I once had a coworker who was very, very strange. It's hard to sum him up in writing -- he was one of those people you really just had to experience in person -- but suffice to say he had led a very sheltered life before entering our profession, which requires you to be at least kind of competent when it comes to talking to people. It did not go well. He was awkward, long-winded and excruciatingly weird.
Watching the demise of the newspaper industry, I realize now that it was probably a good idea to get out of the business while I still could leave on my own terms. Despite that, I don't regret my time working there. You meet a lot of interesting characters at a newspaper. The industry seems to collect rejects and castoffs as long as they’re proficient at working with the language. There's the dude who almost died of a heart attack at least three times a week. There's the other guy who somehow managed to support a family of 30 kids (hyperbole, people) on what a small-town newspaper paid him. There was the photographer everyone suspected of being a pedophile. And then there was Ignatius J. Reilly.
Actually, he wasn't really Ignatius J. Reilly. That's just the name of the protagonist inConfederacy of Dunces, a novel I read years too late to fully appreciate its significance to that time in my life. Having finally read the it earlier this year, I finally appreciate just how amazingly accurate my former boss was in comparing the blubbery blowhard in the book to my coworker.
First, if you’ve never read Confederacy, Ignatius J. Reilly was an overweight, middle-aged idealist who lived off of his mother’s pension in New Orleans. Ignatius rejected many of the trappings of the modern world in favor of Medievalism. He wanted a just king instead of democracy. He wanted a sex-free society. He was fat, sweaty, and seemed to survive entirely on a diet of hotdogs and pastries. The book really isn’t as funny as its premise, perhaps because it drags on a couple hundred pages longer than it should, but the character of Ignatius is really quite brilliant.
And apparently it was retroactively based almost entirely on my coworker. In fact, I had trouble not visualizing Ignatius as the guy who had sat next to me for thee days a week for six months during my stint at the paper. Both the character and coworker were obese with ample facial hair. They both were obnoxiously opinionated and socially awkward. They both seemed a little greasy and sweat stained, somehow. My coworker lived over an hour away from the newspaper, kept his job at his local weekly paper and seemed to share with Ignatius the same fatalism about maintaining a real-world job. No one, not even my coworker, seemed to be surprised when his time to leave came. He just simply refused to compromise on his archaic rules of language or admit that he totally sucked at page design just as Ignatius sucked at doing anything of value.
Luckily, Ignatius’s bouts with flatulence were entirely fictional. I also should probably admit that despite my finding his existence humorous, I actually kind of liked my coworker. He was painfully slow at his job and refused to admit that the English language of journalism in 2003 wasn’t the same as it was in 1925, meaning more work for me, but I was entertained by his bombastic proclamations and his sense that he was always right. He actually managed to be vain about his intellect without ever crossing the line from laughable into annoying, again, exactly like Ignatius.
Despite all of his annoying quirks, what really made me hate the guy was that he borrowed one of my favorite books and didn’t return it before getting fired. I loaned him the book and a month later said he had broken its spine and wanted to take it to a friend who was a book binder to get it repaired for me. I agreed, and a month after that he was fired, still having not returned my book.
Two years later, I got an e-mail from Mr. Ignatius J. Coworker asking me for my mailing address so he could finally return my book. I was shocked. He had somehow searched the Internet for my new e-mail address despite having had limited computer skills when I knew him. Two weeks later, the book was back in my hands, the spine still broken.
I used to work as a reporter at a newspaper managed by a family of idiots. One of my coworkers, whose branch of the family tree sagged dangerously low, used to make phone calls on speakerphone, apparently oblivious to the fact that the entire newsroom could hear him. Our phone system was such that any incoming intra-office phone calls would display the name of the caller on your phone. (This is important.)