The Juicer

Here’s another story about my old job.

My company inexplicably hired a guy I knew to run my department. People knew I was familiar with him—hence the adverb in the previous sentence—so they asked me what he was like.

“He’s okay,” I said. “I don’t mind him.”

True enough, but they didn’t ask me whether I thought he was any good. Different story, that.

One of my coworkers, whom I’ll call El Nepotisto Incompetente—which I know is a shitty translation, but it gets my point across nicely—told me he’d heard the new “boss” used to be a bodybuilder.

I was unaware of this odd and rather irrelevant bit of history, because the new “boss” weighed about 150 pounds soaking wet. El Nepotisto Incompetente, with whom I was actually friends at the time, had come into my office by himself—remember, nobody else was listening to this conversation—so I decided to say something funny.

“Yeah,” I said. “That guy is a major fucking juicebag. He’s more roided out than Lyle Alzado and A-Rod put together.”

It’s important to note, once again, that the guy I was referring to looks like he runs marathons twice a week and spends the rest of his time residing in Ethiopia.

For his first two weeks on the job, the new “boss,” despite the fact that we’d been friendly in the past, gave me the cold shoulder. I wondered why, so I called a mutual friend—another former coworker—to find out what had crawled up the new “boss’s” ass.

“He said you were spreading rumors accusing him of being on steroids.”