MISSION OF THE DAY: GUMBALL FURY
On the table in the accounting lounge there's a bowl of gumballs that measure 1" in diameter each. Someone put them there to spare themselves the nightmare of broken teeth and agonized night whimpers. A micron-thin layer of Testor enamel covers a quarter-inch titanium shell surrounding a core of gunpowder, aspartame and wadded-up Bazooka Joe comics. Your mission is not to eat them. If you do they'll stretch out your cheeks. In the first few heady months you'll do a fantastic Dizzy Gillespie routine, but then your cheeks will deflate and you'll have to join (or start!) a circus sideshow as Dog Man/Woman. Oh yes, in my imagined mission you're transgendered. I forgot.
Anyway, in the boardroom down the hall stands an Emmy Award, a 16 inch high statuette of a winged woman holding aloft an atom (really), 5 pounds of nickel, copper and silver drizzled with 18 karat gold. When the lights dim at 5:00 PM it casts its own radiance. It's the only Emmy ever awarded to a Canadian production company (or so they tell the new employees). It's the gold-plated heart of your workplace, and your mission is to switch the two without a single soul caring. Noticing, sure. Who's not going to notice that the Emmy Award is sitting on the table in the accounting lounge and not commanding the space in the boardroom? The trick here is to ensure that no one, not even the CEO, gives a rat's ass that you've replaced the symbol of your company's achievement with a bowl of inedible gumballs.
Most people think that the key to pulling it off lies in a confident attitude and swift, easy execution: pick up the gumballs with a smile, stroll down past the edit suites and the water cooler, step between the mentally handicapped man with the vacuum cleaner and the martinet who berates his vacuuming style, breeze into the boardroom - meetings in progress be damned! - pick up the Emmy, put down the gumballs, wink at whoever's present, and walk confidently back to the accounting lounge, maintaining eye contact with coworkers but avoiding conversation. That is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. You may get away with it, emerge with a few laughs and a friendly chuck on the back to your credit, but eventually somebody's going to put the Emmy back and throw out the gumballs. When that happens, and it will if you do it the way I've described, your mission will have failed. In order to succeed you must create an atmosphere of apathy and nihilism so corrosive, so anathematical to workplace spirit that by the time you switch the statue and the gumball, your slack-jawed crew of wage zombie colleagues and salaried overslugs will do no more than call out for more porridge as you crawl by. They won't even care that you're transgendered and maundering on and on about your hormone therapy.
I had a whole paragraph here about secretaries, but everyone knows about their mother-destroyer powers, their angora smiles and ice-nine eyes, so I'm not going to waste your time with explanations. Then I was going to talk more about your mission, but I know a done joke when I make one. Please accept this paragraph as a replacement.
STRIKETHROUGH ATTACK!
INT. DAY. A SCIENTIFIC LAB SETTING. TWO MEN IN LAB COATS AND ORANGE HELMETS, CHERNUCHYN AND BRISTER, STAND IN FRONT OF BURNERS, FLASKS, TESLA COILS &c. CHERNUCHYN LOOKS UPSET.
CHERN: Bitter news, Comrade. My heart is heavy.
BRIST: What has happened?
CHERN: The strikethrough virus has broken its containment seals.
BRIST: My God, when?
CHERN: Three minutes ago.
BRIST: My God. At its predicted rate of propagation, it could be infecting us any second!
CHERN: We're doomed! Actually, previous calculations on rates of propagation and infection have been shown to be flawed.
BRIST: Really? When did the newer research come out?
CHERN: I'm infected! Douse me in carbolic and set me on fire, quick! I believe the findings appeared in the latest Journal of Text Format Infection.
BRIST: I'm not sure that's a real journal there, Chernuchyn.
CHERN: Oh sure it is. You get a tote bag with your yearly subscription. Now douse me in acid and set me on fire before the entire world is overrun by this beastly plague! You want to head down to Polerich's and have a couple of Coors?
BRIST: Coors Brewing promotes illegal labour practices. And their beer sucks. Take a bullet for the team? What team? The team of fat-ass losers bloated on light beer and trying to pick up each other's sisters? What sport are they enrolled in? Drunken tetherball? The Silver Bullet! Yeah!
