Sarcasmus

Sarcasmus (sar’kaz’-mus): Use of mockery, verbal taunts, or bitter irony.

I couldn’t stand it any more. My fellow workers had shunned me. I’d say “Hi!” when I got to work in the morning. Each day a different colleague was designated to “break the shun” and insult me for no more than a minute right after I said my cheerful “Hi.” Today’s insult was “You’re so stupid a worm could beat you at Clue.” It was straightforward. It was a low blow. It was definitely an insult, but something was lacking. I tried a comeback “You’re so stupid a worm could make a better insult than you.” He folded, blushed and went back to his desk while my colleagues sat there like my comeback was about their mothers.

I worked at “Bev’s Bureaucracy.” We made our money by looking busy while we did nothing. We would be subcontracted by “businesses” that needed to look like businesses in order to thwart investigations or attract investors. We fronted all kinds of corruption, frequently changing locations and operating under the names of our contractors. Our last location was Clifton, New Jersey where we fronted an accounting firm for a fake doll clothing company called “Ba-ba Boo-boo” that had never produced a stitch of doll clothing and actually ran a chop shop in a warehouse outside Clifton specializing in Land Rovers, Jaguars, and convertibles of all kinds.

Since I was sitting around all day, I got really good at Sudoku. I played on-line on a site called “So-Duke-Who?” I entered a tournament. I won the tournament and it was a big deal. I was interviewed on the web after I won. That’s where the trouble started. While I was being interviewed one of my colleagues walked behind me on camera with a cardboard box full of handguns that we were “holding” for one of our clients who had “wrestled them free” from a sporting goods store. Caring for handguns was a little outside of our mission statement, but Bev wanted to expand the reach of operation. Anyway, the tournament show host was stunned by what he saw and wanted to know “what the hell” was going on. I calmly told him they were Nerf guns that we used for office bonding—we were going to be nerfing that afternoon. Right after I shut down my computer, I had our ITS guy make sure all traces of the interview were wiped from the net, from host computers, from everywhere. He was a preeminent cyber-criminal, best known in the world’s shadiest of shadiest circles for cracking the Bank of Oman. If anybody could pull off the clean up of the damage I had done with my sudoku vanity he could do it. That’s when the shunning and daily insult had begun.

I probably should have been fired, but in this business that means permanent dismissal from planet earth. I knew I was still around because Bev was too cheap to hire a hitter. It was six months since the catastrophe. The persistence of my colleagues was admirable. Their insults were getting better. Accordingly, I wanted it to stop. I managed to get a meeting with Bev to talk about it. When I entered her office she said “Oh look! It’s the flying scum bucket! What do you want shitbird?” I asked her to stop the shunning and the insulting, but it looked like it wasn’t going to happen. She said, “You almost got us sent to prison and you want me to play nice with you—you walking puss bag! Get outta here you fu*king glory hole!”

That was it. That was my fate. As the years have passed and I’ve remained friendless at work and been the target of millions of insults, without wanting to, I have started absorbing them and assimilating them. My back is lined with pustules, my feet smell like Roquefort cheese, dandruff is heaped on my head, countless other “insultables” that have taken up residence on and in my body. I still work for Bev. She made me a portable cubicle with a ceiling to keep the smell in. It goes with me wherever Bev’s Bureaucracy goes. Bev says I’m a monument to fu*king up, but I’m just a dipshit who’s good at sudoko.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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