Skip to primary content

Badger

THE FIRST THING I SABOTAGED was the date function. For what it's worth, and I offer this not as a defense but simply to note the sequence of events, I didn't plan this in advance, I didn't sit around thinking how nice it would be to sabotage the date function on Nancy's computer. Rather Nancy approached me with a request. She needed help moving the bottom margin of one of her proposals, and while I was moving Nancy's bottom margin, I noticed this problem she was having with her date function, or with her time function actually, and this is what gave me the idea to sabotage her date function, her problem with her time function.

I should say that Nancy doesn't understand anything about computers. She's the sort of person who thinks of a computer as some kind of fancy typewriter, the sort of person who indents paragraphs by tabbing each line individually, so that if she happens add a word or two later, all these weird tab-length spaces appear in every subsequent line of the paragraph, which means that she has to delete all the tabs from that point down and insert new tabs at the beginning of each line. It's lunacy.

When I first started working at the Institute, I tried to show Nancy the proper way to indent paragraphs, to find and replace text, to set up columns—simple things like that—but Nancy refused to listen. When Nancy had a problem, she wanted that problem solved. She had no time for technical mumbo-jumbo, as she put it. She had datelines to meet, proposals to get out. Without the money that Nancy raised, there would be no Institute—that in effect was Nancy's unspoken attitude. So when Nancy asked me to fix her bottom margin, I simply went into the Document window under Format and changed the bottom margin setting to three-quarters of an inch. I didn't bother showing Nancy how to do this herself, despite how simple it is, because by this time I had learned my lesson. You couldn't teach Nancy anything. Nancy already knew everything that Nancy needed to know, and whatever Nancy didn't know was obviously technical mumbo-jumbo. Knowing this, I didn't offer Nancy any free instruction in margin-setting, nor did I make any helpful comments about the forced page break command, which lord knows would have made her life a lot easier. Instead I kept my mouth shut and simply did what Nancy asked me to do, nothing more.

That is, except for the date function. As I was about to head back to my office, I noticed that the clock on Nancy's computer was running a bit slow. Normally with something like that, I would have adjusted it immediately; it's simply a matter of changing the setting in the appropriate control panel file. But in this case I decided to wait until Nancy went to lunch, so that I wouldn't have to spend another thirty seconds in her presence. That's how much I disliked the woman.

I was going say despised. I was going to say that that's how I much despised Nancy. But did I actually despise Nancy? Well, if I did, I certainly never indicated I did. On the contrary. I was always quite friendly to Nancy, as she was to me. Although of course I mean friendly in the professional sense of friendly, which is to say that each morning Nancy and I would greet each other in a loud, friendly voice and inquire, as appropriate, how the other was doing, or what the other had done over the weekend, and the like. So yes, I was always quite friendly to Nancy, or at least I pretended to be friendly, which was better I suppose than openly expressing my hostility. Because that's what I actually felt toward Nancy: hostility. She was an obsessive thanker. Whenever you did something for Nancy, you got thanked. You didn't even need to be doing it for Nancy. Sometimes Nancy would thank you for things like replacing the ink cartridge in the fax machine or changing the bottle on the spring water dispenser. But it wasn't just that she would thank you beyond all reason and proportion; it was what was behind these constant expressions of gratitude and appreciation. This is what really got to me, this is what boiled my blood—Nancy only thanked you because she wanted certain favors down the line. Thanking was a technique Nancy used to ingratiate herself with people so that she could later exploit them. I saw her do this time and again with the Institute's donors, and what's more, I saw the results it produced. Nancy was far and away the best fundraiser the Institute ever had, in large part because she knew who to thank and how to thank them. This is what made it so painful, so infuriating to deal with Nancy—the fact that she believed that I did favors for her not because I'm a decent person, not because I enjoy helping people, but because of how much she had previously thanked me. I found it insulting. But that wasn't even the worst it. Far worse was Nancy's practice of framing her more significant requests, the ones I might possibly object to, as though they had come not from her but from some higher power, namely the board of directors. To hear to Nancy tell it, she was but a lackey for this insatiable group of micro-managers. She used the same technique with the Institute's auditors, which is how I learned it was a technique—by overhearing her tell the auditors that the board of directors was concerned about various things that the board of directors had never even heard about.

