Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Fictional Friday

He was a bundle of contradictions. Morose but capable of a huge smile. Lover of the workplace, yet avoider of actual work. Serious of mien, yet hard to take seriously. He lumbered around to various cubicles as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders and indeed he would not take a day off to save his life. Every year he carried over unusued vacation days and would come in even on declared off days.

His presence was naturally startlingly. I’d be minding my own business when suddenly there was the gleaming bald head and gremlin-like teeth and high forehead, the latter which always reminded me of National Review’s Richard Brookhiser’s, though not surprisingly he'd never heard of Brookhiser since he was an avowed liberal who called himself a moderate. Liberals and moderates don’t read Brookhiser.

He had the kind of yogic self-composure that reminded me of single people or the narcissistic. He was the former, I can't speak to the latter. You say blogging is by nature narcissitic and that I’m splitting hairs. Perhaps so.

His presence was contemplative. He spoke of his yoga stretches. He was into psychology and Myers-Briggs and something called “emotional intelligence”. I could've wished for an intelligence a bit closer to the ground. I think: Where's the love for "practical intelligence"? There was, of course, much enthusiaism on his part when his boss asked him to collect our Myers-Briggs scores. I couldn’t help but wish some of that enthusiasm would transfer to our joint project, a project joint only in the way that a man and a goat jointly accomplish the production of milk. Still, the letter of the law was that he was the lead and so if he seemed needlessly authoritarian (for a socialist) then I could deal.

I’d always wondered how others dealt with him successfully. Rumors all had it that he didn’t but of course, in my pride, I always liked a challenge. I would be the one to get along well with him. Ponderous and slow, he approached each difficulty using a two-pronged approach: 1) what was the maximum pain he could inflict on me and 2) how little could something matter and still draw his attention (i.e. why clean a bathroom with a mop when you could use a toothbrush?). Yet he was like Pat Morita in “Karate Kid” -- every job ought be done perfectly, no matter how long it takes and indeed time for him was irrelevant, transcendent. Take as long as you want! Do little things with great love is what he did, though admittedly it wasn’t him doing the work. Laying up large burdens with great love might be said to be his specialty. Still, he had a fine craftsman’s appreciation for quality and he knew that the end towards which we were working was not the company’s bottom line or the utility of the product made, but how well the product was made.