We all loved Harold. He was mostly a quiet guy – but funny, amiable; he had a girlfriend he told warm stories about when you asked him how he spent his holidays; a family he wasn’t very close to but never bothered you with the details. A well-rounded employee overall. He didn’t work with the boys in creative but he could be called on to drum out some extra tags for a flat billboard or a subway eyecatch. Mostly he just worked the backend searches and kept our public site clean while streamlining the bugs in our internal network.

Then one year old Mike McMurty decided he was going to switch the whole operation to a new complex in Iowa. It was a tough move to make but the company was providing for all of the key personnel to transition and they’d take our houses at market value or pay us the difference from the sale. It was a smart move from a business perspective. They said later that Harold was even due for a raise and an office in the new Iowa IT department. But, and this became apparent only on the Friday after the announcement, Harold had something against Iowa.

Old McMurty had just finished his big speech on total sales efficiency and assuring the managers and the rest of us that everyone was making a brave but lucrative decision. And Harold said, “Iowa, Mike? Is that what we’ve been reduced to?” Old McMurty scowled at Harold as if the skinny 29-year-old had slapped him. He began to say something but Harold cut him off:

“À bas this wretched relocation, the temerity explicit virulent amongst these timorous fools. Fie! Fie, elder McMurty, to thy scabrous crown scabrous age now met in bleak, pale certainty, mottled. Gone is the unblemished acumen that once decorated thee invisibly, replaced with visible malady, future terrors as rank on thy shoulders as an anfractuous sewer, spilling out thy insecurity wet and weeping weather attendant wherefore these buffoons clamor when speech fails them against your odious machinations. Iowa? Cost-effective? Five-year-plan? You billowing tumor of feculent tumescence, I submit my resignation. Effective forthwith!”

Harold then filed his reports and quietly left the building.