The monkeys are coming

This Micro-Story is based on a quasi-real event.

I have had many types of bosses. The majority of them good people that, often, have to act against their good nature to achieve the overly ambitious objectives that have been given to them by some higher being in order to maintain a job. There is a minority that are, to state it bluntly, idiots.

This event took place at an unnamed company, year and hour and it is about idiots. I was at my desk extracting data from a survey and putting it into something meaningful that would be most probably discarded sooner or later. My desk faced a meeting room. I was listening to the song ‘The monkeys are coming!’ As I was (probably) miss-calculating a correlation I heard two people laughing loudly. It was the boss of the boss of my boss and a customer. Some sort of high level arrangement had taken place in the smoky meeting room. They had obviously gone through a couple of cigars in there despite this being banned by law for around 20 years. They laughed, slapped each others backs, pants below their obese waistlines, smell of fine wine that I guess they drank for lunch spread across the entire floor. They walked towards me as the song I was listening to struck the climax of the chorus ‘The monkeys are coming!’ And so they were, these two monkeys like characters who were above good and evil, one in government, the other a friend of the one in government, drunk, bearing the stench of cigar smoke, slapping and clapping as they passed by me after having arranged some sort of dodgy deal. It was one of my first stunts working in a job I was taught was proper (all proper jobs seem to be glorified paper pushing sort of gigs — and I will state this in most of my essays). I was impressed. I thought, wow, it must be so cool to either have the power to arrange dodgy deals or to make money from them. I admired both these individuals for approximately one year; equivalent to the duration of my 3.6 Eur/Hour (they billed the customer 200 Eur/hour for my services) net salary. I thought they were some sort of semi-gods capable of making you disappear should you prove to be a nuisance.

I happened to find out the other day (which makes it many years later) that one of them, the government worker, is now being prosecuted for precisely a similar slap backing moment to the one I witnessed and admired. That monkey, I have been told, is about to finish in jail.

But not the other monkey. He is smarter. He is still roaming around the jungle getting pissed at lunch time, smoking cigars in the workplace as he continues to make dodgy deals around the world. And, sadly, there is probably a younger, handsomer and cleverer me observing and admiring his ability to extort money from the government and to pay his employees with peanuts. And it is to you that this essay is for, my dear underpaid and inexperienced young paper pusher that makes less than 4 eur/hour: If you see that the monkeys are coming, you know you are possibly witnessing something rotten. Don’t admire the monkeys, despise them. And never forget: these monkeys don’t belong in the wilderness, they belong in the zoo.