The Project

Several years ago, I was the lead designer, architect, and all-round champion of a big project. Everyday I went in prepared for battle with skeptics and naysayers of every stripe. Were it not for my blind devotion to what I knew was right and true, I would have given up—almost did, many times—and turned over the hospital to the inmates. Every day since, however, my design’s been proven to be the right one, by constant practice and testing.

Skeptics, I can take. Blind naysayers, on the other hand, happy to impede progress for various—almost always petty—reasons are the bane of my existence. I can’t stand these people and unfortunately, there were more of these than the former.

As the project neared completion despite its many man-made potholes, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the “CEO” would be handing out certificates of appreciation at a lunch ceremony to project team members. I felt we’d deserved praise especially knowing we wouldn’t be getting any raises—also, free food tastes great, doesn’t it?

With the appropriate paeans to teamwork, something called “shared vision,” and hard work over, the time to dispense that certificate arrived and I found I was excited. Sure, it wasn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, but I like framing shitty certificates, it’s a character flaw.

My name was called, I walked up, shook hands with the Big Guy, had my picture taken, got a nice “thank you for your service” (so this is what servicemen feel like) and walked back to my now cold—and as it turned out—rather crappy spaghetti, a silly smile of satisfaction pasted on the puss. What happened next almost detached my brain’s left hemisphere.

The number one hellspawn, the master of disaster, the naysayer-in-chief, Lord Voldermort himself. Yes, his name followed mine. I hadn’t even seen him in the “banquet hall,” which is what this restaurant called a never-used outhouse attachment to their building. And yet, here he was, walking the same path toward the same Big Guy, getting the same inconsequential “thank you for your service,” same camera flash capturing the moment for the company newsletter, the jaunt back to his lair chair, my smile pasted on his incubus face!

If it were up to this guy, we wouldn’t be here. He’d tried everything short of walking in with an AK47 and shooting up the place. He’d hemmed and hawed. He’d raised objections at such a furious pace, they seemed to meld into a raging stream of endless German profanity. By the second day he was on the project, he’d stopped extending anyone the courtesy of a “hello” preferring a vampiric scowl and toothy snarl.

The most painful part of the project for me wasn’t the many, yellow hours spent devising and conceiving solutions to all the varied technical problems that inevitably attended a project of this size. It wasn’t dealing with the personalities of all the geeks of varying corpulence welded into too-small seats around too many conference tables. It wasn’t the interminable meetings. It wasn’t answering the same interminable questions hurled by people who thought they’d stymie this know-it-all this time! It wasn’t formulating answers to those questions so they’d make sense even to my embryo of a son (at the time) only to see the answer make hardly a dent on their high-tensile-steel armored, Rhino’s backside brains. It wasn’t even dealing with Mr. Personality, Demon Hellion with diarrhea mouth.

No.

The most painful part of this entire thing was that I’d been the one who suggested Dickhead for the team. Yes ladies, I’d been asked who I wanted on the team and recalling a time in the distant past when he seemed nice—I’d taken his talkativeness as a sign of a lively brain, not realizing maggot-infested decay can have the same effect—I wrote his name down and welcomed myself into hell.

And there he was, his goat hoofs cladding past my table, cradling the same certificate I’d just got for doing nothing at all. He’d stopped “working” on the team after two weeks, choosing rather to disappear back into Cesspit Valhalla where the very best assholes are forged. The horns on his head glowed with what I knew he thought was pride, if such a virtuous feeling is allowed to exist in the pure darkness that is his heart.

My hands grew heavy as the slaggy, ersatz gold lettering on the certificate proclaiming the everlasting thanks of a grateful nation to one Frederic Woodbridge, III and his descendants now and forevermore, faded into a puke-green patina. This worthless piece of paper was now well and truly worthless. If they saw fit to slide one of these things across to the one person who had actively worked to sabotage the project, there was no standard, no judgment, nothing. It was utter meaninglessness. Crap. Vapid. Air-filled. Inconsequential. Trifling. Shallow. Weak. Paltry. Putid. Wretched. Magno conatu magnas nugas.

The certificate spent almost a year in the trunk of my car, after which I tossed it onto the top shelf of a bookcase in my study and there it remains still, the paper personification of a black hole.