Enforcing whimsy!


I went through my desk before Christmas because I was under the impression that I had Christmas Carol CDs somewhere in the reaches of my top desk drawer. I didn’t. I found an assortment of CDs, none that I wanted to listen to, a book mark with the lyrics to You’re A Grand Old Flag, two years worth of office birthday cards, unsharpened pencils – thought, is it really a pencil if it is not sharpened? Does it need to have a point in order to have a point? And then, if it has to be sharpened in order to be all it can be, why do they hand them out unsharpened? I mean other then the public safety issue. My desk is full of them and the offices one pencil sharpener doesn’t work. I would throw them away but I might need to use them as chop sticks someday or I may need to lash them together and use them as a raft. A teeny, tiny raft. Or maybe, the under sized feral cat I feed outside may get hit by a car and he’ll need them for little kitty crutches. I could get all Emergency Vets and break one in half and use the pieces to make a splint for his little shattered leg or use two whole ones and make a little gurney thing to carry him in to one of the nurses here to look at and maybe she could scatter nurse dust on him and cure him of his smushedness . Yeah. I can dream.

I also came across about a dollar in pennies. It’s a good thing that there aren’t any vending machines that take pennies because I might be able to get rid of them or maybe I could put the lot of them in a sock and use it as a weapon the next time someone asks me to find a file I can’t, I can knock them unconscious, box them up and send them to archives. Right.

As I went through my top drawer looking for something seasonal, or eatable or vending machine friendly I ran across a stash of pictures apparently detailing a year in the life of a taxidermy squirrel named “Earl”. Earl had a better wardrobe than half of the people in the office and substantially better recreational gear there were no pictures of these but I remember he had at least one canoe a couple of speed boats, a ski-doo, and some home made skis. Earl was the first thing visitors saw when they entered our building, I would like to think it made us look like nice friendly, folksy types. Most of our visiters only knew our Enforcement side "You owe us $35,000, We're closeing you down, alerting the feds, and talking to the press", Earl let them know we had Whimsical side as well.


In attention to his role as greeter Earl was kind of a Calendar Boy, he was always dressed for the season and you would be surprised how many seasons you can invent when you get to use state time to play dress up with a squirrel. In the series of shots I found were Earl at a picnic, Earl as Tourist and Earl as Santa.

Earl

Picnic Earl 


Summer Earl 


Santa Earl 



Earl “retired” with the past director of our division and it is rumored that he fed Earl to his dogs. Not everybody loved Earl.