Mr. McConvict

Walking into the chamber area with a metal folding chair under his arm and a toothpick sticking from the corner of his mouth, a man with slightly bloodshot eyes and grayish hair sat himself down nearby. I was unloading a temperature chamber at a Spectral Purity station getting prepared for another round of four instruments. Neither one of us had met before but I'd heard this guy was one of the three new people we were supposed to get. As he settled into his chair I noticed he was neurotically chewing on that toothpick. Before I could introduce myself and shake his hand, he spoke. With a slight Southern drawl in his voice he said, "My Daddy told me I should have been institutionalized."

Uh oh.

I started calling him Mr. McConvict after that, it's a close play on his real last name. Shoelaces and a couple other people are calling him by the same nickname already so I feel confident it suits the guy quite well. From talking with Mr. McConvict over the past two weeks he's told me a lot about his life. He was career Army, working as an electronic warfare technician in a branch of the special forces. If anything else his topics of conversation have not been boring. I ask people far too many questions about themselves when I am getting to know them at work. Some people are put off by it but Mr. McConvict doesn't seem to mind at all. He's been yapping away through the shift which helps pass the time when it's slow.

There's one thing that bugs me though. Mrs. McConvict is a phone beast of the worst kind. She calls in here multiple times each night looking for her husband. It's just bad luck he hasn't been in the area whenever she hits the phone, but man, that broad is a nuisance. If I can't locate Mr. McConvict and get him to the phone fast enough she will hang up on me. It's damn rude of her especially when I practically walk the entire shop floor of Building 2 trying to round him up. Shoelaces also happens to be on the receiving end of her futile phone calls often. Most of the time he can't find Mr. McConvict either. I think his wife has the uncanny habit of trying to bother him about stupid household shit (non-emergencies and petty domestic crises) whenever he's stepped out for lunch or gone to take a dump or something.