The Dogs of Bore, Part Two: Rorschach's Revenge

(Ed. note: Welcome back! It has been six weeks since I last posted, which is an eternity in blog years. I got caught up in being a rental property manager there for a bit, which turned out fantastically well but took A LOT of time. But stick with me, won’t you? I won’t be this neglectful again.)


When we left the action, Hapless Carpenter and TwitchyWitch Arts Girl had vacated my cube in a sawdusty huff, threatening to return in two hours to inflict art in an undisclosed location. I spent those two hours collating colorful charts and graphs which indicated how many out of a list of 30,000 financial advisors had actually opened each of the mass informational emails BigAnonymous sent them every month for a year. (The emails included links to various documents that were available on our website and told advisors via punchy little blurbs it was my job to write that the documents were, in fact, available on our website.) The answer: not that many. Then I went to my meeting.

When I returned to my cube after the meeting and lunch, about three hours later, virtually all traces of Hapless and TWAG were gone. No more shelves, no power tools, no rubble—just a hint of sawdust on my chair. Huh, I thought. What had they done? More to the point, where had they done it? To understand the answer, you’ll need to know the lay of the land in question:

Take note of the glass wall in the conference room across from my cube. I could see about 85% of what happened in there. Because people often either a) talked really loudly, or b) left the door ajar, I could also hear about 85% of what happened in there. There was no newly installed art in my cube (leaving unanswered the question of why Hapless had chosen to dump the narrow shelves in it) and none on the walls anywhere around me. I was about to walk down the hall looking for—well, for something, I wasn’t sure what—when a small knot of people came out of the conference room all a-chatter.

“But what is it?” said Ivy, a petite brunette with glasses, a fabulous wardrobe and the most sarcastic sense of humor I'd encountered in my wanderings at BigAnonymous. I was a fan of Ivy, not least because as a rule in corporate America I have found that those who crack the wisest tend to be the wisest.

“I have no idea,” said the Mountie. The Mountie was our boss. (For the record, he’s not actually, and never has been, a Mountie; I’ll leave it to you to decide why it’s an appropriate nickname. It could be, for instance, that I think it would be fantastic if he were a Mountie on the side, like a volunteer fireman. Because I do.)

“It just looked like a bunch of Rorschach blots,” said someone else. Their conversation faded as they walked down the hall, shaking their heads. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t hear the rest; they could only be talking about one thing. I ran into the conference room. There, along the solid wall just beyond the glass, were the missing shelves:






They’d been hung in four rows, each about eight feet long. Spaced evenly across the rows was a series of 4x6 inch black frames. In each frame was a black blob printed on a white background. Hapless and TWAG had barged into my cube at nine in the morning, unannounced and in a big important hurry, because they were on a mission to install forty-eight framed black blobs on a conference room wall. Because the blobs were presumably expensive and copyrighted (I know they were numbered, because I checked), I can’t show you a real one. But let’s approximate:








Depending on your budget, you are looking either at a very expensive corporate art installation or at a black blob made in 45 seconds for free on my laptop. For the former, multiply by 48, place in custom-ordered plain black metal frames and line up in rows in a conference room.

Over the next few days we played some spirited rounds of Name That Blob, a game won decisively by a colleague I’ll call the Mailman, for reasons you are again invited to infer. (Like the Mountie, the Mailman is not, in fact, a mailman.) “They all look like pints to me,” he said. We imagined the blobs morphing into 48 silhouettes of cold, foamy beer steins and let out a collective sigh. “Mmmmmm, piiiiiiiiiiints,” we thought. Then we retired the Mailman’s number and hung it from the rafters.

But we got bored with the game, and I got restless. Like Poe's telltale heart, the blobs cried to me through the glass conference room wall, demanding attention. (I wasn’t the only one who found them irresistible. Someone was sneaking into the conference room and turning two or three of the frames around to face the wall; I admired the impulse, but I wanted something with a little more ooomph.) One day, after eight solid hours of taking screenshots of the BigAnonymous web content management system and marking them up with red ovals and arrows and things for a technical guide I was writing--work that is both extremely detailed and excruciatingly boring, the double crucifix of much corporate activity--this picture caught my eye from its position on the interior wall of my cube:








That is a picture of my dog, and as soon as I saw it I knew what to do. Because it doesn’t take a lot of Photoshop skill to turn that into this:







You see where this is going, right? Of course you do.

That night after everyone left I slipped into the conference room and brought one of the frames back to my desk. I slid out the cardboard backing and lifted the blob off the small sheet of glass. I printed out the Rosie silhouette, centered the outline of her giant ears against the glass, slid the whole thing back into the frame and slipped back into the conference room, where I placed it smack dab in the middle of the second shelf down—eye level for most people—hiding, in all its glory, like Poe’s purloined letter this time, in plain sight.

