The Ghost of Woody

Yesterday, I spent a large chunk of time cruising around Greeley. If there is a foul odor in the Colorado air, most likely you can blame Greeley, which is home to such stench filled industries as feedlots, rending plants, fertilizer factories, hog farms, petroleum refineries, and custom synthetic asshole factories for those suffering from O-ring blowout.

As I was touring the bowels of smelly-ville, I drove past a pizza joint that not only caught my eye but also twisted my eye around so that I was forced to stare into my atrophied raisin of a brain. As my inside-out eye adjusted to the gray luminescence of my oatmeal-flavored brain I caught a glimmer of a memory. The glimmer tickled my mangled eye and flirted with it. This only aggravated the already aggravated eye, for the eye was frustrated with its inability to decode/identify the glimmer.

Meanwhile, my other eye –the one facing the proper direction- was Beavisly laughing at the pizza joint’s sign that proudly stated, “Woody’s Wood-Fired Pizza and Watering Hole.” Heh-heh. Woody is like boner, so that’s like boner-fired pizza. Heh.

Eventually, hemorrhaging eye asked normal eye what was so fucking funny and normal eye started blathering about how erect penises are called wood. It took hemorrhaging eye a minute to process what was going on around him, but finally he looked straight at the glimmer and identified it as “Woody.”

Damn, I hadn’t thought about Woody for two years or more. There he was, though, a dwindling chunk of mandarin orange in my jell-o mind. The last time I heard Woody’s voice was well over four years ago. His voice matched his appearance, understated, meek, quite, and slightly off-kilter. He always put a lilting slur on his “s” sounds, almost like a lisp but more like a calculated verbal flair. In hindsight, this flair was his downfall. If Woody could ditch his speech façade then he would lose the only quality, the only character trait, that set him apart. He would become a ghost in a sea of a thousand anonymous faces.

At the time, I didn’t respect or understand the magnitude of the position that Woody put me in. Today, I still find the episode more of the bizarre variety and less of the threatening type. Yesterday, as I drove the highways through Greeley, I had a lot of time to reflect on my inappropriately nonchalant manner with regards to Woody.

I guess I have an inflated sense of self-sufficiency that borders on perceived invulnerability. Four years ago, I started receiving idiotic voice messages at work like, “I like you *heavy breathing* a lot,” and “I just wanted to hear your voice.” Initially, I figured that these messages were being planted by one of my many comedic coworkers or jokester friends. My theory abruptly swerved when I traced back one of the messages to a public phone in a work conference room. Whoever was leaving these messages did not want to be found. I started forwarding these odd voice mails to the Human Resources department and they instigated an investigation.

Woody worked in the Information Technologies and Services unit. He was one of three guys who kept the company computer network up and running. He serviced personal computers, he troubleshot phone problems, and he assisted in computer upgrades. Woody and I had direct work-related contact once or twice a week. “Woody, my Excel crashed again, can you help me out?” “Woody, what’s wrong with the color printer? I keep getting errors.” etc. It took me two months, but eventually I followed the crumb trail that connected Woody to my funky voice messages. At least I did it quicker then the anti-effective investigator that Human Resources contracted.

After three months of bizarre phone messages, Woody was fired and my work life went back to normal… but the truth is my work life never left the realm of normal. Thankfully, that is a mistake that never bore fruit.

This is what I spent a large chunk of yesterday thinking about. Not once in those three months did I feel threatened. Not once did I get scared. Not once did I alter my habits to ensure safety at work. If Woody were a more sinister individual, he could’ve hit me upside the head with a lead pipe without putting much forethought into it. Right now, my maggot-chewed molested corpse would most likely be rotting in some ditch somewhere. Thankfully, I’m sitting here in front of my computer, instead. I just didn’t take the whole situation seriously enough at the time. I guess there is a personal moral in this anecdote.

I can’t believe I almost forgot about Woody, and it took a stupid pizza parlor sign to remind me.
...and so it was written, shenry at 6/19/2003 08:51:00 PM.
...and so it was appended with .