The Skeleton in Our Closet

Hi. I'm the new guy at DACAPO. Well, not completely new - I've been here for 4 months, but I'm still the last guy in the door. I've always found that it takes some time to adjust to a new workplace and as much as you adjust to the new workplace the company adjusts to you.

This place is different.

Now, there are people who cover their office or cubicle walls with posters with sayings like: Hang in there! (accompanied by a large photo of a kitten hanging from a branch with both arms.) These people should be taken out into the street and beat about the head and neck with heavy bats. But that is a rant for another time. The reason I mention these defective rejects is that having been at DACAPO for some time I am reminded of one of these insipid posters: You don't have to be crazy to work here - but it helps!

I've learned that at DACAPO you can apply that phrase, but with some modifications. Firstly, the trailing phrase, "but it helps" is unecessary. Then we simply have to edit the first part to read: "You have to be crazy..."

Case in point...

After purchasing and moving into our new building we got straight to work on renovations. Most of this consisted of paint and some new lighting fixtures. The big project was a new "mixing studio".

To make the exisiting room more acoustically friendly, we wanted to slope the walls away from where the workstation would eventualy be. This meant installing a false wall and a false ceiling.

Contractors being who they are, the wood frame for the false wall and false ceiling were installed in quick order, but sat there uncompleted and uncovered for several weeks.

Clint and I were standing around in the room looking at the size of the new window sill, when he remarked how it would make a nice sunny resting spot for a "mixing cat". My eyes wandered to the right and noticed how much room was left in the corner by the new false wall. Room enough for a...

That's when the joking started. I joked to Clint that we should have a corpse in the wall. "Why don't we get a stuffed animal and hang it from a noose." Paul, our commercial audio engineer, added, "...with a suicide note pinned to it." Nolan, our voice director, chipped in, "When they put up the drywall, we should put scratch marks on the inside." We all had a good chuckle.

An hour later, when I returned to my office, Clint had a mid-sized stuffed dog waiting on my desk. He found it in the basement of the old building - so we had our vicitm.

A day or two later, I started prepping the dog for it's entombment. I painted "X"s over it's eyes, hogtied it's arms and legs, and put a gag in it's mouth. Then it hit me... the stuffed dog victim was cute, but one of those paper skeletons with the dangling arms that you put on your door at haloween would be even funnier.

So I headed off to Toad Hall Toys to try and find one. I found a 12" tall plastic skeleton or a box of three or four 3" tall ones. I thought the 'mass grave' of the small ones would be kind of funny, but asked if they had any of the Halloween skeletons in storage in the stockroom. One staff member asked if I was talking about the "paper skeleton in the book". So I took a stroll back to the Anatomy Aisle and found the perfect victim.

It took a weeks worth of evenings to put together - approx. 24 hours of cutting, trimming, scoring, folding, and gluing. Plus a whole s*#!load of podcasts on my iPod.

After a few disasters (one clumsy contractor broke the skeleton in four places and I had to perform some serious reconstructive surgery) "Louie" was officialy interred in the mixing room at 520 Hargrave.

With an appropriate message...

After a few weeks the drywaller came in and sealed up Louie for good.

Now, while I was putting Louie together, I took over the boardroom table in the new building at about 5:00 every evening. Several staff members came in and out of the building while I was putting the skeleton together, so lots of staff members were in on the joke.

Several times, Clint would pass by my workspace and chuckle. Making comments from time to time, most dealing with my sanity. Now remember what I said about "being crazy to work here"? Well, at any other job very quickly there would have been laughs at my effort then several rounds of "Jayson... now I think it's funny and I do have a sense of humour, but..." or "Ummm, Jayson, about this little project of yours..."

My final comment when Clint was mocking my state of mental health: "OK, I am 100% mentally disturbed to build a skeleton and bury it in a wall, but at no point over the weeks did you ever stop me, so that makes you 75% as distrubed as I am."

You do have to be crazy to work here...