Tiny

I’ve been resisting writing this for a long time, but I can’t hold back any more.

I work with a guy I’ll just call Tiny. Tiny isn’t a bad man, he isn’t stupid or mean or evil, but he makes me crazy. Tiny stands about 6’-1” and weighs about…hmm…I’d guess about 400 lbs. He sees himself however, as a 6’-10” 300 pound man, which he’s not. He’s just a buddha shaped fat guy that thinks he’s a gnarly giant man.

His next overwhelming feature is his voice. It’s huge. This is the loudest talkin mofo I’ve ever known in my life, and his mouth is approximately 9 feet from my ear hole for 40 hours a week. When he decides to say something, he doesn’t just say, “Hey, blah blah blah”. Instead, he rises from his tortured office chair with his phone headset around his giant neck, (which isn’t much smaller than his oversized-bald on top-hair in the back-mullet head) and begins his oration like a king addressing his subjects. He scans the office until eye contact is made, and bellows thunderously towards the unfortunate eye-contact maker for an indefinite length of time. When it’s work related, he usually just wants to tell someone about the stupidity of the person he just dealt with, or the problems he’s having with the software he’s using. Once he gets started and his giant gears start turning, however, the minor point he originally intended to relay snowballs into an unstoppable juggernaut. All you can do is break eye-contact and act like you aren’t listening anymore. This really doesn’t help much. He simply re-scans the office, without pausing, until new eye-contact is made, and continues talking as if the new “listener” were listening the whole time.

If someone actually expresses interest or participates in his conversation, he removes his headset, walks to the interested party’s desk, bends his giant body 90 degrees at the waist and relaxes on his elbows. This is absolutely horrifying. The sight of this from any angle would “scare the vultures off a guts wagon” (Tiny’s own phrase).

The real treat though, is when he starts a-talkin about his life. Oh, what a life he’s lead. The tales are as tall as they are loud. They almost always start as “when I was in college”. For example, when he heard me talking about my deck building progress with a co-worker, he chimed in and started telling us that when he was in college he built decks, and one guy hired him to build a 2000 square foot deck with curved handrails, multiple levels, curved benches, fire pits, and blah blah blah blah, and to top it all off, he built it with mahogany. When someone started talking about some silly practical joke they pulled off once, he said that he filled the principals office to the ceiling with water and catfish. You get the picture.

Oh yeah……and he stutters.
6.4 on the Richter scale