I live in fear of Fred the Mail Guy.  It’s true.  It doesn’t matter that I am a high-ranking member of the IT group at a major business.  It doesn’t matter that I am a certified Microsoft professional.  It doesn’t matter that I was once a cliff diver (literally meaning I dove, er…jumped off a cliff into the water that was, um, all of 15 feet below me…technically, I *still* cliff dove!)

Fred’s a great guy, a really nice man.  You just have to look beyond the fact that he talks to himself.  And spits.  It’s not his fault.  He’s kind of like my dog…meaning he’s slightly ‘bent’.  He’s like a soup spoon, but with holes.  Like a TV remote where the buttons don’t match the labels, and it actually controls other things.  You think you’re pressing ‘On’, when in fact you just activated the rinse cycle on the dishwasher.

That’s the way it is with Fred.  You never know what you’re gonna get.  Except for the spit.  THAT”S guaranteed.  He just gets so excited when he starts rambling on about his favorite sports teams.  It’s the physics of it all.  He has a drool issue, and when you combine that with a lisp, it’s splatter city.  The only safe way to have a long chat with him is if you are wearing a raincoat.  And one of those blood-spatter shields doctors wear is a good idea too.

But the sports chats are what cause me my fear.  If Fred gets you cornered, you might as well start making plans to pee in your pants, because chances are you’re going to be there a while.  You can’t escape from him, and if you try you run the risk of pissing him off.  And yet if you stay and he thinks you’re interested, he could start thinking that you’re now buddies.

What I learned shortly after starting here is that there’s an internal mafia-like protection system that operates under the covers.  You have to pay for certain ‘services’, and one of the most popular is known as Escape From Fred.  You see, the only real way to end one of his one-sided spit chats is to have a sudden excuse.  But it has to be good.  Lighting your hair on fire when Fred isn’t looking probably won’t get you excused…he’l l talk right through your screams (and, chances are, the spit will put the flames out anyway).

So what you do is hire a protector whose job it is to keep an eye out for when Fred has you cornered.  If this happens, your protector is supposed to come by and say something like “Server A, the one that handles all of the company paychecks, just crashed!  We need you NOW!”  That’s the only escape, and it has to be good.

The problem is that I get in early, and so does Fred.  The issue is when I go to get my tea.  I have to run the gauntlet out to the main hallway where the water dispenser is, and where Fred makes his rounds of doom.  I often hum the Mission Impossible theme as I slink around the cube walls, peering down the hall for Fred, listening for any sounds from his wobbly mail cart, my heart racing…

And so it is…I can brave endless status reports, I can tackle sudden server issues, I can breeze through doing live presentations about potential projects I know will never be funded but we invest hours anyway talking about what we’re not going to do.  But I am humbled by Fred, and his Spittle Death Ray.