Hydrogen Footprint as Personal Crisis: Let the Facts Be Heard!

 

Several of my less tainted colleagues have requested that I take a step back and invest some quality time in adjusting my hydrogen footprint into a more neutral, crowd-defying territory. Normally, in a case like this, I'd come at them with two fists blazing, but I had to admit that they made some good points. And some bad ones as well. I took to keeping lists of every time they were observed in the hallway. One time I caught one of the more flagrant abusers asleep underneath his car during a major work staffing perfuke. This got everyone's personal needles pinned to the red. I wasn't done yet, though. I knew where he kept his lozenges and arranged for one to go missing. This was time that he would never get back. But, all in all, there was still the nagging issue of my atrocious hydrogen footprint. Could I afford surgery? No, but this wasn't in the cards just yet.

I prepared an ambitious yet evasive series of counter-moves. I knew that my supervisor had allowed a suspicious liquid to be introduced into my sanctity bag. It was obvious from the way his shoulders stooped that he wasn't getting any younger. I invited him and his young wife to accompany me on a solo camping extirpation. They would travel in a third car and by the time we met up later near a dry creek bed, I'd spring my findings on them as if I didn't have a care in the world. I knew I'd get a rise out of them, but, sincerely, that's hardly the word that I would use. I'd use a very different word. One that'd have me eating paste for a week if anyone thought they knew better, which they did. But that's not the one I'm thinking of. For that you'd have to go all the way back to the beginning and calculate the odds of running into a stranger who sort of resembled someone you knew a very long time ago. Yes, it was that serious. I shit you not.

In the coming weeks I had my own rather baleful awakening and further resolved to go all in. When one of my more attractive pross-comps unveiled a lucrative proposal into a virtual feeding frenzy of probationary hypectors, it was more like barking up a barren tree than anything else I can think of. They were each given a sheet of paper and told to go wash up. I was the last one in the room so I took my good, sweet time. I took her hand tenderly in mine, and, very slowly, asked her just what the heck she thought she was doing. She turned tail, left the room, the building, the whole goddamned facility itself, for Christ's sake! I waited her out for the next three years and now I hear she's undergoing fertility treatments. If you couldn't look at her for more than five seconds, you'd think I was making this whole thing up! This is why I always maintain a selection of dots, each one corresponding to one of my named enemies. Any dot whose flavor starts to veer into acridity will tell me which 'average Joe' I have to keep an eye on. If it wasn't for this system, I'd have been out of here long ago. If you could humble yourself just a might, now would be a good time to say (or think) a simple 'Thank you'. You're welcome, I'm sure.

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