Canadian Politics Today

Ted Technician can be a bit of a headache around the office. He is usually pleasant and cheerful, but he is one of those people who always has to be right. He is very stubborn and headstrong and convinced of his correctness. If people disagree with him he repeats himself slowly and more loudly.  Also he magically appears wherever people are talking about something more interesting than what he's supposed to be working on so that he can add his own (assuredly correct) opinion to the mix. One time Good Boss Greg and Engineer Ed made a technical decision, and when Ted found out about it he came stampeding over to explain that he'd come up with a better idea.
Greg: "We talked about that, but we decided against it because of these reasons."
Ted: "...but..."
Ed: "also, we didn't like that because of these other reasons."
Ted: "...but..."
Greg: "Sorry, Ted."
He was overruled.  But that didn't stop him from spending the rest of the day pouting to anybody who'd listen.

Good Boss Greg is great to work for. He's always pleasant and even-tempered and always clear about what needs to be done.  He's got millions of great ideas, far more ideas than Ed and Ted and Bob have time to actually work on.

Engineer Ed is somewhat aloof. He is sometimes friendly and sociable, but often has his head in work. He'll walk down the hallway focused on something and not acknowledge that you're even there.   He is tall, athletic, well-dressed, and somewhat good looking. He can be witty and charming when he's pretending to be human.  Which is not all the time. He might be a clone or an alien shapeshifter or a Terminator robot wrapped in flesh. I am not sure what it is, but there are times when I just get this vague "uncanny valley" sense from Ed that gives me the creeps.  I don't know if I am the only one that senses it. Like on the TV show "Dexter", Dexter has everybody fooled except for the black cop who can see right through his act... maybe it's just me that has this sense that Ed is not all there.  I don't have any reason to assume Ed is actually dangerous. He may simply be very "in his head" a lot of the time, and not reacting to social stimulus. I really don't know.  However, I am pretty sure that if any of my co-workers has a human body in their freezer, it would be Ed. If anybody were to show up at work and go on a homicide spree, I think it would be Ed.  He has this very calm and controlled nature that makes me think that someday he could snap.  I have this vague sense that like Patrick Bateman or Roose Bolton, Ed's  pleasant exterior is hiding some powder-keg of rage and violence just waiting to blow up.

A couple of weeks ago the minions had built a bunch of units that were failing final test, so Ed comes over to my cubicle to explain the situation.  So I dug out the work order and the parts lists that we used to build the units. He looks over the parts lists and says "this isn't right."  And I told him that this was an updated parts list that Ted had given me and Greg had signed off on.

So he goes over to Ted's area and says "Ted, why did you delete these parts from the parts list?"
Ted: "Those parts aren't used in this version, so I wanted to speed up assembly and reduce cost."
Ed: "The unit doesn't work without those parts."
Ted: "...they shouldn't matter, they're only used for ...  ... Oh."
Ed: "So you decided to make 6 hours of work for me to save 50 cents worth of parts?"
(This is the closest I've seen Ed to actually being angry.)
Ted: "uhhhh..."
Ed: "hmmm.  Interesting."  (smiles and leaves.)

I can only imagine that he was smiling at the idea of mounting Ted's disembodied skull on a shelf in his cubicle.


 -k