Little known fact: Jos. A. Banks makes excellent slacks. When a small volume of liquid hits the material, the liquid "beads up" into tiny, invisible droplets rather than be absorbed in a spreading, embarrassing stain. The droplets are then easily dispatched at the scene of the crime using readily available toilet tissue.
Buck salutes the good clothiers at Jos. A. Banks for thinking through the practical considerations of life in Cubopolis.
Buck was wrestling with the old, familiar dilemma: how would he find time to finish the important things he needed to complete when his days were becoming jammed with frivolous pursuits that brought him far more enjoyment?
“Take this blog, for example,” he typed, worrying as he did so that he might not be ready for the client meeting tomorrow afternoon if he didn’t stop goofing off and just use his brain for a few minutes to think through the client’s request. “Clearly this is time that could be better served doing whatever it is Buck is supposed to be doing right now.”
What exactly that something was, however, was not immediately clear, and it was precisely that gray area that Buck hoped to avoid addressing altogether. The client had given him an assignment so murky that Buck wasn’t even sure why they needed him to do it at all. Analyze a proposal that they had already written, forming recommendations based on best practices that they had already decided to discard. Be prepared to talk about the proposed process which had, at its core, a requirement that people should be permitted to bypass it completely if they deemed necessary. This was the kind of non-sequitur that left Buck shaking in his loafers.
His manager was still nowhere to be seen, recovering from surgery, but Buck had been promised some guidance by close-of-business Monday (a promise delivered via an email sent from the manager himself over the holidays), so he delayed the analysis until the expert manager had an opportunity to weigh in. Never mind that the “correct” action as dictated by the natural laws of consultancy would be for Buck to perform as much of his own analysis as possible before he talked to the manager, thus ensuring good feedback come review time.
Meanwhile, just twenty-three days separated Buck from his certification exam date. “If Buck doesn’t use this time to address the client’s need,” he pondered in the third person, “could he not instead use it to prepare for the exam?” This was, of course, a fair and legitimate question, yet Buck had no clue why he was procrastinating the test preparation effort. If he failed the exam then his company would not reimburse him the $200 that he had already spent to register for the exam, an exam that would bring him a certification that he pursued by own choice. This was the key point: why would Buck delay something that would ultimately allow him back into a field of work that he actually enjoyed? Was he afraid of failure, or of discovering his limitations? Was he intimidated by some of his firm’s “techies” and their almost godlike IT skills? Or was the inverse true, and he was actually afraid of success? By becoming truly successful at something and becoming all that he was capable of being, perhaps in the future people would set higher expectations for him than he was willing to accept. In the final equation, was he afraid of responsibility?
The more Buck thought about it, the more disgusted he became with himself. He decided to quickly publish the blog entry before it dragged on, then he’d go on to post a question that he already knew the answer to on a ball python forum. A quick check of his email would come after that, and then he’d call the manager on the phone instead of waiting for the call to come to him. If he had any time remaining after that, then he’d do the analysis.
He could always study for the exam at home later that night. Right after “Heroes.”
But the typewriter is the least of his concerns, even though it is balanced precariously between an unused printer and a box of miscellaneous supplies, threatening to topple at any moment and send our intrepid yet highly infected consultant into the rewarding yet bureaucratically challenging world of workman’s comp. No, it’s the contagion that consumes his every waking thought, drowning him in rivers of phlegm and gnawing away at his sanity until he no longer believes that there ever really was a time when he was well. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine what it must have been like to feel healthy, but despite the awesome might of his powerful imagination, he fails in this endeavor. The dull weight of his every breath is too immediate, too palpable to be discarded for even a moment’s fantasy. In trying to conjure up the familiar feeling of finding the tennis ball right where he most wants it to be and smacking a beautiful cross-court forehand winner against his embattled foe, the wet cough suddenly and rudely intrudes, and the sore throat protests. The imaginary optic yellow
Which is exactly what the doctor told Buck, but Buck doesn’t have the luxury of rest. Buck already took time off last week to “rest,” but the results remain a bitter disappointment. Besides, the project is “fixed-price,” which means it must be completed on schedule or the firm takes the hit, and the top chamber of the hourglass is near empty and draining fast. Meanwhile, Buck’s manager on the project will be out for at least the next week to recover from a medical procedure but has failed to leave our hero with the instructions he promised before he left. Buck is the last man standing on a job that needs doing, so the doctor’s orders – repeated three times as if somehow the man suspected that Buck would ignore common sense – are regrettably discarded.
