story - The Lacoste Factor

Casimir Lacoste winced and moaned his tedious way into consciousness, having tried unsuccessfully to ignore the morning sun forcing its way through the wrinkles of his Italian satin curtains and through the creases of his matching satin sheets. As he struggled to come to terms with the hatchet buried in his head – the one he attributed as being the cause of his splitting headache – Casimir tried to put together the pieces of yet another night of debauchery and mayhem. He first sought to recall when he actually went to sleep, vaguely remembering the sun seeping its rays menacingly through the blinds of yet another strange house, with yet more strange people, none of whose names he could remember. He also remembered the shadows that Helios had ironically cast over his conscience, even as he had remained doused in good spirits and continued to babble incoherent nonsense, surfing out the final, dying waves of pharmacologically inspired bliss that splashed on the shores of his drained mind. Amid the “never again”s and the “I wish I hadn’t”s that were exclaimed in the form of inarticulate groans, Casimir found his only solace in the comforting thought that he’d avoided bringing home yet another girl with a body that resembled an over-ripe pear. He half-seriously checked under the sheets, just in case.

A pop, fizz, and a gulp heralded Casimir’s gallant attempt to fight his way back into normality as two noisy aspirin were swallowed with convalescent determination. Next could be heard a snap, crackle and pop, as he prepared his favorite breakfast meal: rice crispies with full-cream milk, honey and banana. Mummy always had boxes of the stuff stashed away in a dry cupboard so it was always only a tug, creak and a snatch away. With Daddy out of town and Mummy on vacation, Casimir would have to bite the bullet and attend his first day of work with feigned intrepidity and an overabundance of self-confidence that would have to go a ways toward compensating for his independence-anxiety. Now if only nobody would notice the hatchet buried in his skull, he should be alright, he thought.

At the ripe old hour of 10:36, by the time the worms had already been caught, devoured, and shat by early birds onto speeding windscreens on the freeway, Casimir made his cheeky and glamorous arrival at his new job, a small dot-com that had been set up just a few months ago. The company had been founded on youthful “I-want-to-be-a-dot-com-too” exuberance, not as yet resigned to its inevitable “I-ran-a-dot-com-into-the-ground-too” fate, and the look and feel of the place resembled a slick ad for what could’ve been a real product. Of course, being an Internet company, there was no real product, just the slick ad. Casimir felt at home, since his other option was to work for a marketing firm. He had also thought of advertising, but he didn’t like the idea of his name being associated with any jingle-driven clichés – the best-case-scenario fate of any successful advertisement, he thought.

Having tightened his buns and sucked in his stomach upon entering the office, Casimir squeezed out his act of self-confidence, this time letting it ooze forth in the form of a wink, a rakish smile and a sideway nod at the first employee he saw. This was rather unfortunately followed by two more of the same cheeky gesture, and then a fourth, so that by the time he offered his tap-tappity-tap-tap on the director’s office door, he had effectively carved out for himself a reputation in the office that usually takes months of social ineptitude and at least one sexual harassment suit to uphold.

The meeting was brief and perfunctory. Casimir already knew he would be working on the new database of triple-A blue chip companies, having talked it over a few days before with the director, who actually happened to be his cousin. Casimir’s uncle had suggested Casimir put in some hours for the company, declaring in the process “if you can’t rely on family, who can you rely on, eh?” And so, remaining aloof to the time-honored dictum “if incompetence cannot rely on nepotism what can it rely on?” Casimir set to his task with a rip-roaring rah-rah spirit that belied everything except his enthusiasm.

As Casimir nestled himself into his cushy new cubicle, he let out a sigh of contentment and satisfaction with his little sinecure. After all, a little money could close the shortfall on his allowance. And besides, he fancied there was some “fit tottie” (as he called it) working in the office, not least of whom would have been the girl in the cubicle behind him, whom he tried sneaking a glance at between his legs as he bent over his knees to pick up the pen that would drop from his hand at shamelessly regular intervals. Casimir felt proud of the ingenuity he demonstrated in being able to make the most of his chronic fidgetiness, especially as he briefly daydreamed of every grade school teacher he ever had regretting and ruing all the “tsk, tsk”s, “tut-tut”s and accusations of dyslexia and hyperactive disorder they had hurled his way; if only they could now see the professional career man that he had obviously become. As the director was heard leaving his office, Casimir finally decided to turn off the daydreaming and turn on his computer to begin his database task, which mainly involved phoning up companies to collect or verify information, and then to store it in an Excel file. In other words, child’s play.