And then I waited.

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Next up: Part Three: Is That a Dog?
Coming much, much sooner than Part Two.

The Dogs of Bore

Part One: The Rubble, The Witch, and The Carpenter

A couple of months after I started working at BigAnonymous I went to see Michael Clayton. Remember, in which George Clooney plays a fixer for a law firm whose client makes a pesticide that poisons people? (I’m not sure why this shocks anyone, as pesticide is poison by definition. My favorite recent iteration of the “No – that’s bad for you?” trope is when someone came out with a study a few months ago that Botox has potentially adverse effects on the brain. This just in: injecting BOTULISM into your FACE could be detrimental to your health! Next up in The Genius’s Handbook: “Razor Blades—Good for Juggling?”)

Besides having the best creepy murder ever (lethal injection under the toenail) and amazing super-androgyne Tilda Swinton at her icy-façade-cracking best, for me one of the movie’s biggest gooses was that the BigAnonymous Building stood in as the law firm’s headquarters, ext- and interior. (I may have yelped slightly when I saw George Clooney walk through the same electronic barrier I walk through every morning.) On the American version of The Office, whenever someone goes to "Corporate," my building is where they go. Apparently—and I haven’t confirmed this, but I found this fun little site while trying—it figures prominently in SPIDER-MAN 2. It’s the width of a city block. The outside is vertical gray metal beams alternating with dark tinted glass, the interior is clad in tan marble accented with narrow slabs of slightly darker marble arranged in geometric patterns, it’s 50 stories high, and Hollywood has decided that, of all the locations they have to choose from, the building I work in every day is the perfect embodiment of nameless, faceless, possibly evil Corporate America. Swell!

In the front lobby is a four-foot high black granite wall from behind which five security guards direct visitors to various tenant firms. Despite two giant planters filled with identical sets of flora (smallish tree surrounded by grassy plants and assorted flowers) on either side, the ambience is best described as “5-star hotel lobby renovated by a prison warden.” The weird thing is, they’re obsessed with having art on the walls. (They’re not alone in this. Corporate America seems to be on a constant mission to prove they have a soul; another firm I worked at, a global real estate company, cleaned out its basement one year and found four huge signed Andy Warhol line drawings just lying around. Apparently someone knew enough to buy them but couldn’t figure out what to do next.)

About six months ago I came into work to find a pile of rubble in my cube: long narrow shelving pieces, a power drill, bags of screws, and some cardboard boxes. At the time I sat in the corner of a hallway across from a glass-walled conference room. As I avoided stepping on the hammer under my desk while I sat down, a harried-looking guy with sawdust in his hair and a toolbelt around his waist came down the hall, followed by a tense-looking woman with long dark hair. The dark-haired woman was youngish and dressed as if she'd just stepped out of a Chelsea art gallery. Her dress was a flashy floral print and she wore thick black eyeliner and super-dark red lipstick; it was the kind of cliché I’d be embarrassed to make up, but here it stood in front of me. “Hi,” she said, in as supercilious a voice as I have ever heard at nine in the morning. “We’re installing a new piece in the conference room, and we need to work here now.”

“Here, like, in my cube here?” I asked.

And she rolled her eyes. She literally rolled her eyes at me. Bear in mind, I had just walked in the door, I had not had my coffee yet, and there was a pile of rubble in my cube—actually, at first there was a pile of rubble in my cube. Then there was a pile of rubble and two extra people, one shedding sawdust on my keyboard and one with an attitude which seemed to convey that a poll was taken amongst those in the know, and that I had been designated a harebrained nitwit who cannot understand art.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but no one said anything to me and I have to put something together for a meeting in two hours. Could you come back later?”

“Okay, sure,” said the carpenter. He unloaded more shelving into my cube. The dark-haired woman glared at me. I swear her nose twitched a little.

“And listen…” I said. “Is there somewhere else you could put this stuff? I need to be able to move in here.”

“Uh, where?” the carpenter asked. He wasn’t rude about it. She was rude; he was fine. He just didn’t seem all that bright. Or maybe, like me, he just didn’t give a damn about his job.

“How about there?” I said, pointing to the obviously unoccupied cube to my right. He looked at me for a split second with a kind of resignation. I felt bad making him move all his supplies, but it was true—I couldn’t get into my chair without knocking into a pile of hardware, let alone move once I was in it. He set to work ferrying the various pieces of equipment from my cube to the cube next door, resembling nothing so much as a worker ant. The dark haired woman watched him for a minute and turned to me, eyes glittering.

“Two hours,” she said. “We’ll be back.”

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Tune in for Part Two: Rohrshach's Revenge! Coming... you know, soon. In the meantime, wretched video. But great song: