A Heart Warming Memory

Sometimes, in your work life, all the frustrations and hair pulling become worthwhile and a little karma is dealt out.

A few years ago, my ex-boss, that whiny old assbandit, Mr. Panty-Waist, had been driving me steadily bonkers for about a month with some vague project we were supposed to present our client with. A very “important” project that was so important he never seemed to actually get anything done except procrastinating and complaining a lot about the project that we hadn’t even started, due to his inability to pull his finger out of his ass.

Naturally, this period of ridiculousness involved much foot tapping, muttering under my breath and going into the ladies’ room and shrieking with frustration when after one more day of procrastinating and whining and sulking, we’d be no further forward than the day before or the one before that.

Thursday arrived and Mr. Panty Waist told us he was going out to the Hamptons, where he kept a summer home, for a long weekend, to “think about things”. By “things” we were under no impression he meant “the project” since he couldn’t manage that in his office on a weekday, let alone on a beachfront with a highball glass in his hand and half naked 19 year old blondes running around playing volleyball. Actually, scratch that. Mr. PW is definitely asexual. Those blondes might as well be squirrels. Apparently his wife and kids weren’t going with him, he just needed some “private creative time”.

Frankly, we didn’t care if he went to the Moon so long as he was out of our hair.

We didn’t hear from him until the following Tuesday when he called to say he wouldn’t be coming into the office because he’d had "a little accident" and broken his leg.

We all made sympathetic noises, then had a party after he hung up. I believe cake was involved. And maybe a Panty Waist pinata.

We found out later that the reason for Mr. Panty Waist’s broken limb was that he had sipped one too many Scotch on the rocks and fallen into his pool. Which is funny enough in itself, if you know his mannerisms and great, big, clumsy body, but doubles in hilarity when you find out there was no water in the pool at the time. Hee!!!! How it is even possible to fall into an empty pool is beyond me but I didn’t care. It made my whole week.

This amused us even more than the time someone dredged up some old print ad from the seventies which showed an alarmingly hilarious photo of a grinning Mr. Panty Waist, boasting huge lapels you could house a small Hispanic nation on and sporting a startling, partial mullet, as a TV weatherman in North Carolina along with a caption about Mr. PW bringing sunshine and smiles to your morning. Clearly this TV station's marketing was top notch and they'd obviously downed a few vodkas before coming up with the type. The mere idea of that horse’s ass being on TV talking about sunshine and hurricanes was just unfathomable, yet strangely irresistible.

Anyway, he had to lie in that empty pool for about 2 hours until a neighbor found him and called for help. I wished I’d been the one to find him. I would have paced around the top of that pool very slowly, sipping one of his vintage cellar wines, looking down at him clutching his limb, asking things like, “Does it hurt? Do you want me to get help? If I get help can I have a raise? Where do you keep the top shelf tequila?”

Damn, my fantasies are always so much better than my reality.