Still, despite how much I abhorred Nancy's methods, the incessant thanking and the lies about the source of her requests, I don't believe I began to actively despise her until I discovered that she was trying get me fired.

*

It happened by chance. On my way back from lunch one day, I stopped at my mailbox to see if I had received any calls. As I did this, I happened to glance in the direction of my boss's mailbox (my boss's mailbox was directly below mine), and there I saw, at the top of my boss's mail, a memo addressed to me. Suffice it to say, I'm not the sort of person who reads other people's mail, but having noticed my name, I quickly scanned the memo to see what it was about. As it turned out, it was a memo I had received that same morning from Nancy. Or rather it was a copy of that memo; that is, a blind copy, a copy distributed without the knowledge of the original recipient. At the top of this blind copy, in the upper right-hand corner, Nancy had written, simply, FYI, Nancy.

I will be the first to admit that I would sometimes mistakes on my financial reports. These reports are quite complicated, and it can be difficult to determine, say, if a certain check has come from a corporation or a foundation, since a lot of corporations have their own foundations. Consequently I would make mistakes now and then, and when I did, Nancy would always catch them because she was the one who knew the information. All of which was fine with me; in fact I appreciated Nancy's help. But here she was telling my boss. Why was she telling my boss? There was no need to tell my boss.

Not that I minded my boss finding out about my mistakes. My boss knows the quality of my work and has complete confidence in me. Besides, I'm not the kind of person who needs to hide his mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes and I don't pretend to be different. Still, there was no reason to inform my boss of these particular mistakes. These particular mistakes were between myself and Nancy. My boss had no need to be shown mistakes made on reports that were essentially sketches, as it were, works in progress. I didn't want to think this, but there was really no way around it, no other interpretation: Nancy was informing my boss of the accuracy, or rather the inaccuracy, of my financial reports, and had been doing so for some time. Why else would she have written FYI, Nancy? This FYI, Nancy indicated that the memo was part of an ongoing discussion between Nancy and my boss, one that needed no exposition, one that could be referenced with a simple FYI, Nancy. How many such memos had Nancy sent to my boss? How many times had Nancy written a memo that on the surface was addressed to me, with my name in the "To" line, but that was intended, in reality, for my boss?

All day long I fantasized about how to get back at Nancy, how to take my revenge. I'm normally a very conscientious worker, even a bit obsessive, but on this day I couldn't concentrate. All I could think of was this imagined scene in which Nancy would show up in my office, asking for some computer-related favor. That's when I would pounce. "Look, Nancy," I'd say, "I'm sorry but you're just going to have to do it yourself because I'm busy right now and my work is no less important than yours."

Ah, but the sad truth is that I always did exactly what Nancy asked me to do, I always dropped everything for her. Doubtless I'm fortunate she didn't need any favors this day, because I would have caved in, I know it. And I would have suffered for it, I know that too. Not that I didn't suffer as it was. You see, I knew I wasn't about to confront Nancy. I knew that my little fantasy of revenge was just that, a fantasy.

In any event I'm not claiming any justification for what I did; I'm simply stating what I did. And what I did was, I went into the Date and Time file on Nancy's control panel and changed the year from 1998 to 1898. A week later Nancy appeared in my office with a stack of proposals. Apparently the date in her computer was wrong. It was one century off. Consequently all of her recent proposals were misdated, as she had used a macro to insert the current date in each proposal—a macro, for what it's worth, that I had previously created for her.

"This is so weird," I said, glancing through the documents. "I wonder how this could have happened. You didn't go into your control panel, did you?"

Nancy said that she didn't even know what a control panel was.

"No, I didn't think you did," I said. "It's just that it's so odd, the computer losing a century like that. I wish I knew how this happened. In any case, I'll take care of it as soon as possible. Please let me know when you're going to lunch, so that I won't have to interrupt your work."

True to form, Nancy insisted that I deal with the problem immediately, so that's I did, I went into Nancy's control panel and changed the date back to 1998. While doing so, I couldn't help notice how happy I felt, how serene. I realized that I hadn't felt this good for some time, that the situation with Nancy, particularly the blind memo incident, had affected me more profoundly than I had realized. For this reason I decided to shorten Nancy's key repeat rate.

