Clean Start

New Years day. The dump is closed, but some of the guys come in to sit around the office anyway. The alternative is to be home with their wives, being harrangued to go to the mall or to to the home decorating store. Women tend to take the new year seriously as a raison to kick off new projects. Most of the guys have learned to find a reason not to be around when the whim strikes.

I was at the desk pretending to do desk work. In fact I was reading the “bird sightings” column that appears each week. This is purportedly a diary of bird sightings as reported to the Audubon society. It seemed to me as a perfect medium to transmit secret codes to terrorist cells operating in deep cover. One brown pelican, two short-eared owls, a rough-legged hawk, 40 wilson snipes, a dozen razorbills, 25 Northern shrikes. What possible use does this information hold for anyone? Is it some sort of competitive game that birdwatchers play? Or does it hide secret messages about troop movements and locations of secret weapons caches? Robert Redford discovered a similar plot in Three Days of the Condor. I decided to keep this theory to myself.

George had a nasty head cold and was sitting sniffling in the corner working on last week's New York Times puzzle. We all regarded him with a wary eye, looking for signs of Mad Cow disease: lurching gait, drooling, inability to make proper change.

None of us was more leery than Bill, whose anxiety about illness and disease has become an obsessive compulsive disorder. He has taken to wearing rubber surgical gloves all the times.
He will not grasp a door handle even with the gloves; he will wait for as long as it takes for soeone else to open a door, and then he holds it with his elbow and passes through never touching the bacteria infested doorknob. Bill was starting to reminds me of Jack Nicholson in that movie with Helen Hunt. Of course any similarity between Bill and Jack was only in the bizarre behavior. The funny part about this is that Bill's constant companion is a filthy offal eating dog who likes to roll in a pile of feces. Bill will not go anywhere without his dog. We make him keep the beast in the car. Dump rules prohibit live dogs wandering around.
"Hey Bill," croaked George, "You wear those gloves when you are whacking off?" But Bill would not dignify the taunt with a reply, other than to display his "fuck you" finger.

(Bill once confided to us that he was so monogamous that he thought about his wife while masturbating in the shower. You can't give that kind of information away and not expect it to bite you later. Like a dog)

Lardass ( who had been in the crapper for about 40 minutes) came out with the newspaper he had been reading. The faint odor of sewer gas followed him across the room.

Bill shouted at him, "Hey, Lardass I didn't hear you washing your hands. Dump Rules say you got to wash the hands before returning to work"
Lardass grinned diabolically. "Didn't you know? We're trying to conserve water this year. Heck, I didn't even flush!"