Edgar Nim's Checklist for Phoning the Wife

1. Call a couple of buddies to gossip about wife
2. Hang up when good and worked up
   
3. Switch to Eeyore voice
4. Practice Eeyore voice on wife's receptionist
5. Talk low and all serious-like
6. Never laugh - remember that you're not talking to the "buds"
7. Get defensive at the first sign of trouble
8. Play the "you never understand me" card
9. Cut wife off in mid-sentence by loudly slamming phone
10. Curse under breath
11. Hang up on wife's return phone call
12. Ignore subsequent phone calls
13. Turn down phone ringer
14. Huff out of office
15. Take 2.5 hour lunch

Mr. Edgar Nim

My close neighbor at the cubicle farm is a man I'll refer to as Edgar Nim.

Technically, we are not on the same team. Our paths have crossed at the whim of a corporate office manager. If I ever find that office manager, well, he/she just better watch out.

Mr. Nim is, to put it kindly, a piece of work. I coined the surname Nim from an acrostic that best describes him - No Internal Monologue. Every vapid thought that breezes through his pea brain passes through his lips at a volume two orders of magnitude louder than the rest of us Internal Monologuists.

He comes in early and leaves early (mercifully). He spends most of his time on the phone. He has three "friends" that he plays against one another for attention. Every mundane occurance in his life is extolled thrice - sick dogs, leaky roofs, overdrawn checking accounts, fights with the wife. He is Willard Scott, Dr. Phil, Dave Ramsey, Tim Russert, and Al Michaels rolled into one. He is an expert at everyone's job but his. Have one or two teammates of his out of the office, and his clients are out of luck. But have a cold front approach and he can read the radar better than the local meteorologists.

He lives in a run down (to hear him tell it) shack on some property his father-in-law divided up. We know all his wife's siblings names, and their kids, and which ones are sorry and which ones are tolerable. We know the extra-curricular activities of his children, and how he resents having to support them. We hear him get out of lunch dates with his wife by telling her how swamped he is and then he immediately dials one of his buddies to make plans for lunch with them. We hear him talk about one buddy to another, then turn around and call the other buddy to talk about the first. Today, I swear I thought I heard my seventh grade homeroom teacher calling roll.

Every little thing about Mr. Nim infuriates me. I can't even make eye contact with him in the hallway. He is human fingernails on my chalkboard. He is a grain of sand in my oyster. He is rude, crude, and socially unacceptable. He drives me insane. He gets on my last nerve.

Hence his assigned first name - Edgar.

Edgar is one of those people that Rick Warren refers to in Purpose Driven Life as EGR people. Extra Grace Required. You have them in your life, I'm sure. People who stand a little too close when they talk to you. Or they tell you the same stories and relate the same problems and ailments every time you see them. Or they are habitually late. Or loud. Or they are undependable. Critical. Needy. Annoying. Dishonest. Two-faced. Loud.

Mr. Nim is my thorn in the flesh, a constant reminder that grace is not just for the lovely (for who among us is truly lovely?). It is a hard truth that I face five days a week, nine to four-thirty.

I wonder who considers me their Edgar?