phone battery stabbed

Kyle is my first boss at the FRB. He smokes a pipe and supervises some 20 young guys and one learning-disabled gal hired under some special deal who never wears the same outfit twice. 

Kyle is a year from retirement and that matters a lot, a bit overweight and short, he scuttles around barking orders, old school, keep your nose to the grindstone, 100% reliable company guy. They boys are something of a herd, a difficult to crack clique when I join them. It is not fun. The leader of the wolf pack is a 29 year-old  6'.4" philosopher-type with a serious problem concerning dating women, concerning his attitude toward women, he is misogynist. 

Two work areas are separated by a row of metal shelves that are backed, each area of divided shelf represents a commercial bank, so a metal wall on one side and a wall of compartmentalized shelving on the other side, with benches and stools for making bundles from trays of bank checks. Checks are sorted by high-speeed machines nearby on the same floor, the incoming bundles from banks of mixed up checks collected through the day are reconciled, the amounts actually match with bundles sorted to individual commercial banks and tossed into shelf compartments of various sizes on the far side of the metal shelf wall. The crew can be heard on the other side of the wall of shelves but they cannot be seen and that is the perfect setup for a joke. 

Kyle's speech is slobbery due to his pipe smoking habit. It is disgusting. When Kyle pulls his pipe away from his mouth a string of his thick saliva stretches from mouth to pipe tip and you're standing there seeing all that dampness and smoke and odor going, ew gross. All his vocalized S sounds are slobbered. Kyle was losing it, not long for the world, the type of guy who dies shortly after retiring. And he did. We all knew it at the time. Odd working with a man so close to the end of his life. His work is his life. Kyle tells us the same stories repeatedly driving the crew nuts. They have his stories all memorized, and that is perfect for jokes. 

One such story is about Kyle's habit of keeping his Diamond stick matches for his pipe loose in his pants pocket. He keeps his lit pipe in his pants pocket too but that's another story and it does show how his entire wardrobe will smell of pipe smoke, his whole body, every cell permeated with pipe smoke, his breath is pipe smoke, his aura that even non-psychics read is pipe smoke. His story is about him walking through the bank parking lot with vehicles tightly packed in, he walks by a truck with a high bumper and the edge sticking out strikes one of the matches inside his pocket igniting the bundle inside there burning his leg and a hole through the pocket and through the pant leg. Kyle is seriously burned and hurt. 

Almost as hurt as when he was hit on the head with a sack of nickels. 

Nickels from the mint. It is a real thing. Kyle has ridiculous bank-related stories of pain and suffering. It's a battlefield out there. His stories are perfect for jokes.

At the time I was not fitting in. 

It's frustrating. This whole fitting in thing gets more and more wearisome.They all know each other. I'm odd guy out. It's up to me to somehow.  Returning from lunch, this is at night, the work group with the rows of WWII era adding machines that go up to 999,999.99 set up like a classroom are all absent with the whole crew of guys and one gal on the other side of the wall sorting bundles of checks that they created using as wrapper the computer printouts from the high speed check sorting machines. They are all busy making their bundles with others industriously and skillfully sorting them by tossing them into the shelf compartments. They're good people. They're quiet for once. They know what needs doing and they're doing it. The situation is perfect for a joke and finally I can bust a move. 

As I approach the dividing metal wall with the crew behind it and out of sight of each other, I put on my Kyle-voice, so splendidly easy to mimic, surprising that the boys were not already doing it. I pretend to be talking to somebody about the work situation as I approach, the only thing Kyle would talk about aside from repeating a tale and only while working. To the crew behind the wall of shelving my voice will sound like Kyle approaching. If my impression is imperfect, there is nothing to contradict the suggestion of the setup. There is only one Kyle, after all.  I say some ordinary thing about what I am expecting from a supervisor's point of view, the sort of thing Kyle will say, the crew can hear Kyle will soon make an appearance on their side of the metal shelf wall, but right before that my joke is to say something  Kyle is incapable of saying, Kyle cannot swear, so I put those words in his mouth, that is the joke, to shock the crew with Kyle swearing. I choose the harsh sweary language for its sibilant phonemes to rely heavily on slobber, "and thosthssssshe cocksthsssssuckersthsssss better have thosthssssse bundlesthsssss sthsssssorted." Boom. It's me. 

The crew is delighted with the joke and join in immediately. They really do like this one. Now this is a good joke. Within minutes there are twenty versions of Kyle saying ridiculous things. Everyone suddenly tries on their own Kyle's voice, making him say something impossible. The variously ridiculous things that different people put into Kyle's mouth by using his voice, the nuances they latch on to reconstruct Kyle's essential sound, the things they pick up and keyed into and emphasize and exaggerate all  keep each other in stitches for the remainder of the year. I mean it. Everything becomes funny. Nothing is funnier to the crew than the poem "Hiawatha" in Kyle's voice. All this situation lasts until Kyle's retirement. Nobody can keep a straight face whenever Kyle says anything during the remainder of his time there because Kyle does the best impression of Kyle compared to any of us. He cracks us all up whenever he speaks. Discipline is destroyed, official discipline, but that is okay because we have our own discipline and everything works very well. There is nothing that Kyle can say that won't  have the boys creased up laughing because they will hear each other saying the same thing as juvenile comedy.