I'M mad, YOU'RE mad, we're ALL mad here! -Alice in Wonderland

Okay, so you may remember my post about the timer on the light in the bathroom, and you may remember one about the mental state of our customer service people (not all of them, but many). You're going to need to pull on your knowledge of both of those for this one.

Apparently, Customer Service had a temp this morning. He came in 5 minutes late, which is no biggie, but also not a good start. Carly reached to shake his hand and he apparently jumped like he had never been offered feminine contact before. Now, Carly is very nice, but somewhat overbearing, so I'm not going to hold that against him, except to say that it was another sign.

Regardless, she took him to where he was going to be working and had her best worker show him the ropes. So the guy was given a headset for working on the phones and didn't start working until he had cleaned it - for 15 minutes. To paraphrase A Long Kiss Goodnight, I submit to you that there is nothing there worth more than five minutes' attention. At that point, anything on that set was either gone for good, or there to stay. Strike two.

But the work didn't start then, either. He had to go to the bathroom. He was gone for 15 minutes when Carly finally got fed up and decided to go looking for him. She walked by the men's room, and heard "HELP! The light went out and I'm locked in the stall!" Apparently he had been in the bathroom when the light timer tripped and left him in the dark. This bothered him A LOT. He hollered for help like death was imminent, and thought he was locked in and nobody would ever come to save him. Carly couldn't help him without laughing, so she went and got Sean Martin to turn the light on for the guy. If you knew Sean, I could paint you a picture that would have you rolling, but you don't, and I can't put the time into it now to do it justice. Let me just say that I have walked into the dark bathroom on at least three occasions when Sean himself was squatting and using his lighter to find the toilet paper. Point is, it as pretty much the blind leading the blind, or the foppish leading the psychotic if you prefer.

So the temp guy finally gathered himself and went back to C.S. and started pacing and shaking and wringing his hands. The girl that was supposed to help him get going tried to calm him down, but he wouldn't sit and obviously wasn't going to be any good to work, So Carly told her to escort him to the front door. It took 15 minutes to walk him out (this is where I came into it, since I can almost see the front door from my desk). The guy was just standing by the front door, staring into space, looking and mumbling like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman about how he was clausterphobic and how he wasn't sure he could recover.

My thoughts:
In case anyone was wondering if there are people out there too psycho to be customer service reps, here's you're bell-ringing prize-winner.

It struck me that it's possible that this guy isn't really this insane and that he either wanted to take the day off work or was looking for a chance to sue somebody. With all the other stuff going on here, wouldn't it be ironic if the thing that took the place down was a lawsuit from a dude who got blacked-out in the potty by a timer that was put in as a cheapass cost-saving measure? Priceless.