fetishistic interest in women's undergarments, I was telling Kim that she was just "another girl in a slip" while she was demanding that I recognize that she was more unique than that. By the next morning I'd "won" the argument, with her admitting that she "wears the slip in the family."
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