A full day passed before Nancy came to me complaining about her keyboard. It seemed that certain letters would appear two or even three times each time she typed them. I had her show me what she meant, then I tried it myself. Sure enough she was right. I tried typing, The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, but it came out badly. The word lazy, for example, had three z's.

"I see what you mean," I said. "It looks like a problem with your key repeat rate."

After resetting Nancy's key repeat rate, I changed her preferences so that all her documents would open in outline view. Next I changed her default font to Wingdings, then I altered her closing salutation macro so that her name would be spelled Namcy with an m. I did other things as well. Each time I fixed something, I sabotaged something else. I confess I enjoyed it immensely—why else would I have kept doing it?—although there were times when I would feel a bit guilt-stricken and tell myself that Nancy and I were even now and that I should stop. The problem, though, is that I didn't really want to stop; I was having too much fun, and besides, my relationship with Nancy had suddenly improved. Basically I didn't get so upset anymore at how much she thanked me or how often she tried to hide behind the board of directors. Plus I confess it became a kind of game, a sport, and that I relished the challenge of thinking up new things to sabotage. In fact I made a rule that I couldn't change the date function again or repeat any of my other "adjustments." Each act of sabotage had to be different, original. That was my rule and I stuck with it; otherwise the whole thing would have been too easy, my advantage as the Institute's de facto "computer guy" too great.

Of course at the same time, I knew that what I was doing was wrong and that it had to end. In fact one morning I felt such shame about it that I resolved to sabotage just one more thing, just one, and that would be it. The next day I made the same resolution: just one more. I did this continually. I continually resolved to commit one final act of sabotage—for the road, for old time's sake, for whatever reason I could come up with—and then a few days later I would change my mind and decide to commit just one more, just one—my finale, my swan song, my coup de grace.

No doubt it would have gone on like this indefinitely, with one so-called final act of sabotage following another, only there finally came the day when I ran out of ideas, when I had sabotaged Nancy's computer in every way I could think of and there just didn't seem to be another way to do it. This frightened me. I couldn't imagine going back to how things had been before I changed Nancy's date function, and I wasn't sure I could do it. It would be, I thought, like voluntarily walking into a prison cell and closing the door behind me.

I tried to approach the problem with logic. I made lists of everything I knew about Nancy's computer, its systems and functions, and then I asked myself what could be done to temporarily alter each of these things. But it was no use. Everything I thought of I had thought of before, and if there was something I wasn't thinking of, I couldn't think of how to think it.

This same night, to distract myself, to get myself to think about something other than Nancy's computer, I called an old friend. This friend, a writer, happened to mention a story he was working on about a badger, about a situation in which a coffee shop worker is having a conflict with his boss about a badger that lives in the yard behind the coffee shop. It is revealing of my state of mind this night that my friend's story inspired what I thought to be the solution to my problem.

The next day I stayed late at work, and then the following morning I popped my head into my Nancy's office. She was at her desk reading the Wall Street Journal. "Hey," I said, "I know this sounds kind of strange, but last night I was passing by your office and I thought I saw a badger crouched under your desk."

Now, in saying this, I realized how silly it sounded. How would a badger have gotten into the building? One could perhaps accept a rat or a mouse, but a badger? No, a badger was going too far, I see that now. However at the time I found it funny and absurd, the thought of a badger living at the Institute. I mean, badgers like to dig, don't they, that's the main thing they do, they burrow underground. But of course there's nowhere to burrow at the Institute, there's no dirt. The floor is made of concrete or steel or whatever they use to make floors in office buildings, and below the floor is another floor, or rather a ceiling, so a badger would have nowhere to dig to, assuming it could dig, which it couldn't because the ground is made of some incredibly hard, nearly impenetrable material. Basically the Institute is badger-proof. Not that anyone bothered to make it so. It's just that office buildings by their nature are not very hospitable to badgers. Still, despite the absurdity of the idea, I considered this a brilliant solution to my problem, a classic example of going "outside the box," of "right-brain thinking," of all the crap they talk about in books on creativity.

Nancy gasped. "A badger?" she said. "You saw a badger under my desk?"