Casimir stretched and cracked some fingers and knuckles, and then began his first calls of the day, swooping in and jousting with one contemptible and assuredly stupid (he thought) secretary after another. With every call, he felt a heightened sense of self-importance, heightened all the more due to his sense of chagrin at having to even exchange words with this execrable rabble he called “secretaries.” He did of course like his daddy’s secretary, but then she was so flattering and charming in her manners, so sincere in her obsequiousness, that she was absolutely adorable. Not like the nasty crones that demanded his name and the name of his company, and then put him on hold, forcing him to bear through another Muzak version of “Hey Jude,” before eventually denying him access to the important people he demanded to talk to. A normal conversation would go something like…

“HELLO I’M CALLING FROM TRIEDANDTRUE.COM, I’D LIKE TO SPEAK TO MR. FEATHERWEIGHT PLEASE!”

“Your name please sir?”

“CASIMIR LACOSTE, AT YOUR SERVICE. IS MR. WEATHERBAIT IN OR SHALL I CALL BACK?”

“What company are you calling from sir?”

“I HARDLY SEE HOW THAT MATTERS, DON’T WORRY I’M NOT TRYING TO SELL ANYTHING OR BUY YOU OUT, I JUST NEED TO SPEAK TO MR. TICKLEMATE”

“Are you dyslexic sir?”

“WHAT? WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

“I said ‘just a second’ sir”

“YES, RIGHT-E-O”

“…pardon-me-boy-is-this-the-chattanooga-choo-choos…”

“BLOODY HELL, AM I GOING TO LISTEN TO THE-CAT-WHO-CHEWED-YOUR-NEW-SHOES ALL DAY OR WHAT?”

“Sir?”

“YES?!”

“Mr. Micklethwaite is not in at the moment, he’s in the middle of a meeting, can I take a message?”

“YES TELL HIM CASIMIR LACOSTE, JUNIOR DIRECTING BUSINESS ANALYST SUPERVISOR, CALLED FROM TAKETHATANDSHOVEIT.COM AND TELL HIM TO CALL ME BACK WHEN HE GETS IN, OK DEAR? THERE’S A GOOD GIRL!”


The telephone call was usually terminated with a clumsy attempt at crashing the mouthpiece down (even in kindergarten he had difficulty putting the right shapes in the right holes) and was synchronically accompanied by a loud, condescending chuckle that said nothing so much as “I can’t believe I’m dealing with these people.” What often followed was a poke of the head over the cubicle and a snickering glance around at the other employees, spouting off derogatory remarks that seemed to center around the discrepancy in mental agility between others (“Telephone People,” he would call them) and himself, but also in an attempt to foster a sense of camaraderie between himself and his new office coworkers through such presumably shared anecdotes in the never-ending struggle against the “Telephone People.” There would also be the odd spontaneous “OH-OH” or “OH-NO” that followed yet another accident with his complex Excel computer software, and other mishaps that arose with the use thereof. Casimir’s confreres proved too subtle in their silent protestations to even garner a modicum of suspicion from him that they were being less than sympathetic with his cause.

As Casimir’s gap-laced database came along agonizingly slowly, yet another setback even more frustrating than the “Telephone People” came Casimir’s way. A blaring “OOPS… OOOOOOPS…. OH GOD” heralded Casimir’s unfortunate discovery that he had just kicked his computer’s plug out of the socket whilst stretching his legs in as violent and vociferous a fashion as his past two hours of tedious frustration deemed exigent upon him. The knot in his throat was compounded when he came to the unsavory realization that he had also not yet saved his work onto his hard drive, thereby having erased every little phone number, name and address he had desultorily recorded over the last two hours. Even his by now long-suffering colleagues began expressing pity rather than their initial cold belligerence as Casimir proceeded to repeat this truly mind-boggling feat of self-annihilation on two more occasions before it was even lunch time. “BY GOD, I’VE DONE IT AGAIN” would be the dreaded words reverberating about the office, setting eyes rolling and heads falling in post-disbelief resignation to the disastrous challenge fate had hurled into the office that fine, undeserving morning.

Lunchtime came as a savior, and Casimir was positively famished. His ego had taken somewhat of a hit, and he was anxious to drown his sorrow in consumptive pleasure. The object was food. His boss – that is, the director, who was also his cousin – took Casimir with him to a meat restaurant where Casimir engorged himself on half-a-kilo of ribeye steak before digging into the leftovers of his boss’ meal, and then ordering and doing away with yet another corncob, so that by the time he was finished he was truly finished, physically and gastro-intestinally, enclosing himself in the restroom for a solid half hour. After he emerged with water – and not insignificant amounts of sweat – dripping from his face, along with the same glazed look in his eyes as had descended upon him after the third corncob, Casimir was carefully escorted back to the office to carry on with his new job.

