Grumpy stirs the pot

No one really learned until much later what had been going on, but Grumpy had finally formed his plan and was about to pull the irreversible trigger that would set it in motion. He would eventually receive most of the credit for the coup d’ état that was being launched, but his narrow little mind couldn’t have known the full extent of where his carelessness and wasteful self-aggrandizement would carry everyone involved.

It was nearly midnight when the plot was finally vaulted into cyberspace. Grumpy sat in the near-total silence of the night at his computer in the Transportation office pounding on the keyboard. His face was red and the veins bulged in his normally long, flaccid neck. The voice inside his head had slowly played a crescendo until it was fortissimo and searching for a rest. Beads of sweat formed in the night time heat of the plywood office as he repeated to himself, “I ain’t afraid of you! I ain’t afraid of you!” With every repetition of the phrase, though, he realized that he was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t really afraid, but the vise clamped down on his gut and he knew that if he really committed himself by actually pressing the ‘send’ button that Maxx would be the last face he’d want to see. Maxx had left for three long weeks. Grumpy knew that he had time to pull this off if it would work.

The letter that he was sending would go directly to the Ethics Hot Line more than half a world away, but Grumpy knew that the repercussions would resound in his far-off corner of Iraq, and that the resonance would be thunderous as the entire corporate world would be brought down around Maxx’s quiet, peaceful life. He looked at his letter one more time and hesitantly reached up to hit “send.” He watched with demonic glee as the blue bar count percentages as the computer sliced up the information into tiny bytes of information and then rushed them off to Houston.

Grumpy’s hand shook as he pulled it away from the mouse. “Done!” the voice in his head screamed. It was finally over. Grumpy was about to change the direction of his life, but what he didn’t think about, or care about for that matter, was that the lives of everyone who would come into contact with his anger would be changed as well.

By seven in the morning the realization of what he had just done had grown and now loomed huge in his mind. The vise had nearly cut off his breathing and his heart struggled to beat as the voice continued to whisper in his head, “You’re a dead man! You’re a dead man!” Grumpy struggled to get himself through the shift change with the drivers and then he drove the white Chevrolet pickup truck to the dining facility to try and ease his tightness by picking up some more Rip-its. He downed two of the energy drinks at the DFAC before taking the rest of them with him to the truck. “You’re a dead man! You’re a dead man!” The voice taunted him and he knew that he would have to act fast to save himself before Maxx returned. He bumped quickly along the back road of the base, through the morning emptiness that gave him some comfort. Even the passing vehicles had become invisible and he failed to return the friendly waves of the passing drivers as his mind focused in on his hope of salvation.

He pushed the door open to the Operations tent and walked down the plywood hallway to the office of the base manager. “I need a transfer,” he trembled. “I need to go to another base just as soon as you can get me out of here.” The large, steel-hard man sat behind his desk and stared at Grumpy, his dark, deep-set eyes narrowing. “Why do you need a transfer?” Grumpy choked as he began to spin his tale of terror in the Transportation department. “I sent a letter to the Ethics Hotline and I need to get out of here before Maxx comes back.” Sam, the site manager considered the request momentarily. “I’m sorry. I can’t give you a transfer. You’ll have to go to H. R. and see if they can help you.”

Panic had set in by the time he opened the door to the H. R. office. “You’re a dead man! You’re a dead man!” the voice screamed. Joe, the soft-spoken H. R. supervisor listened quietly as Grumpy related the horrors of working in the Transportation department and how Maxx was continually threatening, intimidating and abusing him. “I suppose we’ll have to have an investigation before we can do anything,” he finally responded. Grumpy already felt like a dead man as the voice screamed even louder. The vise would never loosen its grip on his gut until either he or Maxx was gone from the base.