War & Peace

Bigbird
Originally uploaded by fishpimp.

I had a rare good day at work last Thursday. I got to let go of a grudge that was really grinding on me. They promoted this kid from the night crew into the sales office in a political maneuver (“see, we really do promote from within!”). He blew out his knee & hurt his back, causing him to gain a lot of weight and more recently a new nickname: The Big Bird.

He’s as green as they get. He tends to employ the “used car sales” paradigm, and poorly at that. He’s very young and still has a young man’s attitude towards life: running up big bills and trying to supplement his income by playing poker. His ski boat is about to be repossessed, but he’d rather default on the loan than sell it. He has not given anyone the impression that he has any sort of intelligence. He’s also been implicated in improper extracurricular activities on several occasions. He got busted for improper internet use a few weeks back and tried to pin it on me. Big mistake. He tried to paint a picture of me using force to make him play a flash-based game that crashed his computer, when in reality it was the partypoker.com plug-in that did it. Regardless, it put me in a bad light.

The real clincher came when he asked me if he could sell some fish that I had already sold. I told him that was not a possibility. Later in the day I walked out into the warehouse and saw the fish in question being loaded into a box to be Fed-Ex’d to one of his customers. He had blatantly disregarded my instructions, not to mention company policy. Hell, he tried to steal my fish! It was all I could to not to absolutely freak out on the kid. I wrote a particularly damning e-mail to him, his boss, and my boss about his attempted fish larceny. When cornered on it by the managers he came up with some feeble story trying to cover his ass. This kid is really amazing, of all the bad things that happen to him, it’s never his fault! Never, ever, ever! What’s really interesting is that for someone who lies as much as he does, he’s not very good at it.

So I’ve been dealing with the rift in a very sophisticated manner: I’ve been giving him the silent treatment with a little evil eye thrown in for variety’s sake. Unfortunately, he’s so dense that he acts like nothing’s wrong.

Finally, Thursday, I exacted my revenge. My buddy, the Punkin’, had his truck vandalized earlier last week, so he was without wheels for our morning Starbucks sortie. The Big Bird offered to let Punky drive his car. The Bird drives a Subaru STI. I’ve been told that it’s the fastest 4-cyl production car ever, and the Bird thinks that if he lets people drive his hot rod they’ll like him better. Punky drives a NASCAR Mini-stock on the weekends for fun, so I strapped in tight. The car is bad-ass. I narrowly avoided getting coffee on the khakis. The Punkin enjoyed driving it so much that he commandeered it for our lunch run also. As we got ready to head back from lunch he flips me the keys. I grinned “I’m gonna get you back for this morning’s coffee run!” Then he made the big mistake: “Go for it, I don’t scare easy.” Hooboy, it was on!

The manufacturer claims a 4.8 0-60 time. I got close to that several times, but what made Punky nearly soil his pants and helped me release my grudge against the Big Bird was our entrance into the business park. It’s a 90 degree turn. I took it wide & punched it putting us into a hard 4-wheel drift for about 50 yards before the AWD snapped us straight at 70 mph. Punky didn’t know the tree-huggin’ college-boy who rides his bike to work knew how to drive. Poor sucka! Nothing like harshing on another person’s property to release the tension in the relationship. When we got back to the office the Punkin starts telling everyone about my exploits. The Bird thinking the “cool-car-will-make-them-like-me” technique had worked it’s magic started acting all chummy. I shut him down, reminding him of his fish-thievery. Finally, finally, he apologized and I was able to burry the hatchet.
I hate holding grudges, very little good can come out of a grudge. At least this time I got to drive a super-hot car and scare the crap out of my big-talking buddy. YeeHaw!