Phlegmophobes Beware!

The situation is dire. Buck is buried deep beneath the bowels of his latest client’s downtown super fortress, stationed within a cramped, abandoned supply closet, facing an unknowable direction on the compass, miles of twisted passageways and security checkpoints from anything even remotely resembling a window, and surrounded by heaps of forgotten paper products, printer cartridges, envelopes, and, if his weary eyes are not mistaken, an ancient relic from a bygone era, a machine once known simply as a typewriter. “You’re kidding me!” he rasps in amazement through his disease-ravaged larynx when it dawns on him what the obsolete piece of junk next to him actually is. “I’m trapped next to a fucking typewriter?!”

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 Wilson 2 ball dies on his racquet and flops meekly into the net as he doubles over in a hacking, phlegmatic seizure. His opponent trots victoriously to the net but wisely spurns the customary handshake in favor of remaining germ-free. “You should get some rest, you sound awful,” he says to Buck.

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 29^th, 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 Africa, not Central America. “Does it matter?” you might ask, and you would have a very good point on several grounds. First, who cares what people think when they hear the name? Why should Buck care what people think? Second, Buck can barely find anyone outside of his family who doesn’t despise snakes in general, so folks probably won’t even register that the pet has a name at all. They’ll hear “snake” or “python” and that’s all the evidence they need to prove there's a menace living within the 99 household, other than Buck himself, of course. Third, ball pythons are, after all, quite deaf and wouldn’t come anyway even if they could hear you calling them.

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.