Backstories: “Leashing That Smart Mouth of Yours”

When “Youthful Indiscretions” Doesn’t Really Get To The Heart of the Matter

(Backstory: Originally published in the online newsletter The Hell’s Half-Acre Herald in 2000, this is the backstory for the famed Dallas Observer article by Jef Rouner on how my life has been, er, interesting. Oh, if only I had any idea of how weird my life got after the turn of the century…)

As August begins, so does school in the Northern Hemisphere. Thanks to the increase of the two-job family in the States, the concept of summer vacation becomes about as much an anachronism as horse-drawn buggies, left over from the days when all hands were needed to help bring in the corn crop. Twenty-five years ago, school (elementary, high, or college, take your pick) generally started at the beginning of September; twenty years ago, it started in the last week of August. Today, all of the neighborhood kids start on August 14, and some of the local school districts started at the beginning of the month.

Some of these neighbor kids are starting high school this year, and they somehow figure that I have wisdom that’ll make the next four years at least a little less hellish. Naturally, they’re completely wrong, but they ask anyway, and so I tell them of all the stunts I pulled where I’m amazed that I lived to see adulthood. I learned from one of my best friends at the time that pharmaceutical-grade caffeine stolen from the University of North Texas chem lab doesn’t mix well with blackberry brandy, although he loved the stuff. I learned that protesting school political processes was bad enough, but running a person who didn’t exist for Senior Class President is potential grounds for expulsion. Most of all, school taught me a major lesson that moved into the work environment: The People In Charge Have No Sense Of Humor.

See, your mother was right when she knocked your feet out from under you for pulling phone pranks and yelled “That smart mouth of yours is going to get you into trouble one of these days, and I just hope I’m around to see it.” There’s a reason high school and college yearbooks tend to list “Class Clown” and not “Class Wit”: practical jokes are bad enough, but wit is the sniper rifle of humor, and using it on authority figures works about as well as using a full-auto BB gun on a rabid grizzly. Wit will finally take its toll, but long after you’ve become worm chow, which is why William Burroughs wasn’t able to hang onto that job at IBM.

The indiscriminate use of humor in the workplace and the school grounds is always a menace to the one using it. Most of the managers are people who had their senses of humor excised at birth, and far too many compadres are the sort who consider the “Terrance and Phillip” gags on South Park to be too esoteric and obtuse. Anything more than knock-knock jokes is likely to backfire and kill the user. And while the urge to use humor or wit (and these are often mutually exclusive, seeing as how wit can kill from a distance while humor requires the user to get close to a victim) at work or school is sometimes unavoidable, remember the old Army axiom of “Watch your fire and check your targets.”

This originally came up last March, when I was a guest alongside my childhood role model Harlan Ellison at Texas A&M’s Aggiecon. We were both on a panel that was supposed to be about something, but rapidly turned into the opportunity for Harlan and any other of us who could keep up to do our best to keep the audience laughing. Everyone was having a great time (my wife and youngest brother were in the audience, falling down twitching from the stories) when someone asked Harlan “Tell us about how you got fired from Disney.”

Well, Harlan wasn’t about ready to tell that one to the crowd, seeing as how it’s in print in his collection Stalking the Nightmare, but he at least tipped off those unfamiliar with the tale that he had been offered a job as a scriptwriter for Disney, and was fired four hours later for joking about an animated Disney porno film, with Mickey Mouse as the director, Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse as the male and female leads, and Goofy as the producer. (Yeah, typecasting never works, but what can you do?) That’s when I piped up “I can top that.”

Harlan was nonplussed. “You can top that?”

“I can top that,” feces-chomping grin spread wide.

He gave me the microphone, seeing as how I had previously explained how George W. Bush got his nickname “Shrub“, and I told him my worst tale of a lack of humor in the workplace. Namely, how I have an FBI record for selling government secrets to the Daleks.

The date was December of 1987, and I was working for Texas Instruments. Most folks only know TI (which to the grunts stands for “Tiny Income” or “Totally Incompetent”, and “Training Institute” to the managers and engineers) as a manufacturer of cheap calculators and Speak-and-Spell machines. At the time, TI’s main business came from filling government contracts for military hardware; in particular, I was building nose cones for the Hostile Anti-Radar Missile, one of TI’s pet projects. And the work environment was one of the most dysfunctional I had ever seen.

I had turned 21 a few months earlier, and most of my co-workers were somewhere between 20 and 30: an assemblage of rednecks who thought that a TI ID badge meant a lifetime of job security, hustlers waiting for their big break, fratboy wannabes who figured that TI was a fast track to management, bluecollars who just wanted something approximating stability in the work environment, and one smartass who thought he wanted to be a writer when he grew up. With one or two exceptions, the managers were fresh graduates from engineering schools with no experience in the workforce, much less any leadership experience, and the company practically encouraged open warfare between management and the grunts. This was best expressed by the appearance of “The Mad Shitter”, whose laxative-induced commentary on the state of supervisory skills was usually found on the desks of their subjects in the morning, but that’s a tale for another time.

Anyway, I’d had a fairly interesting life up to that point: nowhere near as interesting as life afterwards, but also not as terrifying. Two-and-a-half years before, my family moved to Wisconsin and I followed along, thinking that I was homesick for white birch; nine months later, I moved back to Texas after realizing that I wasn’t homesick for nine months of bitter cold and snow. I finally managed to snag a job as a groundskeeper for that very same Texas Instruments plant in the summer of 1986, and spent nearly two years picking cigarette butts and random garbage off the parking lot until I received a job offer to move inside and become a full-time TIer. Seeing as how I was slowly starving to death at the time, I took the company up on its offer.

