The Twilight Report

Today for mum’s day we brought grandma home for a family barbecue. In this case “home” is Gosford, where nobody actually lives anymore. Anyway, mum was running late as always and so while Don and aunty Rae were picking grandma up from the nursing home, mum and I went looking for a mum’s day card for grandma. Pretty much all of mum’s day cards had been taken, and the only one with “grandma” on it was too frilly for me to take seriously (there were “nana” and “gran” cards but I have never called grandma anything but grandma, so they seemed particularly unnatural). It suddenly struck me as slightly absurd that I was standing there in the newsagency looking for a mum’s day card with my mum standing right next to me.

“Happy mum’s day, by the way.” I said.

The other lady in the store also looking for a last minute mum’s day card thought this was pretty funny. Anyway, I think that mum and grandma know how much I love them and how important they are to my life. That the Hallmark Greeting Card Cartel sponsors the day is rather beside the point. It was nice bringing grandma home for the day.

Aunty Rae and mum were looking through some of my great grandfather’s old WWI records and stuff. His given names were “Fredrick Graham”. Seeing his name on one of the papers, it reminded me that I am really named after him. I always think of myself as being named after my uncle Graham (and I am), but my mum actually called me Fred for the first few days of my life. Thankfully mum and dad agreed on Graham instead.

Because the writers guild is on strike, today's episode of The Twilight Report will be a flashback episode. I am going to tell you about a legendary former employee of The Company. To protected this person's identity, I will refer to him using the pseudonym "Bill." For those of you who already know this story, please forgive me if I get any of the details wrong. I didn't know "Bill" well, but I did meet him and talked to him a few times.

The first time I met Bill, he was giving me a ride to West Point so that we could watch Army get beat by some Christian private school. He was telling me that he really didn't want to work for the company, and would rather go back to school to study Art. He also wanted to visit Australia, and since I am from Australia originally, we had something to chat about. He was a moderately big guy, and he drove an enormous green station wagon. We got to the tailgate, had some BBQed food, played a drinking game and made our way up to the football stadium to watch the game. Army was playing some private religious school (as mentioned) so I dubbed the game "Army vs. God." Needless to say, Army has a terrible team and lost a close game. When I got back to where the cars had been parked for the tailgate, I discovered that Bill had left without me. Fortunately one of my friends gave me a ride.

Bill wanted to get laid off from The Company so that he could get the juicy severance package and go back to graduate school. Keep in mind that this was a few years back when The Company was having these big massive layoffs every six months, so you would think it wouldn't have been that hard for him to arrange it. However, Maintaining employment at The Company is never a logical affair, and try as he might he could not get them to fire him. His approach was to dress more and more casually every day. Very gradually, until (I am told) he came to work in his pajamas, when allegedly, Nobody said anything about it.

Back in the day The Company had a reputation formality and suits, those of you who know which company I work for know this. Things have changed. Today, our work environment, especially for those of us who are engineers, the dress code is very lax. Usually I come to work with a nice casual shirt, although today I was feeling especially casual and so wore my University of Arizona Math Nerds T-Shirt, which was given to me when I graduated as a Math major. So although I can't say that I was there, I can say that Bill's story is not so far fetched.

Since dressing down didn't do the trick, Bill decided to just go ahead and move to Australia and go to graduate school to study Art. Without telling management. He wanted to see how long it would take The Company before they stopped paying him. If you have seen Office Space and know about the bureaucracy of Corporate America, you know that this could take years. In Bill's case The Company moved at the lightning speed of several weeks to terminate Bill's employment.

Sometimes, I sit in my office (here is where the Flashback fade effect brings us back to the present, you can see me sitting at my desk typing this into my computer as I wait for another timing run to complete), and wonder whatever happened to Bill. But mostly I wonder what Australia is doing with him. He seems like the sort of person who would do well there.