"Well, I can't swear it was a badger," I said. "It could have been another sort of mammal. You know, a weasel or maybe a raccoon. Although I don't think it was a raccoon because it didn't have those Ôraccoon' eyes, if you see what I'm saying. Or maybe it was a chipmunk," I said. I was enjoying this immensely. "Except that chipmunks are a bit smaller, aren't they? Or are they? You see, we didn't have many chipmunks where I grew up. I grew up in the city. Of course if it was a rat, I would have known it was a rat. I know what rats look like. Chipmunks on the other hand—"

Nancy interrupted me to ask when I'd seen the badger, the exact time. I said I didn't know. Seven o'clock, seven-fifteen. Something about how Nancy asked this question aroused my concern. Or perhaps my concern wasn't aroused until Nancy got down on her knees and sniffed at the spot where I had supposedly seen the badger.

"I don't know," I said as Nancy wedged further under her desk. "Maybe there wasn't any badger. Maybe it was just some sort of optical illusion, the way the light fell. You know, it's dark under your desk and I was standing a good twenty feet away."

Nancy grunted and wiggled her butt a bit, as if to disagree.

"Really," I said, "how can there be a badger in an office building? There are no badgers in the city. You don't see badgers on the street, or even in the parks."

Nancy ignored me and just kept rooting around under her desk and sniffing very loudly, almost snorting. I began to worry that one of our coworkers would hear her from the hall and come in to see what sort of animal Nancy was keeping in her office. Fortunately it never came to that, although what happened was no less mortifying. Nancy sprang up, took a legal pad from her desk, and wrote the word BADGER in large block letters at the top of the first page, underlining it several times. Seeing this, I knew I had gone too far. I hadn't imagined that Nancy would take this badger thing so seriously. I had thought, perhaps stupidly, that it would be just like the date function and the key repeat rate and all the others; that I would place a little obstacle in Nancy's path, then remove it. However there seemed no way to remove the badger.

Nancy wanted to know precisely what the badger had looked like, the color of its fur. I said I didn't know, I wasn't sure, that it was dark. Then Nancy put down her legal pad and announced that she was going to go discuss the badger with the maintenance guy. I tried to talk her out of this, repeating several times that it couldn't have been a badger I'd seen, but Nancy wouldn't be swayed. She got it into her head that other people in the building had seen the badger and that the maintenance guy was keeping a log of badger sightings.

After Nancy had gone to talk with the maintenance guy, I went to my office and spread some papers around my desk so that it would look like I was working. Soon enough, Nancy walked in and sat in the extra chair.

"Hey, how'd it go?" I said, trying to be cheerful and matter-of-fact.

Nancy nodded but said nothing. I didn't know what to do. I waited.

"He laughed," she said finally. "He laughed at the idea that there could be a badger."

"Well, he's probably right," I said. "When you stop to think about it, it is kind of laughable."

"Laughable?" she said. "No, I don't think so."

The next day I overheard Nancy talking to my boss in the copy room, and I distinctly heard her say the word badger. I went straight to my office, expecting my boss to walk in at any moment with questions about the badger, but my boss never appeared. In subsequent days it became clear that Nancy had broached the subject with other staff members, and that her badger obsession had become a target of office derision, particularly among the support staff. In the main recycling bin, I found a copy of a faux memo, undoubtedly created by one of the interns, that featured a cartoon badger with Nancy's head—the likeness was striking. This badger had a speech balloon coming out of its mouth. In the balloon it said, The board considers this a top priority. Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Lost in all this was the fact that I, not Nancy, had actually seen the badger, or had claimed to. This made me realize that Nancy hadn't told anyone about my role in the matter, perhaps in recognition of the fact that I wouldn't have made a very convincing witness.

Nancy did not, however, forget me. In subsequent days she took to stopping by my office to ask if I seen the badger, or any signs of the badger, and also to report on what she had learned about badgers from the various books she was now reading on the subject—several of which, I couldn't help but notice, were intended for children.

I told myself that Nancy's badger obsession was bound to blow over, that there weren't going to be any more badger sightings because there obviously wasn't any badger to be sighted. This proved to be wishful thinking. In fact in many ways I began to notice that Nancy wasn't doing so well. She stopped thanking me so much and also stopped correcting my financial reports. I even made a few deliberate errors one time—obvious errors, egregious errors—to see if she would catch them. Nancy said nothing. I tried telling myself that I was exaggerating, that I was simply seeing what I afraid of seeing because of how guilty I felt, but it wasn't so.

