Wheels of Tragedy
Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 02:39PM Plotkin can walk perfectly fine, which is why he's now confined to a wheelchair.
I was surprised to see Plotkin wheel into my office this morning in a wheelchair, but he assured me he had full physical use of both legs. There had been no accident, no physical injury, nor had any cancerous disease impaired his ability to walk.
"It's 100% mental," he said.
Because he has the full use of both legs, he fears losing it. This became a fear of his when his son offered a prayer of thanksgiving over the holiday and specifically thanked God that his father was not a paraplegic. Since then, Plotkin has been having terrible nightmares about car accidents that leave me paralyzed from the waist down. So now, he will not allow himself to walk mentally for fear of losing the use of his legs physically.
"How do you overcome it?" I asked.
"Hard to say with psychological issues like this," he said.
His doctor did say, however, that if he actually got into an accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, the psychological impairment would go away. So at that point he'd be able to walk psychologically, just not physically.
I guess I won't be able to call his assistant Kristy by her nickname "Wheels" anymore. That would probably be considered insensitive and I'm sure I would be sent to HR yet again because of it.
Plotkin then discussed several critical systems issues they were having in Accounting, which I had absolutely no interest in discussing but nodded and offered a lot of uh-huhs.
I told Plotkin I'd handle everything as long as he put the details in an email and sent it to me. That way my effort to resolve the issues would be minimized to a single mouse click as I forwarded the message to my production support staff to handle.
Plotkin tried turning himself around, but obviously didn't have proper wheelchair operation down yet. He banged his knees and shins on various office furniture in the process, squinting his eyes in pain even though he apparently had absolutely no feeling in either leg. He clarified by saying he could not feel any psychological pain in his legs, but could definitely feel physical pain.
Before he left my office, he turned back and said:
"Oh, and don't worry about your boss. We've got that all squared away."
I looked at him curiously. No, suspiciously.
"My boss?" I inquired.
"Smithee," he said. "He wasn't getting paid. He asked us to look into it. No big deal. We just hadn't received any of his invoices. But he's provided them to us for the past three weeks and he's getting paid now. It's all good."
Well, that's just great. The fraud continues and is completely out of my hands now. But my career's fate now rests solely in the hands of a porn star pretending to be my boss, a man who never really existed in the first place.
Talk about a fucked up situation...
Accounting, Finance, Humor, Office Politics, Satire
Reader Comments (3)
Take this Smithee thing to your advantage, talk with Nick and see what you can get out of it now that Smithee is real...
I think I saw a 20/20 special on this phenomenon...
Bob, good advice. I need to think of all the things I wish Smithee could do but couldn't because he didn't exist. Now that he does exist, I've got to use this to my advantage. As long as Nick cooperates (and why shouldn't he?), this might just work out in my favor.
Remy, I think it was 60 Minutes. Or was it Judge Judy?