A Fright to Remember

Well, tomorrow is my final trek out to the suburban office. Overnight on Wednesday, swarms of movers -- no doubt from impoverished third world countries working for $.58 an hour -- will move the mountain of crap from the old office to the new. My entire department consists of four boxes. That is how woeful their human resources commitment has been.

However, my boss, the vice president of finance, has metric tons of crap that will be moved. In a nod to cleaning out rubbish, I've been assigned the task of sorting threw Alp-like collections of paper. Imagine my horror when I tripped across this little gem: A key ring in the shape of a fish, formed from letters spelling J-E-S-U-S. I'd found several church bulletins, but this artifact frightened me. It was taped to a plea for a commitment of $.58 cents a day to feed a Latin American family of four for a week. (Imagine the number of people who will be fed by the workers who are moving the office crap!) I momentarily toyed with the idea of tossing this urgent plea that had lain deep in the bowels of financial papers for approximately three years, but decided to use it to test my boss.

Now, understand, I like my boss. His wife works in the office next to his and the nightmare the situation could be doesn't exist. They are honestly good people. Or as good as one can be in the imperialist United States while driving gasnivorous, war-wreaking monstrosity down the rugged terrain of an Illinois expressway. Still, good people.

But with the discovery of this plastic relic, I began to fear they might be too good. How does an elephantine faggot such as myself work for one of God's Enlightened?

So, I divided the pile into three demi-piles. One was urgent stuff that needed his immediate attention, one (containing Jesus's fish) with stuff I didn't want to take the responsibility of discarding (and risking eternity bobbing in a lake of fire) and another of precious sheets of information I know need to be entombed in plastic binders.

I took the first two piles to him and discussed the urgent matters. Then I gave him the questionable materials and told him he needed to look threw. When he got to the plastic Jesus fish taped to a picture of an emaciated, crying child with mosquitoes perched on her lashes, he said -- and I quote -- "Man, this is how they get you. They know you won't throw a perfectly good key ring away." Then he ripped it from the child's face (who after three years of neglect under ancient tax returns is probably dead anyway, sated mosquitoes lounging in the hollow of her skull) and tossed the key ring into the back of his desk drawer.

Exactly what I would have done.