Hello again! Recaps are here:
Part One
Part Two
I let the Mailman in on the scheme from the start. When he couldn't find the silhouette among the others even though he knew what it looked like, I wondered how long it would take for the uninitiated to spot it. I didn’t have long to wait.
Or rather, I did. I watched through the glass wall as meeting after meeting took place in the conference room. No one noticed a thing. After nearly two weeks, a dozen meetings, and no results, I decided it was time to step up the game.
How could anyone miss it? The answer is they couldn’t. Again I waited.Meanwhile, Hapless and TWAG had not been idle. After leaving my cube, they installed an identical set of 48 black blobs in an identical glass-walled conference room at the opposite end of the hallway. (That’s right, TWO sets of expensive, custom-framed black blobs in one hallway. One hallway in one financial services firm with a bottom line sinking so fast that not long after all this happened, the two other people who did exactly the same job I did were laid off. But that’s for another post. Let’s stick to the tale at hand, shall we?)
The next day’s first meeting passed uneventfully, and then Ivy showed up. In addition to her penchant for wisecracking, Ivy is an extremely observant person. About twenty minutes into a meeting in which the group’s senior management team ran through a mind-numbing series of quarter end numbers, she suddenly pushed back her chair, stood up, pointed at the wall of blobs, and, cutting the Mountie off mid-statistic, said, “Wait - is that a dog?”
Heads whipped around. I frantically dialed the Mailman. “They found it!” I shriek-whispered. “You’ve got to get over here, the whole meeting’s tanked, it’s chaos!”
It was true. The meeting had crashed to a halt. Ivy pulled the rogue frame off the shelf and yanked the backing out of it. “It’s a printout!” she yelled. “It’s a computer printout, someone did this from their desk.”
“Where’s the original?” someone else said. Ivy started opening the drawers in the gray credenzas lining the room. It didn’t take her long to find the signed, numbered original blob in the first credenza drawer below the shelves, where I’d laid it. Carefully. I was more than willing to subvert BigAnonymous’s artistic sensibility, but I wasn’t about to pay the price for destroying its art.
“Holy shit, there’s another one!” A meeting in shambles! Shrieks of laughter! Real live cursing! This was going even better than I’d hoped.
Clearly, this was the point at which innocent me would have noticed the ruckus. “What’s going on?” I asked, walking in as casually as I could. And as Ivy told me someone was replacing the blobs with homegrown silhouettes of a dog, I realized I’d made a potentially critical mistake: I had no idea how to gauge what an innocent person’s ratio of bafflement to laughter to excitement was likely to be. It’s true, I’m an actor, but being a trained actor does not necessarily make you a good bluffer.
“Ha!” I said, possibly a shade too loudly. “Wow, that’s – ha! Awesome!” From behind Ivy, the tallest of the senior managers gave me a look that said, “I’m onto you.” It took everything I had to resist the urge to wink at him.
After a few more wonderings about how long this had been going on, things settled down a bit, though the meeting never fully recovered. People were still buzzing as they left the conference room. I realized if I was going to strike again, it should be that night. And it should be the final hurrah, the doggiest of the dog silhouettes:
The next day, after the third silhouette had been discovered and the last meeting had broken up, leaving the imposters on the shelf mingling with their legitimate cousins while the team wondered aloud who the culprit was, a pair of security guards walked down the hall accompanied by none other than my old friends Hapless and TWAG. They marched straight into the now-empty conference room. TWAG’s nose was twitchier than ever. She stared at the shelves, took a step backward, started counting, stopped, took a step forward, and then looked at the security guards, shaking her head. My heart stopped. Are you kidding? Someone called security? Wait - was TWAG going to win the final battle after all? Could I lose my job over this? It couldn’t be. It could not be.
They came out of the conference room. TWAG, decked out in a shiny black dress and hair pulled back so tight it gave her a temporary facelift, had an angry-whispery conference with one of the guards, who was valiantly trying to dodge her spit. The other guard hovered by my cube.
“Um…” I said to the hoverer. “So, ah… what’s going on?” Trying again to look innocent. “Ah, nothing much,” he said. “It looks like someone’s been stealing those picture things out of the conference rooms. The uh, I don’t know what you call ‘em, those black shape pictures.” For a flash I was even more confused – how could anyone consider what I’d done stealing? I’d taken steps to make sure the real blobs were unharmed. And granted, the paper they’d been printed on was probably acid-free archival quality as opposed to 20-lb white bond, but it’s not like it was gold leaf, so I couldn’t imagine what damage might have been done.
And then I remembered the identical conference room down the hall, with the identical 48 black blobs. Someone down there, in another group entirely, had literally been stealing the blobs. Not just turning them around to face the wall, not replacing them with silhouettes of their dog, but actually picking them up and taking them home.
“You are kidding,” I said to the guard.
“Nah, can you believe people’d steal those things?” He looked at me with a little roll of his eyes, and I knew we were on the same side. “It wasn’t you, was it?” I laughed, partly out of relief, and partly because you just cannot make this stuff up.
“Nope,” I said. “It sure wasn’t. It was decidedly not me.” A few feet away, TWAG was still haranguing the other security guard about the stolen blobs.
They came out of the conference room. TWAG, decked out in a shiny black dress and hair pulled back so tight it gave her a temporary facelift, had an angry-whispery conference with one of the guards, who was valiantly trying to dodge her spit. The other guard hovered by my cube.
“Um…” I said to the hoverer. “So, ah… what’s going on?” Trying again to look innocent. “Ah, nothing much,” he said. “It looks like someone’s been stealing those picture things out of the conference rooms. The uh, I don’t know what you call ‘em, those black shape pictures.” For a flash I was even more confused – how could anyone consider what I’d done stealing? I’d taken steps to make sure the real blobs were unharmed. And granted, the paper they’d been printed on was probably acid-free archival quality as opposed to 20-lb white bond, but it’s not like it was gold leaf, so I couldn’t imagine what damage might have been done.
And then I remembered the identical conference room down the hall, with the identical 48 black blobs. Someone down there, in another group entirely, had literally been stealing the blobs. Not just turning them around to face the wall, not replacing them with silhouettes of their dog, but actually picking them up and taking them home.
“You are kidding,” I said to the guard.
“Nah, can you believe people’d steal those things?” He looked at me with a little roll of his eyes, and I knew we were on the same side. “It wasn’t you, was it?” I laughed, partly out of relief, and partly because you just cannot make this stuff up.
“Nope,” I said. “It sure wasn’t. It was decidedly not me.” A few feet away, TWAG was still haranguing the other security guard about the stolen blobs.
She never noticed the dogs.
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