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?
