Cinco

“State Bank, this is Nic”, I said answering his call.

“Hey, it’s me. Can you come into my office please?”, the Buffoon said in all seriousness. He’d once again failed to pick up on my sarcasm. The Buffoon sits approximately 20 feet away from me in an office with floor-to-ceiling windows which my desk squarely faces. I basically look directly at him for most of the day and can hear everything he says as if he were sitting next to me. So, I find it ridiculous when he insists on calling me on the phone, rather just looking at me and saying me name.

“What day do you think Cinco will be this year?”, he says as I enter his office.

“What are you talking about?”

“The Cinco party up at Commons Station. What day do you think they’ll have it?”.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about”.

“The party. The Cinco de Mayo party we went and worked last year up at Commons Station. What day do you think it will be on this year?”, he said in a slow, deliberate tone in order to convey his annoyance.

“I never worked a party up there”, I replied. I’d originally had a hesitation of doubt that maybe I’d forgotten something, but now I realized he was simply being stupid once again and had some event confused in his head. I hadn’t started at this job until mid-May, but for now I chose to keep that to myself.

“Yes, me, you and Sonja all went up there. They had that street blocked off and they had margaritas. What day was it? Do you remember?”.

“No, because I wasn’t there. But, if I had to guess, I’d say they probably had the party on May 5th”.

“I know that”, he said with a slightly raised voice. At this point, he was pretty sure I was just being a smart-ass, but he wasn’t positive. He was letting me know that he knew I was insinuating he didn’t know what Cinco de Mayo translated to. “What day of the week was that? Was it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday…or Thursday?”, he continued with a mocking voice.

In trying to be a smart-ass back, he’d messed up the order of the days of the week, skipping Thursday, but then saying it at the end. He knew he looked stupid, which he knew I loved, but he kept his stare on me as if nothing had happened.

“Go check with Sonja, please”, he finished.

Sonja sat at the desk next to me and we had a dividing wall separating our respective work spaces. Although, neither of us had a door, we had developed a habit of knocking on the wall before entering each other’s area.

“Excuse me, Sonja. (The Buffoon) is wondering what day the Cinco party was on last year.”, I said while knocking.

“May 5th?”, she said somewhat puzzled.

I just smiled calmly.

“The Cinco de Mayo party would have been on May 5th”, she hesitantly continued, as if she were nervously answering what she thought was a trick question.

“Do you remember what day of the week it was?”, I asked.

“No, but can’t he just look that up?”, she replied, still puzzled.

The Buffoon had been watching my exchange with Sonja so he was waiting as I walked back into his office.

“Wayal?”, he said in his horrible hick drawl. The Buffoon had one of the most profound, ignorant sounding southern accents I’d ever heard and while everything he said generally sounded dumb, he had a few words in his arsenal that were nearly laughable. The word “well” was one of them.

“She thought it was on May 5th”, I told him, almost giddy to see how he would react. I’d long ago written this job off as a bottomless pit of misery and despair, however, one of the few entertaining aspects of it were my opportunities to fuck with the Buffoon. I would play smart-ass while keeping a straight face and although he may suspect I was fucking with him, I never did anything he could specifically call me out on.

“Oh, great, thanks a lot”, he said sarcastically. “You two ain’t no help”.

“You know, you could just look it up”, I suggested with a level tone but in a manner that was clearly meant to make him feel stupid.

“Wayal, I know that. Alright, that’s all”, he said releasing me from the conversation.

I went back to my desk and pretended to work. A few minutes later I noticed the Buffoon gyrating in his chair while turning to face me. As I looked over my computer screen, he was in my direct line of sight and was waiting for me to acknowledge him. Once I did, he flashed a smart-ass grin and yelled, “I found it”, as if he’d just struck oil in his office. It was surprising that he hadn’t called me with this news. I put on my same calm smile and gave him an exaggerated thumbs-up.

A minute or two later the Buffoon got up and walked over to my desk. “I think that party must have been on a Tuesday last year and will probably be on Wednesday this year”, he said. He was correct. May 5th had been a Tuesday the year before and fell on a Wednesday this year. “I think I’ve got something that night, but you and Sonja should probably go”, he concluded, proud of the managerial foresight he’d just administered.

And that was it. The net-net of this little exercise was that he’d discovered what day of the week May 5th fell on and decided he wouldn’t be available for a party on that night. The whole ordeal took approximately 45 minutes. He left my desk, then sat back down in his office and, as usual, proceeded to casually pick his ear.