They called the shift the "island of misfit toys crew" for a reason. The late shift was where all the physical and mental misfits were stashed. We would arrive right at as everyone else was beginning to finish up. The call volume plummeted in the evening and the single team only consisted of twelve people. The small group sat in the corner of the huge cavernous empty building. Unfortunately I was seated right underneath another ticker again. But by the last couple of hours they would give up on cutting people and if I still remained, I would have some small reprieve from the ding ding ding. For a while I volinteered to get cut every chance I could to escape the ticker, but eventually my checks were so small I had to stay. Those last hours allowed me the chance to savior the characters around me.The team manager was a mean take no shit lady named Tori. Tori was 4 feet tall, had a hunch back and a shriveled deformed leg that forced her to walk with two crutches. She was all business and had no sense of humor at all. To my right sat a morbidly obese black guy named Jamal. He had to weigh around 500-525 lb. He would show up for the shift walking with a cain and carrying a grocery bag full of snacks. It would take him a full 10 minutes to shuffle from the entrance to his seat, wheezing and panting from the effort. He would collapse into his specially made chair that would creak and bow from his weight and then he would immediately begin to work on his snacks. Jamal always seemed to have a twinky in his hand. Directly behind me was Miss Prissy. Miss Prissy was a fire cracker black lady in her late 60's who was loudly obsessed with sex and had a mouth that would make sailors blush. To my left was Mike. I didn't like Mike. He was an smarmy white boy cardigan wearing aspiring thespian who believed himself to be the teams dry wit comedian. But he was incredibly thin skinned and his reparte crumbled when faced with my obnoxious shotgun mouth or my tendency to slowly pick at his brain. I would pop my head around the cubical between calls.
"Psst, Mike?"
"What now Robert?"
"Have you ever eaten a bug?"
"No Robert, uh, I don't eat bugs."
"Have you ever thought about eating a bug?"
"No. I don't think about eating bugs."
...."Psst, Mike?"
"What?"
"Not even a cockroach?"
He was unhinged at Miss Prissy's never ending crass sex talk. She reveled in making him uncomfortable and directly across from me sat (more often stood) her own personal Paul Shaffer. A 6 and a half foot tall ghetto fabulous skinny black dude named Tyrone who sported corn rows and a full grill of gold teeth. By the last hour of the shift, when the ticker stopped dinging, I would get the party started. It would go something like this.Robert: "Hey Miss Prissy, getting any?"
Miss Prissy: "Child, you know I got some drinks in me last night and oh, you know my pussy hurts now."
Mike: "Oh god, please don't."
Robert: "So this guy did you right?"
Miss Prissy: "Shit, this was a big dicked motherfucker, and he fucked me good, all-night-long."
Tyrone: (standing up so he could see us) "You go Miss Prissy, you still got it."
Mike: "Stop it, you're grossing me out."
Miss Prissy: "Hell yeah I got it. Don't be jealous motherfucker. You want to get you a piece of Miss Prissy, but you know you don't got enough dick to get the job done. Ha!"
Mike: "You're as old as my grandmother, stop it."
Tyrone: "You tell that white boy Miss Prissy, tell him how a brother gets it done."
Miss Prissy: "Shit, I'll fuck me a white boy too. But you listen here motherfucker, if you want a piece of Miss Prissy, you GOTTA eat pussy first. You know, to com-pen-sate."
Mike: (grasping his head) "Stop. Stop it for gods sake, what is wrong with you guys?"
The spectacle would escalate until Mike was practically in the fetal position in his chair while Tyrone, Miss Prissy and I were laughing and slamming our hands on our desks so hard that Tori would bound over and snap at everyone to shut up. Coming from anyone else, on any other team, there would have been a law suit.
Even with this spectacle every night, I was rotting with boredom. The walls of my cubical were covered with push pinned reference sheets and forms. I began writing small notes begging for help."Dear God, this place is rotting my soul."
"Please help me, I think I'm in hell and I can't get out."
"I hate everyone here and want to die."
I would take the smaller notes and pin them underneath the reference sheets, knowing that on the day I bailed from there without notice, the morgue cart crew would woefully wheel up to my cubical and start removing all the push pinned papers only to discover my grim pleading messages hiding underneath.
I thought I was dying inside and I had only worked there two months. Then, finally, there was a reprieve. My head hunter called and had a job lined up for me in two weeks. I had a parole date. But the office hell had one last treat for me. One last special mind fuck howdy do.
My Company
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