A couple years ago, I landed a spot in the IT department at my local Census Bureau office. I was referred to by a friend (I'll call him "Nathan", I'm giving fake names) who was a supervisor of the department, and later I would also refer a friend of my own, "Garret", to which he would also join us. This was a really sweet gig. It was impossibly easy work and we found ourselves having a lot of free time. Eight hours a day, $15 an hour, and we got two entire months of paid time off because of the coof.
Three months into working there, our office decided to hire a new batch of in-house workers. This was because the main phase of census gathering was upon us; there would be a lot of old ass enumerators who would need general field and tech support because they've never touched an iPhone in their entire lives.
One day I was sitting at my desk, dicking around with only a couple phone calls an hour to keep me busy. My ticket queue was empty, and it was almost lunch time. Nathan came back from the presentation room and he looked eager to tell Garret and I something. Since there was no work in sight, we went outside to have a smoke along with another supervisor named "Jose". Garret lit me up a cigarette, and we sat down on the bench. Nathan told us there was this guy in orientation who stood up, introduced himself, and verbally announced he was a trans woman, saying he was proud of who he was and that he wanted us to respect his pronouns. I thought Nathan was just fucking with us, because that seemed right up his alley as far as humor is concerned. However, he insisted he wasn't making it up. Guess what fucking department this "woman" applied to work in? That's right: IT. We were going to be working with a tranny.
Now, us four made a lot of homophobic and racist jokes. It doesn't run deeper than that, though. We didn't actually have any problem with someone being gay, or trans, or black, or whatever; jokes are funny. I'd known a few gays and asexual kids in High School, but I live by a "don't be a cunt and I really don't care what you do" philosophy. I suppose what I was worried about the most was I would slip and say something like "man, this is gay" or any number of x-phobic phrases, the troon would freak out, and get my ass fired for discrimination. This worry was shared by the four of us. We made sure to be careful about what we said, and we went back inside.
It was time for the troon to take a few mundane orientation quizzes on the computer. I learned that his name was "Mia" (that's his tranny name, not his birth name printed on his badge so no problem using it). When I first saw Mia sitting at his new desk, I almost had a brain bleed. He was barely shorter than me, a 6ft, overweight, distinctly male-looking individual with long, greasy black hair tied in a pony tail. He wore a flannel jacket, an anime T-shirt, jeans, and converse. Mia was the lowest-effort tranny I've ever seen in my life. One interesting comment he made while taking the quiz was when he got to the section covering EEO law, saying that he would get through that part easily because he was "very familiar" with it. This made a hundred fucking alarms go off in my head.
This guy is out to fuck the system. He is going to try something retarded and find any excuse he can to sue the US government for discrimination.
That was the theory my coworkers and I came up with over a lot of drinks. Unfortunately, what went down wasn't as grandiose. However, I can assure you the things that Mia did were nothing short of mind-numbingly cringe.
Mia really made himself at home in the office. He brought a stuffed teddy bear and sat it on his desk. He had a little plastic statue of a Pokémon and put it on top of his computer. Those were the items that stood out to me the most, though he had many other things he decorated his desk with. It looked nothing like anyone's desk in the office. Hell, I thought me drawing on the sticky notes and making origami out of them won myself the title of "most autistic" in the office. Mia surpassed my autism tenfold, which is astounding.
Mia never did any work and was always late. When we got busy, he somehow always found a way to not resolve any tickets or pick up any calls. When he did, it was basic password resets. However, he did find time to draw, listen to music, and fill his desk with more troon shit. He would fuck with the personalization settings on his PC, he would be searching up shit on it which wasn't related to work, and any other time he would be on his phone. He sat in front of another supervisor, "Lauren", this insanely hot -- but admittedly batshit crazy -- Adderall junkie who none of us really liked because she was power-hungry. Mia talked to her all the time, and my god the visibly uncomfortable look on her face would've been funny if it didn't make me sorry for her. She would avoid him as much as she possibly could, and when she did have to interact with him, it was as briefly as she could manage. She would tell me all the time about how much he creeped her out over smoke breaks.
Mia smelled like shit. There was a very sweet, mild-mannered middle aged woman who was the manager of the department stationed beside IT. I can't remember what she did specifically, but it was mostly spread sheet and e-mail stuff. I loved her to death, and she would always come to me for problems she was having on her computer or with the printer. One day, Mia was out on a break or something, and this old lady came back with a can of Febreze, sprayed it all over and around Mia's desk, turned to Lauren, and said "Y'all need to tell that boy to clean his damn self!"