By four o’clock in the afternoon, the whole office was working for Casimir Lacoste. The technician had tampered with the normally faulty ventilation for a good half hour as fellow colleagues rushed glasses of carbonated soft drinks and pink peptic syrups back and forth between his cubicle and the kitchenette, all to no avail. Soon Casimir’s stomach cramps became so unbearable that he slid painstakingly off his chair and onto the floor, finally lying supine on the office carpet. By now, the feet that were pathologically propelled away from his body as they knocked out the computer plug from its socket for a solid fourth time was merely passed off as a footnote in the afternoon’s proceedings. Casimir seemed almost delirious, as yet more viscous pink-colored syrup stained his blue pin-striped shirt. Voices rose and fell in the form of incomprehensible blabber and from the distance he sensed he could see Orpheus the cat chewing a shoe and playing a lyre on a train from Chattanooga. He was very ill.

After another few forays into the office bathroom, where he proceeded to drive the proverbial “porcelain truck” with some hefty pit stops along the emesis highway, Casimir Lacoste finally decided to lie down on the conference table in the director’s office, although it was an unstable one that was right next to the floor-to-ceiling windows that afforded a view onto the teeming city street below. And yet, before he could even hear his cousin’s warning, Casimir rolled over onto his side, thereby tipping all his weight off-center, leading to the collapse of the table into the window, thus effectively sandwiching Casimir between a heavy pinewood surface and a fragile glass frame that only just decided not to give way in the face of the full brunt of the table’s collapse in this latest in a tragedy of errors usually reserved for the silent film era. By now all Casimir could venture forth was a whimper – and that was the way his world nearly ended: both with a bang and a whimper. As his cousin and his co-workers swarmed all around to help him from this rather tight situation, the people who had looked up from the bus-stop down in the street stared in bewilderment at the large, plump, apple-red cheeks pressed against a window on the 6th floor of the building that towered above them. They noticed the other white-collared employees rushing to the aid of this poor hapless creature who had so nearly flown out the building on a wing and a prayer… and a substantial amount of Pepto Bismol-soaked ribeye

Casimir was hauled up and led back to his cubicle, and as the director’s office was being set back into order, with Casimir’s fingerprints and facial grease being wiped off the glass, Casimir was becoming decidedly frustrated with his first day at work, which really wasn’t going the way he’d expected, or even adding up to much more than a complete flop. He sensed this was probably the general consensus around the office as well (which for a split-second resembled in his mind a malicious Rube Goldberg device that was out to get him), and this made him irritable. His indignation aroused, Casimir let forth a decidedly audible “hmmph” before storming back to his cubicle (carefully avoiding the imaginary discarded banana peels and idle rakes strewn along his path) and throwing himself at his task with renewed ferocity. Tap-tappity-tap rang his keyboard, and people had just become accustomed to relative normalcy, when all of a sudden the phone rang. It was for Casimir. His desire to work at his uncle’s marketing firm in New York was now in jeopardy because of visa problems.

Panic seized Casimir as surely as frustration seized the rest of the office. Hysterical protestations of “HOW DARE THEY!”s and “HOW COULD THIS BE?”s were followed by an unfortunate amount of audible thinking on Casimir’s part. His cousin, the director, tried to help him. The first task was to call…

“DADDY? YES, HULLO DADDY, I HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THE WORK PERMIT, WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING… YES… WELL DO YOU KNOW ANYONE THERE? RIGHT… WHO?…. WELL BETTER GET HIM ON THE CASE THEN… RIGHT, OK… BYE DADDY!”

A way would be found. For the rest of the afternoon people called, connected, dialed, redialed and then reconnected every phone-line the company had for the sake of Casimir’s crusade to move to Manhattan by September of that year. Soon Casimir looked like the producer of a TV news show, accepting, declining, offering intermediary ideas, expressing hope and then distress as call after call flew back and forth between lawyers, bureaucrats, geeks, totties, horrible secretaries, Daddy’s sweet secretary, friends, Daddy, Mummy, and whatever hapless civilian happened to get caught up in between. Casimir’s uncompromising English accent belched forth one anomalous expression or comment after another, when finally, by evening, a lawyer was found who would take charge of what had by now become ubiquitously known as “The Lacoste Case”, aided by an insider in the relevant ministry’s bureaucracy, and a push and a shove from Daddy himself. Casimir’s “WHEW, THAT WAS A CLOSE ONE!” followed by his trademark cheeky grin, marked the end of the working day. The show was a success after all, everything worked out, God was in his heaven and all was well on earth.

