Stolen Burrito

Two years ago, when, I was but a wee lackey at my current place of employment (not that I'm a lot more now, it just sounds cool), the summer was ending and it was time for end-of-summer final reports. All of the interns were required to do a final presentation on their summer work for department staff.

Arbor is a good guy, a good team lead, mentored me a little in digital photography, and gave me my first actually useful photoshop lessons. At that time he was a master's student. He isn't a particularly serious guy, but sometimes I think he really wasn't prepared for the circus of shenanigans that was our program. He doesn't drink, and mostly keeps to himself in his off-hours. He's relatively quiet, and normally fairly calm. I can't imagine him getting really mad enough at anybody to raise his voice significantly, let alone punch them. He's also a notoriously picky eater.

He came in early to the presentations with them and put a white plastic bag down on the desk with a thud. One of his team members pulled the handles apart and looked inside. Arbor looked at her and grinned, "they're for when we're done, I figured you guys deserved it."

"They finally get yours right?"

"Yeah," Arbor replied grinning ear to ear, "Going to be great, with this deadline I haven't had a square meal in days."

The presentations started shortly after.

If there is something I have found it is that as seriously as some government employees enjoy taking themselves outside the workplace there are other people who delight in acting as absurdly as possible behind closed doors within the system. I think enjoy the fact that it quietly ruins the "men in black" mystique and (not so) quiet sense of self-importance that attracts so many government employees despite the low wages. They could also just be clinically insane or just trolls. I'd like to hope I'm one of the latter two.

My (at the time boss') boss Crash was, classically, a little late. He walked in while most of the program was intently listening to the current presentation and sat down briefly at one of the tables, pausing for about a five count. He then stood up again, removed his sunglasses and poked around at the contents of the table by the wall. His eyes glanced over the plate of fresh fruit provided for us to eat during presentations briefly and then turned to a plastic bag next to it.

"And as you can see," the presenting intern was saying, "by varying the shutter speed of the image we can get various portions of this darkly lit room in good quality while others are either too dark or blown out. If you combine these images with this software you can gain a single composite image with all portions appropriately lit in excellent quality..."

"Ish thaf," Crash started before thinking better of it and swallowed the portion of the burrito he was eating. He then pointed to the projector screen which currently showed a sample image the intern had taken in a dark closet to prove the software. "Is that a dead body?"

"No," the intern sighed, "its a mannequin." There was a short awkward silence before he shrugged and said, "Don't ask me, I just work here."

I found that statement wildly hilarious but felt significantly bad laughing at somebody during their final presentation. Instead, I pretended to have a slight cough and turned my head away from the presenting student in a pathetic attempt at subtlety. This was how I caught sight of Arbor.

Arbor looked like a five year old who had just been told Christmas was canceled, like somebody had just killed his puppy, like Milton from Office Space asking for his stapler back. He was just staring at the food Crash was eating.

If I thought Arbor looked depressed upon his first discovery of Crash's mistaken conclusion that the burritos on that table were up for grabs like everything else, that was fairly minimal compared to the expressions Arbor made during his presentation. Crash grilled Arbor fairly ruthlessly (as was Crash's job) about all of the work he had done. I suppose that constitutes a new low: having your summer's work publicly ripped apart by your boss' boss as he eats your dinner in front of you.

Arbor was quietly upset about that burrito for some time. It isn't that he would sit around and whine about it. Instead you would catch him looking sad, and when prompted he would sigh "Crash ate my burrito." That was probably the funniest part of this whole incident. I guess it isn't in Arbor to confront somebody on something like that, so he sulked about it for weeks on end instead. I've never seen somebody to let down over a five dollar food item.

Somebody might have told Crash, but I didn't, I figured it wouldn't get Arbor back his burrito anyway. Additionally, at the point where he is upset about it a whole week later, whatever it was that upset him so much probably didn't have a whole lot to do with the burrito anyway.

So today, almost two years later, I'm having lunch with PJ and we're catching up about this and that

Pika: Did you hear about Arbor? He's a big shot now. They were flying him to Italy three weeks ago to speak at a conference.
PJ: Seems like things have worked out well for him
Pika: Did you catch him in Atlanta? He IMed me and asked for your phone number.
PJ: Yeah, we caught up
Pika: and?
PJ: We were standing on that big outdoor escalator at Georgia Dome when all of a sudden out of nowhere he said "I still can't believe Crash ate my burrito."

Poor Arbor :p