Mia didn't follow dress code. We had business casual. I wore a button-up shirt with dress pants, most people in the office were fine doing that. Mia apparently wasn't. He would wear a T-shirt and shorts one day and a fuckin duster and jeans the next. In every conceivable way, Mia stuck out like a sore thumb and accomplished his mission of getting at least half the office's attention.
It wasn't very long before I figured out why Mia was late so much. Too many times I had to talk to him on break and pretend like I wasn't completely repulsed by him, and one of the things he would tell me about was how much he loved cars. One day he was telling me about how he had a project car he was working on. I didn't care about any of that shit, so most of the details went in one ear and out the other, but that was then when it hit me. The day before, he showed up an entire hour late, smelling like motor oil with black stains on his jeans, on top of whatever other scents he accumulated over his days of not showering. Our department manager actually got pissed, and he never got pissed. Mia made some bullshit excuse about needing to do something for his roommate, that he was sorry and wouldn't be late again (he would be, just not by as much). I can deduce that this motherfucker was working on his car late into the night, going to bed in his clothes, waking up, and going straight to work.
COVID was creeping up on us, and Mia came in the office one day, casually talking Lauren again, and mentions that he might have been exposed to the virus. This scared the fuck of her, and Mia was sent home. The whole fucking office needed to get sterilized, so we missed a day. Thankfully, no one got sick.
A couple weeks prior to the office getting closed due to COVID, Mia did something absolutely fucking stupid, and to this day I still wonder what the hell he was thinking. See, we had badges to get in and out of the building and to access our computers. Every computer came with a badge reader. You put your card in, enter your password, and that's that; never lose it, never leave it in unattended because it's a security risk. Mia would leave his card in unattended from time-to-time, because "of course", but that isn't even the most stupid thing he did.
No, one day I was looking in his general direction, and noticed he was coloring in the emblem on his chip reader with a Sharpie. If you don't understand just how retarded that is, it's a FELONY; vandalism of government property. This fucking idiot could've done time for that. "What the fuck is that?" our department manager said when he noticed it, too. Mia got pulled into the boss's office, and the entire IT department was facepalming and pinching the bridge of their noses. When he came out, he told us that he had to clean off the chip reader and that he got a warning. That's right: they let it slide. Mia had wreaked havoc on our office being as autistic as he could possibly manage, and just got off scot-free after committing a felony.
Though, COVID would soon strike, and everyone in the office had to stay home and get $500-$800 a week. Fortunately, this story has a happy ending.
During the shutdown, some of us in the IT department got together to have ourselves a couple hits from the bong. We partied and watched movies the whole night and were having a great time. We started talking about how unbelievable Mia was, and I mentioned how I dreaded going back to work and how I was pissed that he got away with all the autistic shit he pulled. Jose said "Hey Crep, guess what." Stoned out of his mind, he looks up to me, eyes red, with this grin on his face I'll never forget. "Mia has 27 infractions on his permanent record. Every time he's done something I've been there typing it in. He's been exited, he ain't coming back." My only response to this was pure, uncontrollable laughter and I gave Jose a bro hug. They exited Mia the day before the office closed, meaning he wasn't still getting paid like the rest of us.
A couple weeks passed and the office re-opened. We tried getting ahold of Mia because his shit was still on his desk. He never came to pick it up, so that teddy bear and Pokémon figurine remained. We decided to clear everything off and throw the stuff away. Lauren noticed that the bear had a zipper on the back of it. Curious, she opened it up and a bunch of Q-tips stuffed in the pouch fell out. Startled, she dropped it. She raised her palms, went to get hand sanitizer, and said "who the hell keeps q-tips in a teddy bear on their desk?" That question is the perfect embodiment of Mia's troon autism.
I decided to take the Pokémon, knowing exactly what I wanted to do with it. I brought it to Nathan's house, mounted it on his fence post, and fired two shots at it with my pistol. The second one hit and that fucker exploded. I've never felt so much closure from killing a Pokémon in my entire life.
I heard a little bit about Mia post-Census. He would hang around a local vape shop, of which I'm good friends with the owner. I talked about Mia and he told me he knew exactly who I was describing and mentioned that he came in the store the other day, lied down on the carpet, and took a nap. He told me about how Mia would drone on-and-on to him about his HRT and depression. I've never made an effort to talk to Mia, or really even thought about him until tonight. It's a very dumb and long story, and I almost can't believe that it happened.
[edit]: i wrote this at 5AM. fixed some sleeptard spelling