The Ballad of Bippy the Clown
Sometimes when you write a weekly column for an online literary zine, you just have to vent to your imagined readership about the shit that especially pisses you off. Here in the land of Hydra Hydraulics, it’s been a steady stream of sixty plus hour work weeks since the start of the year. This sort of schedule doesn’t leave one much time to warsh his ass, let alone write deeply affecting, beautifully crafted columns analyzing the human condition. Yet, somehow, I manage to check both these boxes at least once a week.
It’s a superhuman effort, really. Let me stop, now, before this devolves into self-hero worship. Where was I? Sixty-hour work weeks that would kill a lesser man. Okay, you would think business must be booming at Hydra Hydraulics. Well, let me tell you something, brothers and sisters, it ain’t. Hydra continues to skirt the rim of the toilet bowl. Financial collapse looms. Sales are nonexistent. Yet the twelve-hour shifts persist. Why?
The answer is and always will be incompetent management, of course. The same jackasses who got us into this cock-up continually double down on bad decisions.
There’s one person in particular I find overwhelmingly vexing today. A person who purportedly holds some sort of authority over me, as though it were possible for the Polish Hammer to acknowledge a power greater than his own. You might be thinking, hey, wait a minute, didn’t this squirrelly Polack just write about his wife last week? Yes, eagle-eyed reader, yes, I did. And this ain’t about her and her almost supernatural ability to call the tune I gotta dance to. Right now, I’m referring to the production manager at work. For all intents and purposes, the boss.
It would be career suicide to use his real name here. And though my chrome career seemingly lies on its acidic death bed, there are three outstanding bills that say I can’t pull the plug on the whole sorry affair just yet. So, for the sake of this column, we’ll just call him Cockwaffle the Chihuahua Cornholing Clown. Or Bippy for short.
And he is short. 5’4 if he’s an inch.
Now, I’ve known Bippy for over fifteen years through Hydra, and he’s always been a bit of a little bitch. We’re roughly the same age. The man has a brilliant mind in regard to all things mechanical. His ingenuity is unrivaled here at the factory, and he’s known throughout the entirety of the Tennessee Valley as the leading repairer of vibrators and assorted sex toys. But he knows fuck all about anything else. He lacks the ability to communicate without coming across as an utter toadstool. He’s the sort of guy who’ll tell you those ICE agents out there in Minnesota doing the Lord’s work. I think he’s always been envious of my obviously superior grooviness, the ease in which I can enthrall the ladies merely by poetically rhapsodizing about the Star Wars mythology.
We’ve never seen eye to eye and bumped heads more than once. Here’s an example: Back in the day, the first time I was running the chrome shop and Bippy oversaw the maintenance crew, the wrench jockeys installed sensors at the bottom of the chrome pit to endure that if there were a chrome leak or a water pipe broke, and the liquid levels rose dangerously high to the point of a chemical spill out the back door, an alert would be texted to all the phones of the staff. The big wheels of Hydra. The idiots. So that first night after installation, everyone gets woken up at three in the morning with warnings that the tanks are in imminent danger of overflowing into the back acres creating the sort of ecological disaster we would surely have to work overtime to cover up. Of course, there was no such contamination outrage. Bippy simply installed the sensor incorrectly, and it needed to be tweaked. Did he admit his basic failure? Well, hell no. He claimed someone in the chrome shop (me) threw a T-shirt down in the pitt which tripped the alarm. When I was taken to task for it, I had to reason with the goofy bastards in charge at the time.
“Look, man, I ain’t denying we get up to some crazy shit back there on a daily basis, but I promise you, no one is ripping their shirts off, swinging it around our heads, and launching it down in the pit so we can all get alarms at the witching hour.”
“You also said you didn’t throw ninety-sixty empty Coors Lite cans in the bathroom ceiling tile.”
“Yes, and I stand by that denial.”
“Why would Bippy say such a thing?”
“Because he’s a fucking clown! He ‘d say such a thing because he’s a lying cunt who can’t take responsibility for his own catastrophic failures.”
This is almost word for word how the conversation went. Also, Bippy sat in the office with us during this confrontation. But, like I said, he’s 5’4 and lacks the silver tongue I effortlessly flaunt, so all he could do was sit there and stew in his own bland juices.
“I’d like to see this shirt,” I pressed. “Since all my shirts are seemingly accounted for.”
“Ah, there won’t be a need for all that,” the boss at the time said. “I think I know what the problem is.”
Bippy squirmed in his chair. His tiny feet nervously swung a couple inches above the cheap laminate.
And, now, through an inconceivable series of irrational moves perpetrated by a totally imbecilic management team, a sort of chess game played by mentally lethargic eels who lack the first shred of integrity, Cockwaffle the Chihuahua Cornholing Clown has become my immediate boss. And he’s taking his short aggression out on me by demanding my son and I remain on the premises whenever the doors are open.
You might think I should shut up and bask in the overtime pay. This is where these ignorant bastards flash a modicum of genius. I’m still salary. When they bumped me out of supervision where I could write these columns leisurely throughout the workday, back onto the floor where I have to furtively scribble these columns in a notebook when I think those jackasses aren’t watching one of the forty-eight video cameras pointed in my general direction, my exempt status remained intact. I don’t clock in. I don’t worry about production numbers. And I don’t get paid one extra dime of overtime whether I work forty-one hours or sixty-five hours. I see nothing.
What can I do? I gotta keep playing their game if I want to keep buying stupid shit like an 8.0 graded Giant-sized X-Men #1.
And Bippy’s the sort of coward who refuses to come at me straight on. He likes to wait until I’m taking one of my many, many thirty-minute bathroom breaks and come at my son who works diligentlyish beside me in the chrome shop. He’ll ask my son jackass questions he’s too scared to ask me. Questions like “why are y’all running orders not due until March while we’re still in the middle of February?”
The answer to that is, Bippy can’t manage his floor correctly, so the March orders reach me before the February orders, and I got to put something in the chrome tanks. The tanks can’t just sit empty.
When I confront him with this information he says something smarmy like “I asked your son that, and he acted like he had no idea what I was talking about.”
My son may have a fairly good idea what’s going on. I don’t know. He might not. I never know what the fuck’s going through his mind. I know I explained it to him. He may or may not have thought to listen. He is antisocial as hell, though. Doesn’t matter if you’re the operation’s manager, the leader of the free world, or a janitor, he will ignore your existence and hope you go away.
Apparently, Bippy lacks the basic knowledge of human behavior to accept this, and I don’t feel like explaining it to him. What I do feel like doing is fucking with him.
“One thing you gotta understand about that boy is that he’s scared to death of Leprechauns. Ever since he was four years old and suffered through that series of Warwick Davis movies, he’s been deathly afraid of Leprechauns. You come wobbling up on him with your little 5’4 ass, little sawed off legs like a fucking bandy rooster, hollering about me gold or hydraulic cylinders or some shit, of course, he’s gonna lock up every time.”
He stares at me, almost without comprehension. Almost. “It is what it is,” I assure him.
Which I guess is why my son and I find ourselves working Saturday on Valentine’s Day with scarcely enough work to keep the tanks filled. Which gives me plenty opportunity to sit on cans of powdered chrome and write this column…
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
