Dear Stinky

Dear Stinky,

You're a co-worker of mine. No, clearly your real name isn't "Stinky", but to add insult to insult, it's a nom de guerre applied to you by other co-workers that have as much (and in some cases more) loathing for you than I do. The laundry list of reasons why there's so much contempt for you is epic in scale and the purpose of this letter is to detail for you in clear-cut fashion why we hate you with the fire of a thousand burning suns.

When you started working for this company, you were but a lowly temp, one assigned for your ability to do your particular job; a job which our company was sorely lacking qualified people to do. Evidently, you did pretty well during your tenure as a temp, hence us hiring you as a full-time employee, acquiring new benefits, better wages and the ability to piss off your cubicle neighbors in such a fashion as to draw verbal barbs and a litany of "WILL YOU PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP"s on a daily basis. Congrats.

We should've known that you wouldn't make this a happy place before your full-time hiring. For instance, our desks are rather shoddily constructed. We all have the movable keyboard holder. And the brain-trust that designed these particular keyboard holders put the lever for its height adjustment smack dab in the center, forcing everyone of us over three feet tall to smack our kneecaps whenever we rise, sit or adjust our seats to properly face our computers. It happens. As I said, everyone does it. You, however, feel the need to yell loud enough for our entire corporate campus to overhear you say "Owowowowowow!" It's not necessary, I assure you. It's not so much the fact that you yell, it's just that you do it every 5 minutes, so the repetition is more annoying than anything. Switch it up with a well-placed "FUCK!" and that'll be one less thing that's annoying about you.

It also appears you and I share musical tastes. I know this because I hear you humming to every song you know, and it also happens to be the exact same song I'm playing on my radio, at a decibel I cannot hear outside my cube, so I know you're not listening to mine. Please, stop. I want to kill your out-of-tune-humming ass no less than 30 times a day.

But we ignored these signs. And so today, you actually stooped to a new level of "OMGWTFwerethesepeoplethinkingwhentheyhiredyou" level. First it was the huffing and puffing, as though you were about to have some kind of coronary. Not beyond the realm of possibility, as you aren't exactly the picture of health. So when someone checked on you to see that you weren't clutching your chest ala George Wendt in the SNL "Da Bears" skits, they did notice that you had a few signs of one having a heart attack. You appeared sweaty and clammy and awfully pale for someone living in SoCal, with the 90 degree weather we've been having the past few days.

Showing concern, this person asked if they needed to summon an ambulance for you. It was at this point that you said no, grabbed your trash can and hurled into it while proclaiming, "Don't drink the milk in the cafeteria...RALLLLPPPH!" Thanks. That's exactly what we need. The smell and the sound of your yak, just as the lunch hour has passed, lingering for the rest of the day.

You're aware, of course, that the men's room isn't but 20 feet from your cube? If you were feeling sick these past 30 minutes, don't you think you could've maybe gone in there and done a binge and purge instead of saving such lovely hurling for the rest of us? Of course you know about the men's room. You're in there daily doing things that require a can of Lysol, three rolls of toilet paper and perhaps an exorcist. Next time, please utilize the facilities accordingly.

The list of things we hate about you is much longer than this, of that you can be certain. These are just a few things I wanted to point out so that, if you start correcting right away, the desire to bring a blunt instrument to work won't be quite so apparent.

Thank you,

Hershey