Crazy bastards you work with

Lemme seeeee....

Best one's an oldie. Knew a guy at my college paper who wore fake animal parts on his body (like the shit you'd wear as a Halloween costume), along with a photog who wanted to run a pic of two basketball players under the basket, super-imposed on another pic of a guy hold a bag of pot.

 

At the paper before this one, there was a news copy editor, big old guy, with cronic b.o. People refused to use his computer on his days off because he left this greasy film all over everything. The woman who sat two desks down (and worked day shift, before he was there to observe) burned through a can of Lysol a week trying to deodorize. Naturally he was also the standard issue copy desk know-it-all with the condescending attitude and latent Asperger's Syndrome to match.

What made him a cut above your average crazy bastard with poor grooming habits was his infatuation with The Little Mermaid. When it was released in theatres (before my time) he went to see it daily, sometimes 2-3 times a day. When it left town, he would drive two hours to the nearest big city in order to get a fix. Every year, his vacation time gets spent at Walt Disney World (single, no kids naturally). At some point he met one of the animators on the movie, who gave him a PG-13 drawing of Arial. It remains his prize possesion to this day, and he would show it off at least once every other month without anyone requesting he do so.

 

Was he the dude with all those Disney tattoos who was featured in one of the lad magazines a year or two ago?

 

I worked with a copy editor who had a bad case of OCD. The media guides on his desk always had to be in a certain order and he would freak out if one was missing or out of place. He would also Lysol his desk about five times a shift and would take his breaks at precisely the same time every night.

He was great at catching errors, but was a total dick. He was the kind of guy who would let the entire staff know if he caught an error and would call writers on deadline to point out the most miniscule of mistakes, sometimes things like punctuation...

Guys would fuck with him on his days off by moving his media guides and pencils around. He would go ballistic when he came in the next day.

This was years and years ago, and I wasn't in the office that much, but one day another writer and I decided to work in the office to see if all the stories were true... I felt bad, but it was funny as shit...

 

Hey, Zou-Boy, this is your copy editor calling. Hey, asshole, it's minuscule, with a U instead of a second I, got it dickweed? It's 9:47.24, so it's time for me to eat lunch now. Go to hell.

 

Show us what you got, Maestro.

 

That's funny... He was annoying, but he wasn't a dick about it. I never was rude to him. It was just something he did. He did it to everybody, so I didn't take it personally.

I can't imagine it's easy to go through life like that...

 

OK ... there's a newssider at my place. Let's say he's a wee bit socially awkward. Guy went to a party at an editor's place and got banished to the porch because he wouldn't stop fucking the party host's couch. This was after one Bacardi Breeze, I believe, and he claimed he was completely drunk out of his mind. The other week, he puked in the bathroom at the office, didn't bother to clean it up and then said, "that's the janitor's job." OK. Sure it is, douche. Just the other day, he says to an editor (why the topic of conversation was sodomy, I don't know) ... "so (editor), since we're on the topic of sodomy, can you do me a favor?" Screams this across the newsroom. Nice. Also has a habit of getting up from his desk and running out of the office at full run, knocking shit off people's desks and causing a general scene, for no real reason at all.

This guy is one big reason why I'm glad I only spend 10-15 hours a week at the office.

 

VERY VERY CLOSE. Not as quiet as Milton. He also thinks he is cool because he reads The New Yorker.

 

Remember this thread when one of the "loons" sprays the newsroom with gunfire.