Today, one of my coworkers, a puzzling and nauseating rube named Billy, turned to the supervisor and said, "Okay, I want to test your acting ability. I'll give you an emotion and you try to--"

"What are you talking about?"

I turned to Billy and explained this normal human reaction, as I so often have to do. I chose to explain the simplest of the many reasons what he had just said was absurd. "It's considered polite to ask permission before making a request like that."

The other reasons for the absurdity are that even if he had posed this "test" as a request, it would be inexplicable, since he had given no introduction; that, as soon became clear, he was seriously looking for us to portray deep emotions as accurately as possible, which would erode the defensive wall between public self and work self; that his uninvited request, without reason or warning, disrupted whatever each of us had been doing; and that Billy is himself absurd.

He is the newest worker in the office, and ever since he came, there has been a noticable increase in the already present tension caused by cabin fever and bizarre activity. He is both a childlike simpleton and an extrovert, which leads him to break into every conversation in the most painfully awkward and uninformed manner possible, while at the same time being entirly unaware of why people don't like it when he does this. Example: two people were talking about politics yesterday, and how they think there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats (a harmful illusion which originated with the rhetoric of Ralph Nader and the Green Party, and from there made its way into the discourse of ignorant people everywhere). Cindy Sheehan came up, favorably as this is, thank god, at least a room full of Bush haters; Seun (yes, S-E-U-N "shawn", a black guy from New York and the smartest of my coworkers) asked if Bush ever talked to her, and Billy nitpicked that he had already met with her, along with other mothers who had lost children. "Come on," Seun called out, "they were prepped! They were probably telling them what they could ask for weeks!" This was met with astonishment. "I'm telling you, they were prepped, just like everyone else he talks to." Billy took this opportunity to steer the discussion toward whether he himself would be allowed to express his thoughts to Bush, asserting that surely he would be able to. He could just walk up to him and tell him how mad he was, and nothing would happen to him since we have free speech.

If this is hard to follow, it's because I'm finding it hard to recreate the situation. It was so absurd. Maybe you get some idea of it.

Another example of Billy's eerie annoyingness: three weeks ago, I was walking back to the office after buying cigarettes when a car drove by me and honked its horn. After I got back to the parking lot, I was standing on the sidewalk smoking when Billy walked up to me and said, "You didn't even jump!"

Another example: today he held up a sheet of paper and asked us each in turn, "do you think you could solve this?" I squinted to see what was on the paper. It was a maze. Billy had just created it and he wanted one of us to try it. He gave it to Matt (who has a highschool mentality and acts as though he's in a perpetual Will Farrell movie), and then told him, "and don't try starting from the finish, either. Start from the start."

Another example: At any given time, Billy is liable to look up from whatever he's reading and ask me (me specifically, because the room has decided that I'm a genius; no, really, they have said so many times and without irony, it's really embarrassing) to explain a concept, define a word, give a history, provide a fact. The questions are usually phrased in a manner so unclear that I can't tell exactly what he's asking.

"Can we see other galaxies?"

"What's so bad about marijuanna that they've made it illegal?"

"Is it better to buy a house and fix it up and then sell it, or to build a house and sell it?"

Another example: Billy has mainly read entertainment magazines since he's come, although recently he's started reading novels. I think he has a gay friend, who has been recommending stuff he can read to figure out what it means to be homosexual, because two of them were written with a gay narrator and, when asked, he said a friend had recommended them. I asked him what one of them was about, and he said, looking defensive and weary, "well, it's not necessarily work safe."

"What do you mean?"

"You have to be a . . . you have to have liberal views not to think it's offensive. It's about a gay kid."

I wish I were making all this stuff up, I really do. I don't think I could invent Billy if I tried.