Log #0005: A Fish Story

A Dilbert Office. A Worker Rebellion.

I got a polite, if clipped, email back informing me that these methods were PROVEN to improve efficiency and cut costs (although no one has yet been able to explain to me exactly how). Furthermore, if I had any CONSTRUCTIVE criticism (does that mean "agreeing with them?") I was welcome to share it with my committee representative.

Now I was not only "not on the team," I had a "bad attitude." Fine. Clearly more drastic mocking was called for.

I went shopping to find the most obnoxious toy fish I could. Plus a barbecue fork. (Some of you see what's coming already.) I found a suitable candidate right away. This thing was awful. Smarmy expression, and if you squeezed its fins it sang or made bubbling noises. Truly a crime against humanity and fishdom alike.

I took it to a coworker's house, where she had her camera ready. After disemboweling it of its electronic guts, we impaled it on the barbecue fork, poured a little torch oil on it and lit that sucker up.

Flaming Fish

Children's toys burn marvelously well, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It was a great spectacle with lots of smoke, melting polyester and flaming filler. Very cathartic, somehow. We took an entire roll of photos, though I wish we'd had a camcorder to capture the entire experience.

Flaming Fish

We shared the photos discreetly with known sympathizers. I wanted to put some in a blank envelope and leave them anonymously on the committee leader's desk, sort of a la that horse's head in The Godfather, but my coworker convinced me not to. She pointed out the Powers That Be would take one look and know immediately from whose mind this must have sprung. So I refrained.

Flaming Fish

Some of my coworkers found the photos hysterical. One dubbed the incident the "Fabulous Flaming Flounder." The photos got passed around, tacked up in various places, and yes, the bosses saw them. It didn't change a thing, of course. Such tongue-in-cheek worker rebellions as mine never change anything. My boss was annoyed, the visiting "expert" was offended (ha ha), and some of the committee members took this as evidence that I was cantankerous and probably unstable. The fish madness continued unabated, however. The one upshot was that none of them bothered me with this particular nonsense ever again. The entire hospital got subjected to this idiocy, but I didn't have to have anything more to do with it. They just.... left me alone. Which was really all I ever wanted in the first place.

I'll take my small victories where I can find them.

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Fish photos are ? 2002 to F. Smith, partner-in-crime par excellence.

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