Office Commando
Office life has a strange sense of dread about it. It's nothing you can place your finger on, but it's pervasive. Everybody comes to the job with their own tensions, stresses, and secret desires, and it all mixes together in a kind of heady perfume of fear and loathing. Nobody acknowledges it until the day that somebody goes off and delivers all their memos in bloody lead.

Naturally I just have to poke the shit out of that sleeping bear. That is why I display the Office Commando.

The Office Commando makes everybody profoundly uncomfortable. It's a little plastic bobble head statue. It depicts a man naked from the waist up save for an ammunition bandoleer, a headband, and a big-ass gun. He is standing on a plastic chair and peering over a plastic cubicle. His face is frozen in a rictus of hatred, his tubby belly barely obscuring the charts and graphs peppering the walls of his private hell.

Visually he is quite entertaining, but that isn't what makes him my pride and joy. It's the sound effects that really sell it. There's a control stick attached to him that, when pushed, will cause him to swivel in his chair as the sound of gunfire plays from his tinny speakers. He will shout various things like "Deadlines! DEADLINES!", "Here's a PERFORMANCE REVIEW FOR YOU!" and my favorite: a simple, inarticulate scream of rage.

People are fascinated by Office Commando. It reflects what they're all thinking, yet can never say. Some days they really would like to come in here and bust a cap or twenty. Here is my proof- I also have a giant red button from Staples that sits next to Office Commando. When it is pushed, it says "That was easy." Take a wild guess which of these gets messed with a dozen times a day. Go on, I'll wait.

We are violent and savage creatures at heart. That is the lesson of Office Commando. He does not dissemble, he does not hem and haw. He says "This is what you are thinking about. Yes, you, in the suit at the cubicle. You file that travel expense report, you call those meetings and sit in them and while away the years before your death. I know what you really want. You want to fuck your coworker and eat your boss's heart. You want to steal every last pen from the supply cabinet and bathe in the blood of Marketing."

You can watch them give in as they listen to him curse and fire his gun. Just for a second, there is something like primal joy in their eyes. I like to think that the recognition of our own natures is what keeps us sane, in the long run. Bless you then, Office Commando, for you are truly the sanest of us all.