Illinoir

6. A photo that makes you laugh. Dave Dubois @ Ripon College, ~1995(?)

This photo is hilarious because that’s not his real hair. It’s not his hat either.

Good timing on this part of the meme because yesterday I was given the phrase “Where are we going to find a Canadian at this time of night?” which is just about the funniest phrase ever and the perfect caption for every New Yorker cartoon. Anyhow:

Covered in scratches, I made it to the patio door just as Greta and Helene, two women who worked on the second floor and whose job descriptions I had never quite figured out — I had thought that maybe Greta worked in HR and perhaps Helene did something with accounting but the heads of those respective departments had each told me that wasn’t true — were coming out for their 11:30 smoke break.
Greta was finishing a joke: “…and then the priest says to the violin maker, ‘Where are we going to find a Canadian at this time of night?’” she said.
“I don’t get it,” Helene said.
“Neither do I,” Greta admitted. “I was hoping you could explain it to me.”

Also, for some reason today I decided to write as if Coca-Cola was sponsoring this novel. Keep in mind that “Cola Industries” is the name of the entirely fictitious company where the narrator is employed and has nothing to do with Coke or Coca-Cola or beverages of any sort:

I stepped through the doorway into the break room and stopped dead in my tracks. The room was filled with the older folks, and they all stopped mid-sentence, mid-chew, mid-swallow to look up at my arrival. I waved, smiled, pointed at the soda machine.

“Just, uh, just here to get a Coke,” I said. “You guys know how much I love Coke.”
The room nodded as one. The break room contained the only aluminum recycling container in the building, and since it was upstairs from the cube, that meant expending a certain amount of effort in order to be a responsible citizen of planet Earth, not that I really gave a shit about that, but it was good to keep up appearances. Thus, my desk was often home to a stack of empty Coke cans. People mistook my apathy and lethargy for an extreme sugar and caffeine addiction and just loved to comment on it. I’m not hypoglycemic, I’m just lazy.
I made my way to the Coke machine, fed it a dollar bill, retrieved the can and my change and turned to leave. At the door, I found myself face to face with Cheryl, the head of IT. I said hello and tried to get around her, but she blocked my way
“Arthur Traum,” she said, looking as sour as usual. “Just the person I wanted to see.”
My luck had run out. I knew it had been too good to be true. I had almost made it to the relatively safe haven of my desk but I had pressed my luck, stopping for the Coke. Curse my love of its distinct cola taste, the sweet bite of the bubbles.
“What’s up, Cheryl?” I asked, opening the can. I even loved the sound of the spliting metal, the escaping carbon dioxide. It was like music.
“It’s about that web site of yours,” she said, the words dripping like flat Coke from her mouth.
“The web site of mine?” I knew she was referring to the Cola Industries intranet site. Aside from the sales staff I was the only one who made use of it, but I had never claimed it and certainly felt no ownership over it. The site had been built by a third party web development firm — one that, coincidentally, I had applied to upon my arrival in Jersey. I mentioned this to their project manager after a strategy meeting. He had given me a thin lipped smile and said that he “vaguely recalled” seeing my resume. So much for that. “What about it?”
“Your photo uploads are tipping us over our bandwidth allotment. You’re going to have to reduce the file size. Or something.” She smiled, saccharine sweet and just as cancerous.
“You mean to tell me that uploading a couple hundred 30k files each month is putting that big a dent in our bandwidth allowance? That’s just not possible.”
Her smile vanished, evaporating like Diet Coke on a hot summer day, leaving behind a sticky residue of disdain.