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One of the several employees that have been fired over the last few months by the old twit that I work for was Eric. Eric was a quasi-tech person whose actual job function I'm still a bit fuzzy on. Among other things, Eric would repair broken desk chairs and move computers from cube to cube...largely due to our boss' frequent 'restructuring' of the office. Eric was also the only person who knew how to change the names on the office phone system...so that when you phoned someone a few cubes over, your name appeared on their phone's console so they knew who was calling.

Once Eric was fired, the names on the phone were pretty much stuck. This being the case, Peggy, who was moved to a new cube, is now 'Carol'. And Terri has become 'Brian'. I am now known as '286' when calling anyone in the office. Now, it's not that it takes an engineering guru to figure this out, rather it's due to the fact that, once fired, Eric took the phone system manual with him. And all those sequences of numbers that have to be entered in order to make the phone system do all those neat little things that phone systems do, such as checking voice mail, changing voice mail greetings, and correcting the employee names to match their new extension, were lost. I had been thinking just the other week that Eric could have had quite a bit of fun with the phone system before he left...perhaps forever changing our boss' real name to something like Jabba the Hutt...forever sealing her fate when she would page anyone in the office.

And, as if some primitive phone god heard my thoughts, this Friday the old twit put a photocopied sheet of paper in everyone's mailbox. This paper contained the instructions on how to change the name function on your phone extension.

And what you need to understand is that providing me with this information is much like locking a group of third graders on a tenth story balcony over a busy street corner along with hundreds of water balloons.

The temptation was simply too great...so I changed my name, and the remainder of my Friday afternoon was spent placing calls to people around the office and hanging up before saying anything. These people would then wander around asking, 'what the hell is going on around here?! Someone named Superman just paged me.' Later in the day 'Jim Beam' phoned our company party girl/most mornings I'm hung over behind my desk girl.

Personally, I found this all to be quite amusing. And in all honesty, I'll probably find this to be quite amusing for the next several weeks. And I'm anxiously awaiting the day that our old twit boss is out of the office. Because, if the phone gods are smiling on me that day, I'll get a chance to spend a few seconds of quality time with her phone.

Of course, the following day when I get a page from 'Jabba the Hutt' to report to her office, I'll know that I'm being fired.

But at least I'll be chuckling on my way out.