by David Thorne
David
............................................................................................
From: Kenneth Warner
Date: Monday 6 August 2018 1.39pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Update
I’m speaking to Jennifer and Mike about this. I’ve had enough of you and your whole fucking department and am going to file a complaint.
Ken
............................................................................................
From: Jennifer Haines
Date: Monday 6 August 2018 2.27pm
To: David Thorne CC: Kenneth Warner
Subject: F26-A
David, I’m cc’ing Ken on this email.
1. Please make yourself available for meetings.
Communication between departments allows both parties to perform their job to the best of their abilities.
2. Personal insults are not permissible in the workplace.
Rather than lodge a complaint, I’d prefer we all met to discuss the issue like adults.
Would 4pm today work for you?
Thank you, Jennifer
............................................................................................
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 6 August 2018 2.35pm
To: Jennifer Haines CC. Kenneth Warner
Subject: Re: F26-A
Jennifer,
I’d rather you just lodged the complaint to be honest. I’m sure Ken has a fractal boner over the prospect of a meeting to discuss missed meetings but I have actual work to complete. I will apologize to him for the insults.
David
............................................................................................
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 6 August 2018 2.48pm
To: Kenneth Warner
Subject: Apology
Kenneth,
I’m sorry for calling you a plain donut, a shriveled carrot, and an old woman buying stamps.
David
............................................................................................
From: Kenneth Warner
Date: Monday 6 August 2018 3.07pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Apology
Apology not accepted.
Mess with the bull, you get the horns.
Ken
.
Kenneth’s Horns
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 10 August 2018 2.06pm
To: Kenneth Warner
Subject: Emerson contract proof
Kenneth,
Emerson packaging proof was signed off on Wednesday.
I have the cromolyn (contract proof) in my office if you’d like to see it.
David
............................................................................................
From: Kenneth Warner
Date: Friday 10 August 2018 2.17pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Emerson contract proof
Sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t go in your office because it’s like being punched by boredom coming to life.
Ken
.
Ben’s Car
My car interior gets a little messy sometimes, everyone’s does. Generally, when a vehicle is first purchased, it’s cleaned out religiously for a few months, then intermittently, then when the console gets a bit cluttered with candy wrappers, receipts, lighters and notes. I smoke in my car so my cleaning schedule is based on how full the ashtray gets but if I have to pick someone up on short notice, I’ll do the equivalent of hiding dirty dishes in the cupboard when people give you five minutes warning that they’re coming over and shove the candy wrappers, receipts, lighters and notes in the glove box or center console, maybe give the dashboard a quick wipe with my sleeve.
This is not the case with my coworker Ben’s car. Ben drives a blue 2006 Toyota Camry that last had the interior cleaned, I’m assuming, in 2006. An archaeological excavation of the layers is probably the only way to determine for sure but once, when he picked me up from the airport, I had to burrow with my feet to make room in the front passenger footwell and found a dead mouse - flattened like a pressed flower in a dictionary. It probably made its way in to feast on remnants of takeaway food and couldn’t find its way out - or settled in and lived like a king on McDonald’s fries and Taco Bell burritos until dying of old age. The rear of the vehicle is worse as you can only see the headrests of the back seats poking out. It’s impossible to describe the smell as it’s all of them.
Yesterday, while Ben was in meetings all day and I was procrastinating about laying out a sales brochure for window awnings, I decided to take the keys from Ben’s desk and perform a ‘stock take’ of his vehicle. I made Walter, a junior designer at the agency, do the actual work as I didn’t want to touch anything but I gave him a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves from the kitchen to use so the complaining was unwarranted. Also, you’d assume Ben would have been pleased about it (two large garbage bags of rubbish were removed and items that might not have been rubbish were put in archive boxes and placed in his trunk) but he’s been going on about ‘invasion of privacy’ for hours now and is threatening to file a formal complaint.
Regardless, here’s a complete list of the contents of Ben’s car:
16 McDonald’s bags and 9 Burger King bags.
28 empty drink containers.
8 pairs of sunglasses.
12 various charging cables.
6 empty chip packets (barbecue).
2 empty Pringle’s cans (sour cream & onion).
16 lighters.
11 unpaid parking tickets.
34 empty cigarette packets (Virginia Slims, Menthol).
760 cigarette butts (approximation).
2 Redbox DVDs (Battleship & The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2).
38 various takeaway food receipts.
1 sock.
8 scratch’n’win lottery tickets (scratched, no winners).
