One More Typical Day - The Office Party

Clawing, snarling, and hungry for human flesh.

Bloody perforations staring. Teeth gleaming with a sheen of saliva and blood.

This is not how I pictured myself going out. Not like Droopy. At least I won't be duplicating his exact demise. There'll be more fight from my corner than just a melodramatic sigh and grunt of incomprehension as my innards are scooped out.

Scissors and pens.

Somehow this sudden 180 from office routine to cannibal death-trap doesn't strike me as all that out-of-left field. If I had suddenly gotten rich, then I might be suspicious. This smacks of Euclidean Universe # 1's interesting sense of humor. I always figured I'd get eaten alive in this endless career-bloodbath. This occurring in the literal sense at least provides an opportunity for some good cardio.

Scissors and pens.

They move in, sightless, drawn by some intangible sense of my presence, the ragged holes in their faces giving away more than their glazed eyes ever did. A rumpled middle aged man with level 12 male pattern baldness and severe back problems comes lurching toward me. First in line for a meal, hey Elmer? He tries to get a good grip on me, and to his credit, this change in status from trampled piece of bureaucratic gristle to blood-spewing cannibal thing has given him a more robust appetite, but he's only as fast as his body will let him be. Not going that easy, Elmer.

A Bic(tm) pen occupies a linear portion of his brain pan, inserted through his conveniently vacant eye socket. He drops like a narcoleptic marathon runner, giving one good splurt of thick blood from his ocular orifice as he collapses.

If only Frank Frazetta were here now.

He could really capture this moment--cubicle barbarian selling his life, and contract position, dearly against hordes of the hungry and brainless. Although he might be tempted to flesh out my abs a bit.

As they pile onto me now, I find myself having to kick and punch to remain free of their desperate and grasping claws. My clothes are torn. I lodge a pair of scissors in an older woman's mouth, driving the point up through her hard palate. Her face jets blood and she flops idly to the ground as I wrench the scissors out of her maw, splitting her nose and upper lip wide open.

Scissors and pens.

Blood splatters and squirts. A pen thrust into an ear canal here. Scissors rammed down through a skull there. A pen stabbed up the nose repeatedly here. A pair of scissors transfixing the base of a neck there.

The last hurrah for my abused arsenal results in a longish-haired gentleman having his head removed from his neck and lower-jaw by a deft little scissors-in-mouth maneuver which I admit I completely improvised. As he drops to the floor fountaining blood, his tongue keeps waggling around looking for the rest of his mouth.

In spite the novelty, this isn't getting me anywhere.

Well, shit. I'm not unfamiliar with this observation. If you've looked at my academic and job record for the last two years, the sentiment seems almost a universal truth.

However, now my scissors are broken, and I'm out of pens, and this pack of blood-weeping maniacs isn't getting any smaller.

I need a real big fat office solution.

Time for yet another fit of incredible improvisation. I unhook my key ring and make a dash around my slavering friends toward the copy machine. Reaching my destination after hammering one man's skull against a desk and accidentally impaling it with a paper skewer, I employ the screwdriver attachment on my key ring toward the task of disassembling the paper slicer.

Not much time. Of course, there never is. Especially when you're standing at the copy machine. And there's a line. Like right now.

This line wants to tear me to pieces and devour me raw. So did all the former copy machine lines, but back then they pretended to observe etiquette. At least these bursted-eyed freaks are honest.

I kick one in the chest (I never could have gotten away with this yesterday) and keep at my task. At one point I have to pound a dishwater blonde graduate assistant's face to pulp with an SOP manual, but eventually I have unhinged the large, heavy-duty blade from the paper slicer. It even comes with a convenient handle.

Who says a young unmarried male with little or no social life has trouble starting his own party?

Bring it on. In the land of the blind cannibal things, it's way easier for me to kill everyone.