You don't often get a chance to use a name of an obscure "Borrowers" character, but here it is. The Dreadful Spiller, named after a little (and I do mean little) boy, perhaps the last hope of the Borrowers species, which seemingly dwindled away to nothing as a result of cats, pet ferrets, and being stuck behind drywall during renovation efforts. I was hoping to find an original illustration of him from the Borrowers books (probably by Beth and Joe Krush), but will settle for the DVD illustration to the right.
I don't remember the Dreadful Spiller doing a lot of spilling in the books, but I always liked his name, and wanted to use it somewhere.Long ago a guy named Evil-E had an excellent blog. One running series he had had to do with generic office types. The types of people you sometimes end up working with. So this is in the spirit of Evil-E's blog post series.
The specific guy I am thinking of could probably get other nicknames. He has the aspect of an evil wizard. He had a wizardly name; perfect for a Harry Potter movie. He'd be perfect in dark blue robes and a tall pointed hat with stars and planets on it. He had a habit of covering all fingers with those rubber finger covers for moving lots of paper. Which made him look like a wizard arming himself for spell combat. Of course, the fingers were for moving papers, not casting spells. He would wear these sometimes instead of licking his fingers to shuffle and count papers. Or that was the way it was supposed to work: sometimes I caught him licking the rubber fingers in between turning pages.
Enough about his wizardly abilities. That's not typical. There's no such thing as an office-wizard archetype, is there? But this guy was also a Dreadful Spiller.
The office I worked at ran on coffee. We drained many pots a day. The wizard guy always had a large silver travel-tankard of coffee, filled from home, gas stations, and the office. Or perhaps filled from the carafes of the Orthanc Tower. The first day he worked with us, he set his tankard next to a stack of files, which got bumped. The tankard fell over. This time, the lid held and did not leak. He got warned.Later on, I was working with him, and I heard a steady trickle. His tankard had fallen over, and this time had leaked. A large puddle had already formed.
Another time, the tankard took a header in a carpetted room. The wizard spent hours trying to mop the coffee out of the carpet.I think he had a veritable keg of coffee with him that day. No, it never did come out of the carpet.
Has anyone ever worked with a dreadful spiller? Or been one?
11 comments:
Ha! The mental picture in my head of the Dreadful Spiller licking his rubber tipped fingers made me laugh out loud.
Oh dear... I think I may well be a dreadful spiller too, though mostly its a matter of dribbling on my own shirt. Maybe I am the Dreadful Dribbler!
The Dreadful Spiller! I love that...The Borrowers are great fun.
Your story about your own Dreadful Spiller is very funny. I can fully picture this guy at work with his rubber tipped fingers and his barrel of coffee.
I would say that in my department, if anyone would be called The Dreadful Spiller...it would have to be me.
Oh, dmarks, surely the borrowers did not die out! THE BORROWERS AFIELD is one of my all-time favorite books, even more dear to me than the first book in the series because they are outdoors at last, where Arietty always wanted to be. Surely Arietty and Spiller are grandparents by now, don't you think? And there were the cousins, too, don't forget. The movie--ugh! That troupe of mean borrowers invented by the scriptwriters had nothing whatsoever to do with the story in the books and was completely unnecessary!
I must be related to Ananda girl, another Dreadful Dribbler.
He was a dreadful spiller, but he actually got called worse things much of the time.
PJ: I remember being sad reading them about the Overmantels .... Harpsichords? and all the other families of that house, which had pretty much all died out.
I liked the Goodman movie better than you did, as we discussed before. Because there had already been a couple of true-to-the-book Borrowers adaptations up to that point.
But I admit, my favorite part of that movie was the Leighton-Buzzard skyline, oddly enough.
I hope some day to do a similar entry using the name "Poor Stainless".
I hadn't thought about The Borrowers in ages. The books, not the movie.
I'm not so much a Dreadful Dribbler, but a Freezer Fouler... I would often leave sodas in the freezer at work and forget them. Yeah. That's me.
Maybe a Forgetful Freezer...
LOL! Love the rubber-tipped fingers.
Has anyone ever worked with a dreadful spiller? Or been one?
**Raises hand**
Me, Me! I was a dreadful spiller. Except I'd like to think I was rather entertaining. After spilling my coffee onto my desk, keyboard, adding machine, or my lap...I'd jump up and try to sop it up with tissue paper, my sleeves, or whatever else I could find--rather amusing for the office staff! Then they, said office staff, purchased me coffee mugs with lids! Maybe it wasn't so "amusing" after all! ;-)
DO children count? Because if so, I live with two Dreadful Spillers! (And I have my moments, too.)
Working with a dreadful spiller...well, us chemists were invariably
considered 'stain removal
experts'.."Can you get the
india ink out of my white
carpet", "The CEO's Yorkie
pissed in the conference room", "The Mrs. washed my shirt with the ballpoint pen still in the pocket"
and "The head of engineering parked his car under some weird tree and there is sticky stuff all over it." Guess I was lucky, though..everyone seemed to clean up their
coffee spills....
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