He often described himself as “six feet one inches, two hundred pounds of beautiful, black muscle.” His ego was fragile enough that most folks just left it alone. The reality of the situation was this-Raymond was closer to five foot nine, two hundred forty pounds, and it included a good deal of fleshy tissue.

This was not his only delusion, though. Besides the taller, trimmer, more muscular apparition he saw in the mirror, there was also a brain that could out-think Einstein.

Okay, so he didn’t SAY Einstein. He did say that he could be the president of the United States, that he could run the Fortune 500 company we worked at together better than the folks who were running it, that he could write a best selling novel if he wanted to, that… well, perhaps you get the point. No matter what it was, he could do it better, faster, brighter, higher. And he said it in so many ways, so often, and so tirelessly.

Well, tirelessly for HIM. The rest of us were RATHER bored with it.

I find, though, that you can put up with lots of nonsense when a person works hard, diligently does his part, shows up to work on time, comes to work every day, persists when times are hard, endures to the end, keeps going when everyone else is quitting, pulls more than his weight, performs seeming miracles, does the unexpected, and shows himself to be an unbelievably great team player.

Raymond, of course, was NONE of these things.

Wait. That’s neither accurate nor fair. He DID do the unexpected.

In fact, one of my favorite Raymond stories is of the hot summer night that my boss did NOT give Raymond the night off when he REALLY wanted it. He didn’t request it ahead of time. He just walked in and demanded it. Well, when the boss didn’t give in, he fussed and fumed and stomped around like an out-of-control toddler.

Our shift was all of four hours long. We usually worked about two hours, took a fifteen minute break, then worked about two more. We worked until all the boxes on our box slide were sorted into racks that moved around the boxline. Each boxline had about a third of the addresses of the surrounding area. We had to know what color of cage to put each address and which level (high, middle, low) box to put it in.

Ours was not as physically demanding of a job as the folks who unloaded trucks. They had to keep three different boxlines working, so they had to move 3 times as many boxes as we did. However, we had to memorize a lot of addresses. Ours was skilled labor!

Each boxline usually had three workers at a time. The slide was on our right, the moving boxline on our left. All night we would move boxes from our right to our left. Nick was usually at the front of our boxline. He liked it up there, and had been around for a long time, so he kind of got his choice. That, and he intimidated Raymond by being snarly and intelligent. This was Nick’s second job. He had been working there as a box sorter for eleven years. His day job was something he did in an office for the state. He was just biding his time in both jobs as he waited for his chance to be a UPS driver. He was Greek, grumpy-looking, and I liked him. I didn’t agree with him on much, but I really enjoyed our banter.

On our boxline, I was usually in the middle or the back. On this infamous night, Raymond chose the back. He often chose the back, because he could be a slacker without our easily detecting his crummy behavior-he was behind us.

However, tonight he wanted to be noticed.

I was working away early in the shift-right to left, right to left-when I heard a bit of a bang. Our work was a noisy place. We had big metal boxes going around about a 150 foot long, oval-shaped line, conveyor belts moving all over the building, trucks pulling in and out, fork-lifts, etc. There was a lot of noise. A bang doesn’t necessarily mean anything. So, when I first heard the bang it didn’t seem too out of the ordinary. Then I heard another one, but this one was louder.

When I turned around I saw Raymond lying on the steel grate floor. He was just lying there. This might not be good, I thought, and called out to Nick.

“Hey!”

He turned around, I pointed at Raymond, and we both moved slowly towards his immobile person. Nick (Nicholas to Raymond–”My friends call me Nick. Raymond, YOU can call me Nicholas”) and I stood above Raymond’s “unconscious” body. We looked down at him for a moment, then at each other. I bent down and tried to wake him. I shook him a little, called his name, but no response. I stood back up, Nick and I walked aside a bit, and quietly conferred.

“He’s faking it,” Nick said.

“Yup.”

Nick told me to go get the boss. He continued working on the boxline. We left Raymond lying on the steel grate floor.

When I returned with the boss, I couldn’t help noticing that Raymond, who had been “unconscious” the whole time, was no longer lying with his head on the steel grate floor, but was conveniently lying on his arm.

What a fascinating study, this man.

The boss came, Nick and I worked extra to make up for our “unconscious” peer, and the boss, who had some medical training, tried to wake Raymond.

To no avail.

Are you surprised?

The boss called Nick and I downstairs for a few minutes-out of earshot of “the body”.

“I am going to have to call the ambulance,” the boss said.

Nick erupted. “He’s a — —- ——- faker!!!” And so on. The boss said he knew that, but he didn’t have any choice in the matter. Rules were rules. We talked a bit, fumed over our ONCE AGAIN having to make up for Raymond’s lazy incompetence, and got back to work.

The paramedics came about ten minutes later. The ambulance drove right into our building. Nick and I had a lot of work to catch up on, so we didn’t bother watching-for the most part. The boss was good enough to get us an extra helper.  We did turn around once in a while to see the paramedics hovering around Raymond’s retired frame.