The Gummy Wars
By M. M. Garcia, author of “Hate Mail”
There isn’t much to look forward to at the Daily Times. We get popcorn on Wednesdays. Fridays are office casual days, which means we can wear slacks, the same thing we can wear every other day, only on Fridays we may don any color not just khaki or black. We can get crazy with some blue or green or even pink slacks, although anything too colorful would certainly raise an eyebrow.
There is a barbeque every summer on the Fourth of July and the company serves up burgers, hotdogs and runny coleslaw. We are offered one can of soda and an individual serving of potato chips to go with our holiday meal. I guess you could look forward to that. You could even strive to become employee of the month so that you’ll be rewarded with a parking spot right next to the employee entrance of the building, and even retain this prestigious spot for an entire 30 days.
Then there are the gummy bears. There is a plastic jar, shaped like a cheerful bear that sits on the large filing cabinet in the advertising department and that jar is perpetually brimming with gummy bears. The office manager buys them in bulk at the local outlet grocery store for seventy-five cents a pound. She puts a cup next to the gummy bear jar with a sign that says, “Tips.” Once she put a dollar in the tip cup and somebody stole it. We all know the company buys those gummy bears, not the office manager, and it’s one of the few meager niceties that they feign on a regular basis. In other words, they fucking owe us those goddamn bears and there’s no way in hell we’re kicking down a penny toward them.
The first time I saw douche bag Danny, the creepy sales guy with a Hitler haircut who never spoke to a woman unless he had to, reach into the jar with his grimy fist and manhandle the gummies, I swore I’d never eat out of that jar again.
But sometimes when I walked by that filing cabinet I would spy those colorful, chubby bodies floating in there and even though I knew they were likely suspended in a sea of bacteria, there were times when my need for sugar outweighed my germ phobia and I would reach in, grab a fistful and try not to think about it as I savored their fruity goodness.
One night, while I was working yet another overtime shift, everybody had gone home and I was doing one of my anthropological examinations of the sales reps desks, where I walk from desk-to-desk learning what I could based on the artifacts left behind. Mona, you could tell, was one of those older ladies that had a messy house, a middle-aged son whose life she meddled in too much, and judging by the box of Romance novels she kept tucked under the desk, probably hadn’t been laid in at least ten years. Other people had less stuff on their desks, but you could still discern a few things. Who was messy and who was clean, who had kids, who liked to golf, who had a sense of humor and who was totally boring.
Gary, for instance, had nothing but a Seattle Mariners mouse pad, a glamour shot of his wife in a cheap plastic frame, and a copy of Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing a Sale on his desk. Later on he would add a Yogi Berra-ism-a-day calendar and this would lead me to believe that he was probably an even bigger douche bag than Danny.
I went on these excursions after everyone else had gone home, usually while on my way to the photocopier or while I waited for a FAX to go through. On this particular night, someone had bitten the heads off of a dozen gummy bears and left them in a circle on Jake’s desk. Jake was one of the younger advertising guys. He was nice, maybe a little like a grown up frat boy, but the fun frat boy. The kind that does keg stands and takes embarrassing pictures of his buddies when they pass out.
I called my friend Samantha who worked in the design department so she could witness the spectacle with me.
“Wow, that’s pretty fucking cool,” Samantha said.
“Yeah, it’s a good idea,” I said thinking about how those stupid gummy bears represented everything that sucked about working at the Daily Times. They represented all the overtime hours I’d be screwed out of, the lack of Christmas bonus, the twenty cent an hour raise that I’d been given and most of all, they represented the Lexus SUV that the publisher drove and parked everyday next to the employee of the month.
“I could kill those bears in a much more interesting fashion,” I said.
“Like how,” Samantha asked? I knew whatever I came up with, Sam would help me execute my plans.
“How about an itty-bitty guillotine?”
Most people, most normal, boring people would laugh about something like that, but they would never actually go home and devote a Sunday to constructing a gummy bear execution device. But I was the obituary writer and was, therefore, expected to be a freak. It was a reputation I had no problem living up to.
I started with toothpicks for the frame and added a cardboard seat and head brace. I cut a hole in the brace with an Xacto knife for the gummy heads to go through. I wanted to use a real razor blade on a string for the chopping element, but decided that this might get me into trouble. Instead I made a mock blade from aluminum foil and suspended it with hemp string to mimic rope. I painted the entire thing black, including a plastic lid from a soda bottle that functioned as a head-catching basket. I brought my creation to work the following Monday and showed it to Samantha.
“Oh my God. That is amazing,” She held the tiny guillotine up, inspecting my craftswomanship.
We set the guillotine up on Jake’s desk that night after the advertising department went home. We place a green headless gummy bear on the guillotine and filled the basket with multi-colored, severed heads. Then we position a gummy executioner next to the guillotine with his hand on the hemp string. Finally we add a gummy audience standing in a semicircle around the sacrifice watching with expressionless candy faces.
We giggled as we took pictures of our death scene diorama. Then we went home.
The next day, Jake pokes his head into my office.
“Um, somebody left a surprise on my desk last night. You wouldn’t know anything about that would you?”
Grinning like a Cheshire Cat, I say, “What’s it worth to ya?” Everybody knows the sales reps make base salary plus commission.
“Oh nothing,” Jake casually replies, “but I wouldn’t want to be that person.”
“Oh really,” I say, playing along.
“Really. I fear they will suffer retribution at my hand.”
“Well that person is truly in for it,” I reply. “Everyone knows about the creative energy brewing in the sales department. It’s a hotbed of revolutionary thought.”
Jake feigns irritation. “If I didn’t know better I’d call that a challenge.”