Now Buck has to extract meaning from a heap of flowcharts the client has given him that pertain to an operational area and subject matter of which Buck has no previous experience. Falling back on the Vanguard principle of consultancy (see the “99 Club” entry of September 29th, paragraph 7), he plans to reach out to experts within the firm, but first he must tie up some political loose ends. He dials up the manager’s cell phone and leaves a voicemail to follow up an email from yesterday requesting the required information. Then, after several hours of waiting, he decides it is safe to proceed up the chain, having given the manager ample opportunity to deliver the goods (which were due last week). The manager’s manager, a large hair piece, is the font of knowledge from which Buck will procure the names of the experts.
One email and two voicemails later Buck still hasn’t reached the head honcho. He is stranded, left to rot in the Cubopolis version of a medieval oubliette, a dank crypt from which the anguished cries of the despairing go forever unheard along with the fading, hollow echoes of a pair of dusty lungs striving explosively to expunge themselves from their languid human host.
So Buck is left to do what Buck does best. He pops a prescription narcotic and some nasal decongestant (either of which he would hastily endorse by name if they would be so kind as to actually work), and gets busy procrastinating. He submits an entry to his blog, this very one, in fact, idly wondering as he does so whether his experimental usage of the present tense really matters in the grand scheme of things, and allows that at least one positive thing has come of his predicament:
He got to use the word “phlegmatic” in a sentence.
*******
The ball python (see "What to Name It?") turned out to be a male, which explained the bargain basement pricing. Females get bigger than males so it was a bit of a disappointment for Buck, but he took it in stride. The creature was healthy and behaving in a manner consistent with an unstressed ball python: he wasn’t curling into a defensive ball when approached anymore, he was curious and gentle when handled, and he hadn’t once attempted to bite anyone but the mice. Since the mice were already dead and frozen and the snake didn’t get them until they were properly thawed, it turned out to be not too scary for the mice.
So Mr. Python was comfortable in his surroundings and Buck was left with a guy snake named Morticia. This would not do. In the meantime, Buck had received no suggestions for names as he had requested in a previous post. So he went, at least temporarily, with the name “Gomez” to keep faith with the Adams Family reference, and Gomez is now the official name on record at the veterinarian’s office.
Yet after that fateful day Buck remained unsatisfied with the name. He felt that people might miss the T.V. sitcom reference and instead interpret some kind of an Hispanic origin, which would amount to a minor educational misdirection since ball pythons are indigenous to western
Besides, Buck feared that yet another name change (Cleopatra, then Morticia, then Gomez) would convince his children and the playfully exasperated Mrs. 99 that Buck was indecisive at best, but probably something worse. Nevertheless, the imperfection of the name rankled like an old sore, or like a phlegmatic cough that stubbornly refuses one’s abjurations for a moment’s tender mercy. Thus he changed back to the present tense to implore you, gentle readers, to settle the score. The three options are:
1. Keep the name as it is, and call the pet Gomez.
2. Keep the name as it is, but call the pet “Mez” (think of how it phonically suggests “mesmerize”, and reflect on Buck’s mental health for asking you to do this).
3. Change the name to “Lurch,” keeping with the theme but evoking the sometimes clumsy way the animal changes his mind about which way he wants to go and, from time to time, tumbles from the couch.
Buck leaves the ball in your court, until such time that he gives up waiting.
Then a reptile exposition composed of independent regional breeders came to town and Buck took two of his girls along to look at all the herps (that’s herpetologist terminology for reptiles and amphibians), and couldn’t help but notice the fine health of the snakes and the bargain basement pricing. He knew from inquiries with trusted sources that the breeders at the expo were reputable and did not import wild caught animals or animals hatched abroad and shipped overseas to the U.S. He left the expo exhilarated at having seen such a huge selection, but he felt deflated because he’d missed a grand opportunity.