The other factor one has to consider was that this was about the time I discovered the joys of science fiction and SF fandom. That is, hunger tends to sharpen the mind wonderfully, and the best way to ignore the urge to start trapping and eating the neighborhood dogs was to read and sleep. Reading made more sense, seeing as how I didn’t have a television at the time, but I received regular offers to head over to friends’ houses and watch television, and that’s how I became, for a short while, a Doctor Who junkie. I was still a kid: what do you expect?

I finally learned how much trouble my smart mouth could get me into came about a month after I started work as an official TIer instead of a contractor. My supervisor at the time was a wonderful boss. He never lost his temper with anyone, and he never called anyone on the carpet unless they deserved it. He was also the only engineer I’ve ever met besides my father who could spell worth a damn, which naturally earned my undying respect. Unfortunately, as with most of the breed, he had no real exposure to the idea of humor, and that was our downfall.

This wasn’t to say that Steve was a dour or bitter man: far from it. He just wasn’t exposed to a lot of japery, especially in the workplace, and he certainly wasn’t used to a lot of wit. Therefore, I didn’t realize that he was trying to be friends when he came up one day while I was feverishly at work trying to master the intricacies of my new job, clapped me on the shoulder (something you really shouldn’t do to someone with razor knives and scalpels in hand, FYI), and asked “So, Paul…sell any government secrets to the Russians lately?”

I should have seen it coming: he was a nice, earnest Mormon, and I was a cynical, bitter Catholic, so naturally our senses of humor weren’t going to mesh. I also should have considered that his life experiences weren’t anything close to mine, and I definitely should have considered that I was working in a position that required a government security clearance. With my youthful naivete, I should have known that my comments wouldn’t be interpreted the way they were intended, but I still looked him in the eye, opened my piehole, and said “No, but I’ve been selling them to the Daleks.”

The only other time I’ve seen a similar expression as on Steve’s face was when I dedicated a song to my old high school homecoming queen at a class reunion. The song, of course, was “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols. He rose up, looked at me with intense interest, and asked “Daleks?”

Oh, God, I thought, I’m in trouble now. I quickly backpedaled, asking him if he was familiar with Daleks. Nope: never mind that anyone born between 1950 and 1984 in civilized areas like the UK, Australia, and Canada gets the joke when someone starts walking stiff-legged, waving a toilet plunger around, and shrieking “EX-TER-MI-NATE!” We Americans are backwards that way. (And if I was pedantic and Anglophilic then, I only got worse when I discovered The Prisoner two years later.) Therefore, to convince him that the Daleks weren’t some strange Muslim splinter group planning to bomb the US back to the Carboniferous, I started to demonstrate. With a toilet plunger borrowed from Facilities. Dear God, I demonstrated.

It still didn’t work: he excused himself for a moment, and then his boss came out and started questioning me about the Daleks. He went away after a time, seemingly satisfied, but they all kept an eye on me for the next two weeks. It apparently took that long to run a query with the FBI to see if I had indeed been selling government secrets to the man-sized salt shakers from the planet Skaro. I lasted another three years at TI, until the 1991 layoffs after the Persian Gulf War took out everyone, but I know that the FBI has a complete record of my alleged attempt to pass on US defense secrets to an extraterrestrial power.

(What’s worse is that the Daleks were responsible for more horrors in North Texas. At the time, I was a regular at a sadly long-defunct club called simply Club Sparx just north of downtown, at a time when Dallas’s PBS affiliate, KERA, was running Doctor Who reruns in big blocks at midnight on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Only Dallas could turn Doctor Who watching into an act of intense subversion, but while most of local fandom was passively slurping up the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the real local weirdos, freaks, protogoths, and other people you really wanted to know were sneaking home at 11:30 to watch Doctor Who at midnight. Club Sparx died for a lot of reasons at the end of 1987, but a big one was that I’d accidentally gotten everyone worth knowing hooked on the show, so the club was half-empty by 12:30. At the time, the Saturday lineup ran from episodes released in 1974 to the present, introducing unsuspecting local iconoclasts to the actors Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy: when KERA held its monthly pledge drives to finance the station and discovered they had a loyal and dedicated fan base, the station started a new lineup on Friday nights at midnight, running episodes from 1963 when the show started to 1974, thereby introducing local fans to William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, and Jon Pertwee for the first time. Club Sparx didn’t stand a chance. Come to think of it, mentioning Club Sparx to coworkers and bosses at TI wasn’t exactly the swiftest move, either.)

The worst part of all this is that I’d never, EVER sell government secrets to the Daleks. The Sontarans and the Cybermen paid a lot more. I just wasn’t going to bring it up right then.

I’ve worked in quite a few environments since then, including the printing plant that nearly blew up three times in two weeks, the insurance company where the entire staff literally sang “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” when the supervisor announced her transfer to a new office (only to be replaced by a duo who reminded everyone who dealt with them of Burns and Smithers from The Simpsons), and the horrors of CompUSA, which is why I cheer every time the company veers toward bankruptcy. Nothing, though, quite compares to the strange, surreal tale of my ordeal at TI. It just makes me want to start singing “You can get anything you want at Davros’s Restaurant…”

As for Harlan, there’s something indescribable about the apprentice being able to top the master, and not the way you’re thinking, you perverts. By the time I was finished, Harlan was laughing hard enough he almost fell off the stage. Subsequent HR managers and recruiters, not so much.

Backstories and Fragments Daleks Harlan Ellison Texas instruments