Poems From Louie

Louie is one of those people everyone hates to be around. Most of the time he smells rotten, like fish guts or human excrement. Some days he comes in to work reeking of both. It's a horrible mix. He's a space invader, when he wants to talk to you he gets too close for comfort. And then there's the spitting. Louie can't manage to finish speaking a single sentence without spittle spray raining down from his lips onto a hapless victim. Real unpleasant. Whenever he stops at my workbench to bother me I want to reach for a plastic garbage bag and wear it as a protective shield against Louie's cloud of stink and filth. He's that bad.

As an electronic technician, Louie sucks. The man can't troubleshoot his way out of a cardboard box.

The majority of his time is spent bugging other people in the area. He's an expert time-waster. Photocopying shoddy poems from an old, worn out, stain encrusted hardcover book is a favorite method of Louie's to kill day shift hours instead of fixing busted instruments. Making 50 pages of the same stupid poem from his book he will wander around the shop floor pestering anyone he even remotely knows and hand them a copy. With a smile on his face revealing gaps between his upper teeth Louie will say something like, "Hello, friend. I was thinking of you today and I have this for you. Read it." Droplets of spit hit my forearms causing me to cringe, and his stench nearly burns the hairs from my nostrils every damn time this happens. As soon as Louie turns his back to walk away the poem he generously dished out is crumpled up into a little ball and tossed into the nearest trash can.

TC mentioned to me recently that one afternoon Louie came out of the restroom with a few ribbons of toilet paper hanging out of the back of his pants. Nobody bothered to point that out to Louie, so he cruised around the building all day long with toilet paper streamers drifting along behind him. I didn't see it, but if I had I probably would have fallen off of my chair laughing at the guy.