When I opened my desk drawer at work yesterday, I noticed that someone had put a box of tampons there.  There were 16 of the 18 remaining.  Who put them there, and why?

Since there were a couple of tampons missing, I began with the assumption that whoever put them there planted them as a stash for personal use.  If this was the case, I could safely eliminate all male coworkers from my suspect list.  The same logic could be used to eliminate all the more venerable female ones as well, especially the few whose blue-rinse cooters haven’t shed a drop of blood since Hinckley shot Reagan.

Unfortunately, this did not even come close to eliminating the possibilities to a select few.  My workplace is pretty large, relatively young, and women make up at least half of it.  Even if it did not run afoul of both the sexual-harassment policy and common courtesy, it simply would not be feasible for me to confront and accuse each potential tampon-box planter individually.

As if the question of who wasn’t perplexing enough, figuring out why seemed absolutely mind boggling.  We all have desk drawers.  Why would a woman choose to store her feminine-hygiene products in my cube rather than her own?  Naturally, I smelled a conspiracy.

One only has to look through my extensive secret file that is no doubt being amassed in the basement of some quasi-legal shadow-government agency somewhere.  “It is hard to imagine how someone who is so chronically inappropriate with the basest of sensibilities and immaturity run riot has neither been incarcerated or beaten to death by decent people.  It is our recommendation that Jennings be tempted to perform some loathsome act for which he shall be apprehended and severely punished.”

In light of this, the motivation behind this becomes pretty clear.  The person or persons responsible placed the tampons in my cube in the hope that I would be caught on video taking one one of them out of its wrapper and putting it in the office coffee pot.  You know what?  I would have done it in a heartbeat too if I had not been onto their little game.

hese sorts of dirty tricks by the Global Managers are nothing new.  One need only look at the tragic case of Phineas Gage.  Gage was a railroad employee in the mid-nineteenth century.  By all accounts, he was both a conscientious worker and a virtuous person.  All accounts, that is, until his “accident.”  In 1848 while working as a crew foreman in Vermont, Gage was in the vicinity of some dynamite that “just happened to go off” and launch a three and a half foot tamping iron up through his jaw and out the top of his head.

It is my guess that he learned something he shouldn’t have and because he was a good American, said he would go public.  Among the railroad robber barons, only locomotives were allowed to do any whistle blowing.

The injury changed Phineas Gage forever.  The once solid citizen had been transformed into a violent and lecherous alcoholic.  Even if he made good on his threat to tell all, no one would trust a man who was known for the horrible sucking sounds his cranium made while he downed one rye whiskey after another and tried to ram his hand up a barmaid’s skirt.

I was certain that the merciless success of silencing Phineas Gage has emboldened many thuggish operatives over the years and that I was the intended target of this brutal legacy.  I have to admit that I was skeptical at first.  I was willing to accept as mere coincidence the fact that both of us being in the employ of large profit-motivated organizations, or even that “Gage” and “Dave” have the same number of letters.  What I could not dismiss was the undeniable fact that TAMPING IRON THROUGH THE BRAIN is an anagram of INHERIT THROUGH BRING A TAMPON.

I know that I’m going to have to watch my back to avoid a similar fate.