Our stunt was soon the talk of the office. I overhear some coworkers discussing the implications of our gag. They wonder if we are emotionally disturbed or just have too much time on our hands. “My kids keep me too busy for shenanigans like that,” Gary tells his cubicle-mate Rod. Even those who pretend to be shocked or disturbed by our stunt, have to admit that it gives them something to talk about around the old water cooler. Something besides the latest episode of 24 and who is going to get salesman of the year award earning that coveted extra week of paid vacation.
Two weeks go by and Jake had yet to seek his revenge. In the meantime, I spent several hours per shift thinking about new ways to kill gummy bears. I imagined a gummy iron maiden and gummies drawn and quartered by My Little Ponies. I imagined gummies impaled on toothpicks and Frankengummies assembled from chewed up parts.
By the start of the third week, Samantha and I become increasingly concerned that Jake would let our challenge go unmet. One day, as we eat our sandwiches in the lunchroom, we formulate a plan to strike preemptively.
Samantha and I both bring a toy car to work the next day. Samantha chooses a blue truck with large wheels and lights on the roll bar. I pick a red convertible with doors that open. We meet out behind the building where the trucks pick up the newspapers to be distributed throughout the city, and we proceed to beat the crap out of our toy cars on the cement. A few dock workers watch us with quizzical looks as we giggle knowing what mischief we are up to on the
company clock.
Later we sneak into the advertising department for a handful of gummy bears. I put them on the lid of a Tupperware from Jake’s desk and microwave them for twenty seconds. Then we string gummy bear guts all over the mutilated cars simulating a gummy car accident.
By the time Jake finds the wreckage we left on his desk, everyone on the advertising side of the building knows that Samantha and I are behind the gummy terrorism.
It wasn’t terribly surprising when I arrived at work two days later and found a cookie sheet, covered with gummy sharks swimming in blue jello. The sharks appeared to be attacking helpless swimming gummy bears and ripping them to pieces, a bit of red food coloring trickled down the mutilated body of a gummy and pooled around a particularly aggressive looking gummy shark. Jake had upped the ante.
Samantha and I wait several days before we respond with a pre-historic gummy diorama depicting dinosaurs chewing gummy bears to shreds. A plastic pterodactyl hangs from the shelving unit above the desk, a lifeless gummy in its claws. A T-Rex tramples one gummy, while ripping another in half and gnawing on the head of a third. Other gummies languish in the tar pit made from microwaved gummy bears turned black with food coloring.
Jake retaliates a week later with a gummy battlefield, complete with gummy bears smooshed under tank tread, gummies blown apart by grenades and strung from tiny barbed wire fences. Still more gummies cower in bunkers with machine guns and a gummy bear pilots a tiny replica of a Stealth bomber.
It was around this time that we started noticing that pranks were taking off around the office. Somebody steals a ceramic cat off of Cody’s desk and then leaves him ransom notes demanding tins of Tender Vittles every day for a week if he ever wishes to see his lucky cat again.
Samantha and I are fingered as the cat thieves, but we insist that our devious activities are confined to a general gummy theme.
Someone else steals Samantha’s mouse off her desk and leaves a cryptic note that reads, “You never used me so I ran away for a snack.” She finds her computer mouse has replaced a can of Red Bull in the lunchroom vending machine and it costs her three dollars to retrieve it before she can start work.
One day someone steals all the staplers from the entire advertising department and leaves Office Space themed clues around the building, forcing those in need of staples to hunt from supply closet to abandoned desk in search of their Swinglines.
I kept thinking that one of the managers was going to point out the obvious, that we were wasting precious company time on our little games. I mean, this is a company that required me, the obituary clerk, to have pre-approved overtime, as though clairvoyance or the ability to control life and death were requisite skills in my line of work. But nobody ever complained about our pranks. I think it was because the managers collectively realized that our stunts were boosting the dismally low morale around the office. Suddenly people weren’t complaining about the low salaries, the overtime or the fact that we’d been out of popcorn for the past two Wednesdays. Instead people hatched plans, plotted revenges and had a little fun.
On the day I quit, I decided to enlist Samantha’s help for one last prank. We used approximately half a dozen newspapers to wrap Jake’s entire cubicle in several layers of newsprint. We covered his chair, his desk, his phone, his pencil holder, his pencils, his stapler, his tape dispenser, his picture frames, his filing cabinet and even his lunch bag that he’d forgotten to take home with him.
I experienced a strange moment of melancholy as I stood looking at my final newspaper prank. I knew I wasn’t going to miss the corporate bullshit. I could happily shed the monthly pep talks, the overtime hours and the emails sent from a mysterious CEO that opened with the touchingly personal line, “Dear Daily Times employee.” All of those things I could easily relegate to a place in my distant memory, but I realized at that very moment, that it was the mischief and the merriment that I would later long for.
I was leaving the Daily Times to start graduate school, a move that I hoped would eventually lead to a “real job,” and by “real job” I mean one that comes with respect, actual pay increases and possibly, dare to dream, a parking spot. Still, as I stood there gloating over all that newsprint, I couldn’t help but wonder if a “real job” would also mean I’d have less fun. Once you start caring about your future with a company, I wondered, won’t you also stop trying to piss them off? If I started towing the line, if I stopped rocking the boat, how much enjoyment could I really get out of any 9-5 activity?
As an afterthought, I attached a single post-it note to Jake’s newspaper covered chair upon which I left my final words. They were meant for Jake, it’s true, but they were also meant for the bosses, the publisher, and the CEO and all the other people who didn’t have to settle for gummy bears and popcorn Wednesdays.
It was a message to the corporate cheerleaders whose job it was to keep us fearful for our jobs, non-unionized, underpaid and overworked. In black Sharpie on yellow sticky note, I left these two words: “I win.”
And yet, as I walked away, I pondered the idea that perhaps, maybe, I had lost something, too.