The Ryno Pen

Dear Both My Readers, I’m sorry I’ve been absent for a few days, but I’ve been doing some fairly intense winnowing through the collected papers and belongings at Chez Ryno.

Ah, the cruft I’ve sent to meet its Recycler! Oh, the odd things I had totally forgotten I owned!

Then, I turned over a piece of paper and knew I had to share its history…

In 1995, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I was dumb enough to get myself in the way of a major back injury. Dumber yet, I did it in my own time, although at the house of somebody who had public liability cover.

Anyway, I was off work from my public service¹ job for four months. Not only was my Cassandra-like request for an understudy “in case I get snotted by a bus” suddenly a regrettable oversight, but my one man project had become a bit of a hot potato. Questions Had Been Asked at a high level not long before my fall, and now the promises, made in haste, could not be kept.

¹ “Public Service” was what government employment was once called. Don’t suppose it would be fair to call it a service to the public these days.

Naturally, there were calls for a suitable scapegoat. The short straw is traditionally reserved for the bloke who’s absent when the straws are rigged fairly and randomly distributed. And so it was, I received a call, asking me to “come to the office for a few moments”, about a week before my due time to return.

We’ll gloss over the difficulty of getting there, the vast tract of footpath between the disabled parking spot and the door, and the testudian progress of your humble blogonaut-on-a-walking-stick. Let’s just say: painful, took bloody ages, and hoped it was important…

I arrived, and Ms Darth-Vader-Helmet-Hair (a recently-rotated-in boss) motioned me toward a small conference room, stepped in behind me and deftly closed the door.

“Your work performance over the past few months has been unsatisfactory.” (Ah, the subtle poignard!)

“Yes, I’ve spent the time on lying motionless on my back, getting used to walking again, and the like.” (Hey, it wasn’t me who set this up as a “no witnesses” mock-counselling-interview. If I’m getting screwed, I intend to rumple the bed!)

“What is more,” quoth I, “my imagination is currently peopled by squat, hairy, Mongolian tribesmen, all of whom are armed with various nasty pointy things which they intend to use on you. Slowly.” (If you’re going to go all official on me, then I will insist on my exact words being used, and People Will Laugh At You.)

I turned as fast as my stick would allow, and shuffled away in a smouldering fury.

It came to pass that I returned to work, to find my job “reorganised”, and Penfold, a crony of Ms Darth, some two pay-rates higher than me, in charge of my brainchild.

^Penfold

Bitter? Moi? You bet your bits I was. Nearby was a bookshop, situated along a walkway used by the hundreds of members of my government department en route to the major shopping mall. The owner, A, was an old friend, and I sometimes spent my lunchtime there. Occasionally customers would borrow one of the cartoons and quirky signs A displayed in her window and on her back wall. These became part of the vast waste of employee time that was faxlore. I understand faxlore has since evolved into the LOLcat, or one of those horse-choking FWD’ed emails.

My intention was to waste government employee time and/or motivation, to at least the equivalent of my indignities. I contributed this:

There is a sort-of epilogue:
Because the rules, being what they were, had meant I exhausted all my sick pay during the time off, but forbidden me from converting accrued holidays, I faced the prospect of returning to work demoted, but with a couple of months of holidays banked up. I’d been working flat-out for a few years.

As Arnold J Rimmer once said, “Who lives by the rules, dies by the rules.” I’d been stitched up by the system: what could the system do for me?

Aha.  A bit of checking, and some Union representation, paid off. Apparently, since I had accrued the holidays with the expectation of continuing at the higher pay rate, I was entitled to take my holidays at that rate, before the demotion became effective. Result! The 12.5% leave bonus came in handy too: that four months off had left me close to skint.

And so it was, that I lay relaxing on a warm plank deck in the sun, occasionally answering my cellphone and telling an increasingly-desperate Penfold that, now I was demoted, I could not possibly function on such an advanced level and tell him any of the technical things he had absolutely no clue about, and anyway, I was on holidays!

“Carry on, old man: Darth has every confidence in you!”, I said as I hung up, yet again. It was worth the nuisance of answering the phone just to do the refusals.

And the cartoon? It was sighted in the wild in Perth and Brisbane within weeks of its release into the wild. Computers aren’t the only thing you can slow down with the right script.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 2:16 am and is filed under Humour, art, humor, memories, people stuff, revenge, schadenfreude, stupid people, workplace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.