6 batteries (4 AAA and 2 AA, charge level unknown).
6 baby mice (flat).
3 empty pizza boxes.
1 piece of string (approximately 5” in length).
1 bird’s nest.
46 compact disks.
1 panini-maker box containing a pair of boardshorts.
26 used napkins.
1 pair of tongs.
15 pens.
1 laser pen (confiscated).
1 Subway foot-long sandwich (contents unknown, petrified).
1 Fleshlight.
1 Wonderwave Fleshlight replacement sleeve.
1 box of kitchen backsplash tiles.
1 small notepad (green, contains handwritten poetry).
1 copy of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.
1 plastic sandwich bag containing marijuana (confiscated).
1 Stormtrooper figurine (4”, confiscated).
4 unopened reams of A4 paper (suspiciously the same brand we have in the stationary cupboard).
And, finally, 1 box of Betty Crocker Super Moist instant cake mix (unopened, chocolate, expired in 2012).
Ben’s Poetry
I’m not a huge fan of poetry. I’ll accept the argument that it’s an art form - being an expression of the imagination - but by that broad definition, so are Etch-A-Sketch drawings and Magic Aqua Sand sculptures. I don’t think anyone really likes poetry, apart from the ones writing it, and they only really like their own. People declare they like poetry but if pressed to name their favourite poem it’s generally a struggle;
“Oh, um, probably The Road Less Travelled. It’s a classic.” “The 1978 book of psychology and spirituality by M. Scott Peck?”
“No, the poem version. I had to read it in school. It’s about a guy who’s taking a walk and chooses an overgrown path. It’s a metaphor for not worrying about ticks.”
“Do you mean The Road Not Taken?”
“No, that’s a movie about a dad and his son who have to escape from cannibals after the apocalypse. I think Liam Neeson was in it.”
I copied and pasted the above text from one of my previous books because, quite honestly, I couldn’t be bothered writing a new paragraph about poetry. I’ve never read a poem and thought, ‘That was wonderful, I shall read another,’ and, if someone recites a poem to me, it’s as if my brain is hard-wired to blank out and I just hear a ‘womwomwom’ noise and see static. Kind of like that girl in the movie Serenity when she sees the octopus animation but without the mad fighting skills. Kind of the opposite really. This all changed when I found Ben’s small green notepad of handwritten poetry in the back of his car and read every single page. Mostly with horror and a slight tinge of guilt but that’s not the point. From what I could work out, much of it is regarding his ex, Sarah, who’s either schizophrenic or a twin, is having engine trouble, showers a lot, and cheated with someone named Robert:
Texts
You said you were at your sister’s house,
I knew it wasn’t true.
I read his texts while you were showering,
hope you enjoyed the rendezvous.
Sarah
The engine light won’t say what’s wrong,
no clue to what it’s about.
It just tells you there’s a problem,
It’s up to you to figure it out.
Mirror
I could always tell you both apart, it wasn’t hard to do.
One was always nice.
The other one was you.
Cut
The Band-Aid eventually fell off in the shower,
it barely showed a scar.
A blunt knife slips without warning,
like you in Robert’s car.
Bathroom
I threw out your apricot face scrub,
your coconut body wash and apple shampoo.
I bleached the tiles and wiped the sink,
but the bathroom still smells like you.
Personally, I feel the above poem would have made a lot more sense if Ben had ended it with, “but the bathroom still smells like fruit,” but what do I know.
Ben does make a valid point about blunt knives though, it’s important to keep your kitchen knives sharpened, as a blunt knife is far more dangerous than a sharp one. I recently purchased ten expensive Wüsthof knives, as I’ve always wanted a set. Last week, Holly and I went away for a few days and her parents stayed at our house to look after the dogs. When we got back, two of the knives were missing and one looked like it had been used to cut concrete. Apparently the missing two fell into the insinkerator, which was then switched on, and the other was used to scrape the barbecue grill clean. Which brings me to:
Asking Holly’s Parents to Housesit While We’re Away
I’ll open this paragraph by stating that I do appreciate everything Holly’s parents do for us. Only because it would have been rude to simply dive straight into details about how they destroy everything while housesitting though. Holly’s father recently read one of my books, which contained a few satirical exaggerations about having Thanksgiving dinner at his house, and he didn’t speak to me for a month because I’d referred to his baked celery bread balls (with flour and milk sauce) as ‘dryballs’.
“How are you, Tom?”
“Hm.”
“You’re not still cross about the book are you?”
“No, I couldn’t give a fuck.”
“Good. It was just satirical exagger...”
“It was shit.”
“...yes, referring to your baked celery and bread balls as dryballs was certainly a bit uncalled fo...”
“No, the whole book was shit.”
“...right, well, they were pretty dry.”
“That’s what the sauce is for you fucking idiot.”
Tom is retired US Army and was stationed in Germany for many years which is where he met Maria, Holly’s mother. Maria is probably too young to have been a member of the Hitler Youth but based on her unquestioning devotion to the current sociopathic halfwit in the Oval Office, she’d have fit in quite well. She’d have had the most patches, the first to point out dissidents to officials and, had Facebook been around in that era, posted ‘Share if you’re proud of the Führer’ memes eighteen times a day. It’s good to have a hobby though.
I’m not sure what hobbies Tom has, if any, but I know he watches a lot of sport on television because when he housesits, he records about 90,000 terabytes of baseball, Nascar and football events onto the cable-box. It takes me around four days to scroll through and delete them all and we’re downgraded to dial-up speeds for the remainder of the month.
Last month, after Holly and I arrived home from three days away with our friends JM and Lori, I noticed there was something different about our living room but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The room seemed bigger somehow but contained the same leather sofa and loveseat, the same Noguchi coffee table, the same floor lamp and the same new rug... It wasn’t until I sat down and my knees bumped against the coffee table that I realized the rug was half the size it had been before we left and that the furniture had all been pushed closer together to fit on it.
“Hello Tom, it’s David. I just noticed the rug and I was wondering what...”
“What rug?”
“The rug in our living room. It’s half the size it was.”
“Bullshit. It might be a bit smaller but not half.”
“Why is it any smaller?”
“How the fuck would I know? Maybe it shrank in the dryer.”
“You put it in the dryer?”
“I had to wash and dry it. You can’t spot-clean lasagna out.”
“You dropped lasagna on our new rug?”
“The baking-dish was too hot to carry and I couldn’t make it to the dining table in time.”
“It was a whole lasagna? Why didn’t you use oven-mitts?”
“Why is your dining table so far away from the kitchen?”
“Yes, valid point. When we were laying out the furniture, I should have taken the distance you’re capable of carrying a piping hot dish of lasagna with your bare hands into account. Perhaps we should have some kind of lasagna conveyer belt system installed to prevent such a situation happening again.”
“There’s no reason to be sarcastic about it.”
“No, I suppose not. I should probably just be happy it was only lasagna you were throwing about and not a chainsaw or bucket of acid.”
“Now you’re just being stupid. I’ll buy you a new rug if you’re going to cry about it. How much was it?”
“Twelve-hundred dollars, it’s handcrafted wool.”
“That’s ridiculous. Home Depot has rugs for $99 and they’re a lot nicer than yours. I’ll get you one today.”
“I don’t want a rug from Home Depot.”
“They have modern looking ones.”
“I’ve seen them. I wouldn’t put one in a crack-house.”
“I’ll pick out one with a nice pattern.”
“It’s not going in our house.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Tom, don’t buy us a rug from Home Dep... Tom?”
I was wrong about the rug; it would have been quite appropriate in a crack-house. When I was growing up, my parents had bedroom curtains with almost the same exact design - green and blue overlapping circles on an orange background. If you stared at them for too long, you’d get dizzy. They’d had the curtains for as long as I remember and only replaced them when they melted from being too close to an electric heater - so also the same material as the rug.
“Are you sure it isn’t an outside rug, Tom? It’s very shiny.”
“It’s an inside/outside rug. You can use it anywhere. Pretty good for forty-five dollars, hey?”
“I thought you said they were ninety-nine?”
“They are, usually, this one was in the sale bin - fifty percen
t off. With the extra money, I got you a floor lamp.”
“We have an Arco floor lamp. It’s a design icon.”
“This one’s a lot nicer, its shade has tassels. Besides, yours doesn’t work. It fell over when I was moving the furniture. You’re lucky it didn’t smash the glass coffee table. Come and help me get it out of the car, I’ve got a framed print of a steamship in there for you as well.”
Prevaricate Pseudologia
From: Craig Buchanan
Date: Tuesday 14 March 2017 9.32am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Annual report files
Good morning,
Attached hi-res photos for Unilever AR you asked for.
Also, FYI, Walter was here for an interview yesterday afternoon. I saw him in Jason’s office. He applied for the junior designer position we advertised in February.
Trouble in paradise?
Craig
................................................................................................