Casimir gave a big grin, brought his hands behind his head, leaned back in his seat, and – of course – kicked his feet out and knocked the plug out of the socket for the fifth time. But Casimir was a step ahead this time, for he’d saved all his work. Even as the screen went “bleep” and blank, he didn’t hurry to plug the computer back in. After all, it was almost time to go home. He sat there grinning, wondering what that smell of burning plastic was all about. It was a distinctly noisome smell and he wanted it gone. It was then that he noticed there was smoke emanating from under his desk, and that he had a very, very bad itch in his toes. Casimir jumped in the air when he realized that it wasn’t an itch but a burn, and he let out a scream and a terrible cry when he found that the plug and the computer cables and part of the carpet were all aflame.

“OOOH MY GOD, FIRE, FIRE… EVERYBODY RUN!” shouted Casimir with a shrill, panicked voice at the top of his lungs.

The entire office jumped up out of their cubicles and ran around in panic amid more screams and shrieks. The director ran out of his office and wanted to know what was going on. He instinctively looked first at Casimir’s cubicle, and sure enough, his desk, his computer and a good portion of his cubicle were all alight. He saw Casimir screaming and running for the wrong door – and then to the elevator – as others ran for the fire escape. The director – his cousin – grabbed him and shook him, trying to calm him down, but Casimir wouldn’t listen.

“JESUS CHRIST, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!” Casimir screamed.

The director slapped him across the face, but Casimir just panicked even more and threw himself to the side where, unfortunately, there happened to be another computer on another desk in another cubicle. Casimir lost his balance as he cowered away from the slap and fell crashing onto the computer. The entire desk collapsed under the weight of his body. The director ran for the nearest fire extinguisher and unloaded it all on Casimir’s cubicle. The fire had already spread to the adjoining cubicles, however, and now the director found himself screaming at Casimir to get up and help him. Everybody else had fled from the office, naturally unwilling to risk their lives. Casimir was in a daze. His stomach churning, his body hurting, his mind spinning, his heart thumping and his hands and knees shaking, he mumbled incoherently to himself.

“are you… Chattanooga, cat, who chewed ya, I should have choo-chooed ya…”

As the director ran past him to get another extinguisher, he grabbed Casimir by the collar and pulled him up, ripping his pink-stained (and now blood and smoke stained) shirt as he tried to shake him out of his shock. Casimir cried out “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY!!!???” and he curled up in a ball and continued babbling insanely. By this time, the director had got another extinguisher and was foaming it all over the rest of the fire which was, within five minutes, finally out. The wailing fire engines screeched to a halt and firemen came marching up the stairwell. They burst into the office to find a smoke-filled mess. The director lay soot-faced on the floor trying to breath, while Casimir rolled around on the floor crying as broken computer parts dug painfully into his ribs.

The firemen took them outside where there stood assembled the rest of their coworkers. They cheered when they saw Casimir and their boss rescued and seemingly alive. At that moment a chauffeur-driven limousine pulled up alongside one of the fire engines. It was Casimir’s father’s driver who had come to pick him up after his first day at work. His face sooty, with the residual streaks left in the wake of the tears that ran down his cheeks, his shirt bloody, pink, black and ripped, his hair frazzled, his right shoe burnt, his dyspeptic stomach in pain, Casimir began walking toward the limousine, still in a shocked daze. The chauffeur dutifully opened the car door for him, helped him in, and then drove off.

Thus ended Casimir’s first, and almost last, day at the dot-com, save for the 3:15 p.m. appearance he put in the next day, just before he had to take off at 6:00 p.m. in order to make it to the Turkish Embassy cocktail. Despite feeling a little groggy, Casimir Lacoste gave good account of himself, tightening his buns, sucking in his stomach and trying his darnedest to remember what the Turkish Ambassador’s name was – yet again…

“AH, MR. AIRGUN PELLET!”

Diplomats, bureaucrats and their wives were impressed by the story of his day at work. They gasped and raised eyebrows as they heard of his brush with death, the time he prevented an entire conference table from crashing through the glass and onto the unsuspecting pedestrians below by throwing himself between it and the window; the time he was given a faulty computer that exploded in his face even as he still managed to fulfill the task at hand; the time he contracted food poisoning yet braved through it all and kept working; and of course the fantastic feat of heroism in which he not only fought a fire but saved the entire office and his coworkers by warning them of the danger, even as he stayed back until the fire was out and his cousin – the director – was safe. As he took a smug sip of his white wine, he basked in the admiring stares of the eminent company around him.

“Yeees,” said one diplomat with a French accent, “working is such a dangerous profession these days.”

Casimir smiled.

“Well of course,” he said, “the people in charge are all so incompetent!”

They all laughed heartily at this, and nodded their heads in agreement. Casimir was the only one unable to avoid spilling part of his drink on his shoe.