a small plunger for a long night

At some point in the late 1990s—back when I was in Midtown five days a week and “busy season” meant we all just silently agreed we lived at the office—I found myself in possession of (OK, I went to a hardware store and bought) a small plunger. Not the industrial-strength bathroom kind. This was a modest, kitchen-sink model. Discreet. Almost polite.

That evening, while working late at my desk, I discovered that it adhered quite nicely to my forehead.

Now, a normal person might remove it at that point. But it was a long day, the numbers weren’t getting any friendlier, and for reasons that made perfect sense at the time, I decided to leave it there and continue working. I imagine I looked like a unicorn, if unicorns specialized in spreadsheets.

A few colleagues walked by, took it in, and reacted the way New Yorkers tend to react to anything slightly unusual: they shrugged and kept going.

But then one of the secretaries passed my cubicle, saw me, said something in Greek (to be clear, she was an immigrant from Greece, so it's not as if the shock suddenly taught her a new language). It did not sound encouraging, and the fact that she fled immediately afterwards didn't help.

About a minute later, my boss came over. He looked at me—plunger still firmly attached—paused just long enough to process it, chuckled, and walked away. I could hear him explaining it to someone: “He’s just having fun.”

Which, in fairness, I was.