This is all I thought of for weeks. I began having trouble sleeping. I couldn't eat. Instead of working, I would catch myself thinking about Nancy and the badger. And then one day I finally realized what I had to do. I laughed when it occurred me. The solution had been there all along. I had to find that badger. Not the one at the Institute, of course. That one didn't exist. Instead I had to find a different badger, a real badger, and bring it to the Institute and put it somewhere where it would be discovered.

*

Knowing nothing about badgers except for what Nancy had told me, I called my writer friend, the one who was working on the story about a badger in a coffee shop. I thought that since he had done research about badgers, he might be able to tell me where I could find one and how to capture it.

He laughed when I asked him this. That is, after first laughing at my predicament.

"You have no idea what badgers are like," he said. "Badgers are vicious. Even if you managed to catch one and put it in a box, which I don't think you could, the badger would screech for days and wouldn't stop screeching until you let it out of the box, at which point you're going to have one very unhappy badger on your hands."

"Well, what if I got another kind of animal?" I said. "A raccoon or even a cat?"

"I think you need to tell Nancy the truth," he said.

"But what if I put the cat, or whatever it is—let's just say it's a cat—in a box, an empty computer box? I put the cat in a box and then I simply carry the box, with the cat in it, through the front door of the Institute. Who would ever even guess there was a cat in there?"

My friend didn't say anything because my friend didn't need to say anything because it was all too obvious what I had to do. The whole thing had gone too far, it had spun out of control, and if it meant losing my job, if it meant being disgraced before my colleagues, I still had to do it.

That night I sat at my kitchen table and wrote out what I needed to tell Nancy, the key points. I copied these points onto three-by-five cards and arranged the cards in various configurations, looking for the right order. As it turned out, there was no right order, because there was no order that would save me from what I had to say.

*

First thing the next morning, I went to Nancy's office. She was sitting at her desk, thumbing through one of her badger books. I asked if we could talk.

"Will it take long?" she asked.

"Not long," I said. "And it's important."

I shut the door and sat down.

"Nancy," I said, "to be frank about this, we've had some difficulties over the years. We've not gotten along that well. There's been some tension between us, some unacknowledged animosity. I don't consider it anyone's fault. I know you're a good person and that you do wonderful work here at the Institute. But we've had some difficulties, you and I, and I've felt hurt sometimes by how you've treated me."

"I want you to know that I'm truly sorry I didn't say anything before. I'm sure that if I'd had the courage to approach you, we could have worked things out. However I didn't have that courage and instead I let my feelings fester to the point where I felt I had to strike out at you. It was wrong, I know, but this is what I did: I secretly altered some things on your computer. I don't know if you remember when the date changed to 1898. That didn't happen by accident. I did it myself, deliberately, because of these feelings I had. There were other things as well, the key repeat rate, the default font, I can't remember them all. And then there was the badger."

Nancy sank down in her chair. "The badger?"

"Yes, the badger. I made up the story about the badger, that I had seen a badger under your desk. I don't know, I suppose I thought it was funny, the idea of a badger. I don't know why a badger would seem funny; it certainly doesn't seem very funny right now. In any case I meant no harm by it, you've got to believe that. I just had no idea how much it would affect you. I would take it back if I could, but I can't. All I can do is tell you the truth and apologize. I want you to know I'm willing to leave the Institute if that would be best. I love my job, but I'm willing to leave it."

Nancy looked me in the eye for the first time. I saw tears well up. She dropped her head, composed herself, then looked up again.

"I can't tell you how much I appreciate this," she said. "I don't know a lot of people who would do such a thing. I've worked with you for six years and I feel like I don't really know you. Still, I have to say that as kind as this is, it's really not necessary."

"Not necessary? I felt I had to let you know the truth. I had to end this."

"It's incredibly sweet of you," she said. "I can't tell you how much it means to me. But still, there's no reason to lie."

"Lie? Why would I lie? This is the truth. This is what I've done. There is no badger."

"I understand what this is about," said Nancy. "You're concerned about me and so you've made up this story."

"Nancy, who would make up a story like this? This is the truth. There was never any badger. There was never anything. It was just something I concocted to get you, and I'm so sorry."

Nancy smiled and straightened the books on her desk.

"It's not going to work," she said. "I appreciate it, it's really very touching, but it's not going to work. I know there's a badger. I've seen it myself."