Ladies and gentlemen, there's something behind your neck that smells oddly like mustard gas. Or is that sulphur? I worked at mid-level market research firm in Seattle washington in 2003. I talked on the phone to different people continusly for hours. I asked them about their health. I asked them about their employment, about their ethnicity; their income; their insurance; their martial status; their mental stability; their diseases; their sexual preferences; their sexual behavior, but never their credit card. Up on the 3rd floor we were all generally fucked up. I met some oddball folks working there.

Len was a giagantous, curly-orange long-haired, bearded, intensely freckled, 43 year old, lunch box carrying ex-convict; recently released. He wore shorts that were affendingly small and tight that skinny, young bicyclists would wear in the seventies. Usually they were aqua-blue and he would wear an aqua-blue, red, black, and white stripped t-shirt. He rode his bike to work and wore those damn shorts even in the dead of a rainy, washington winter. His skin was harmfully tan in the summer. His fuzzy, matted beard was a mixture of brown, gray, red, and white wires that had no equaling length. He talked with a moaning drag at the end of every thing he said; which was likely to regard sci-fi B movies, particularily the ones directed by Fritz Lang. Het ate the same thing every day; sardines with Tabasco sauce on bread. Every day. At the same time listening to something on his pocket radio and looking out the third story breakroom window. If he spoke during his lunch, his words were usually followed by sporatic flying bits of food.

My cubicle was aside a very large, warm, carismatic black buddist women's named Simrajah. My working space was always very stark and cold because I never wanted to mentally invest myself in my job and the time I spent there because it would quickly turn me into a depressed monster. I had to separate my life outside of work from my life at work so much though that I wouldn't decorate my cubicle with personal flair. I enjoyed the feeling that I was always on the move and could have another job, or live in another town without notice. I believed that if I put up a bunch of pictures and brought stuff from home, then I would turn into the same zombie dead-end man as the people around me who had been working there for twenty years.