They Never Did Find The Body

This is a script that I spent 2 days writing, editing, cutting, and loading into the prompter. It made it all the way through preproduction and was axed because, it's just not good enough and doesn't fit my channel well enough. So I'll share it here, and you'll be the only people who ever see it. Enjoy the story. :)

So I’ve had….a day. But bad days make good stories so grab a drink and let me spin you a yarn. You just might learn something along the way.

It’s late August here in Michigan, and the weather has been keeping up with my workshop playlist, they’re both stuck in the 90’s. The heat isn’t the only thing making me want to work inside though, because for the past week or so my backyard has smelled like the floor-drain in an Alamaba slaughterhouse.

The stench of death is primarily caused by the compounds putrescine and cadaverine. These are decay products (get it) that which are produced when bacteria break down amino acids in decaying bodies. This process is called putrefaction, and the mephitic offgassing is every bit as pleasant as you imagine.

Ever wonder why I went into physics and electricity? The nastiest slimy thing I ever work with is Noalox. I like it that way. The bionerd girls are super cute, but where physicists keep skeletons in their closet, they hide demons in their fridge. I’d rather face the daily danger of electrocution arc flash, and sublimation, than have to wear a vaporub mustache. Don’t ever let anyone tell you the bionerds aren’t tough.

Funny thing is, when people watch either of us work, they all say the same thing.

I AIN’T STICKING MY HAND IN THERE!

Some critter had clearly gasped its last somewhere in my backyard. As is clearly outlined in the 14th amendment, it was my job to go find it. The problem was, the stench was everywhere and I was unable to localize, much less visualize the source. Every member of the household went on this hunt at various times over the following week, and none of us could pinpoint it.

Thus, I did what responsible adults do in such a situation. I invited a couple friends over to play everyone’s favourite game “find the smell”.

To absolutely no avail. We concluded our efforts with even less productivity than an HOA meeting.

But the stench just kept growing. My back porch smelled like hell’s dumpster. It was so bad I was having difficulty taking the dog out to pee. It was time to call in the professionals. But this was on the thursday before Labor Day weekend, and the professionals in the world of dead-critter-removal do not consider this an emergency situation.

To be fair, it’s not like it’s going anywhere, and it smells fine from their house. 

They informed me they’d be here at the blistering pace of three weeks from now. Thanks bud, after a month of baking in the August sun between scavengers and the substantial boost to the local Musca domestica population it won’t be that much of a problem by then.

So I called a different place. Four different places. Thanks to consistent persistence I was finally able to find someone who had a cancellation and could get me in blisteringly quick…..next Tuesday.

So, no grilling in my backyard for labor day weekend. I can roll with it. To be fair, it’s way better than my last few labor days. So there’s that.

Tuesday comes and the dude shows up. He’s exactly what you imagine. He’s a nice kid but there’s no danger of him using a word I’m going to have to google. I fill him in on the basics and he sets off on his hunt while I went to finish my lunch. I expected I wouldn’t be in the mood to eat in an hour and didn’t want to miss my chance.

Fifteen minutes later, and three bites from finishing my lunch, he’s knocking on the back door like Rocco Siffredi. He’s got that look like a cat that just brought deadmou5 tickets to the doorstep so I ask how he did on his hunt?

With the relentless confidence of an incorrect youtube commenter he pointed to my back deck and assured me it was really most sincerely under there. He’d checked the entire area and that was absolutely positively the source of the offending aroma.

So I said Excellent, sic-em beavis.

And that’s when you could see his brain missing a shift. [dzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz dzzzzzzz chunk chunk chunk]

Now I had been informed by their dispatcher office goddess that it would cost somewhere between one-hundred and four-hundred bucks, depending on the scope and scale of the carrion to be carried away. This is a spectrum of something like rat to deer, and that made perfect sense to me. Now I’ve got this poster boy for birth control informing me that it was most certainly four-hundred just for him being here to remove the creature (which we were all pretty certain was a groundhog, I’d have noticed a deer). After his consultation with the boss it would be another four-hundred if he has to cut a hole in the deck.

Chuck you farley I can build a nontrivial part of a new deck for that. I’m not paying you four hundred bucks to fuck up my deck. I’ve got a PhD in breaking shit and am perfectly happy to spend some quality time with a tool in my hand.

After a short negotiation he agreed to head off to his next client and circle back with me mid afternoon. We’ll do the deck removal and he can come recover the body in a bit. I walked inside and filled my roommate in on what’s up, and five minutes later we were rocking out with a screwshooter and a crowbar. The back deck was framed in wood, but decked in composite. But after three batteries and more screws than I had in college we had all the boards towards each end removed and could very clearly visualize the entire underside of the deck.

We found the old corner of the house before the addition. We found several dozen frightfully unhappy spiders, an ant colony the size of Nebraska, and even found some interesting artifacts from families that had lived here before. But you know what we didn’t find?

A body.

Habeas Marmota!

By this point I’m like three hours late for work, so I head off to install the new fans for the exciter cabinet and just quietly await what I’m sure is going to be one hell of a fun phone call. A couple hours later he calls and inform’s me he’s ready to get his hearse in motion. He asked how it went with the deck removal and I filled him in on the parts of the story he’d missed.

You know how you can hear someone smile over the phone? You can also hear them run through the employment options flowcart as they’re dreading having to call their boss. I wasn’t terribly upset about all this, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let him know that. This is cheap entertainment and I had long since resigned myself to the fact that my day was hosed. The least I could do is make that contagious to his boss with him as the vector.

As the pieces clicked into place in his brain, how he had just told me to carve my deck into kindling for nothing, he had a kernel panic and blue screened to his default error message,

“I have to call my boss and will get back with you.”

That was late afternoon, four days ago, and I still haven’t heard from anyone.

I doubt I’ll ever hear from him or his boss ever again. Because that’s what counts for accountability these days. We have a world of people who love drama but lack any meaningful problem solving skills. Nobody ever talks about the other end of the Karen’s extreme, and both ends are functionally useless.

It’s six to five and pick ’em I ever get a bill for the undertaker circlejerk that was my entire morning, but this is still going to be expensive. 

Since the deck is composite I can’t just chop it up and toss it in the firepit. It’s way too big for the trashcan, so this meant renting a dumpster. So that’s four hundred bucks. Not counting the day of work that it’ll be to dismantle everything and load it into the dumpster. My time is not without value.

Then there’s the substantial cost of building some manner of new back patio. Because otherwise I have a sliding door that sits two feet off the ground and one hell of a big ugly spot behind my house.

If I had my way, I’d cover the whole area in enough concrete to bury the elephant’s foot. Pave the planet.

AND WE NEVER DID FIND THE DAMN BODY! It still stinks back here.

So what do I get out of all this? Opportunity.

I get the chance to tell you a story and give you a laugh. More than that, like an old ‘80s cartoon where we were watching anime before it was cool, I get the chance to give you a moral to the story.

This is the kind of knucklehead everyday situation that often results in a lot of fuss, fight, and fingerpointing. Shure I could raise a stink (get it) and make several people’s week way more interesting. But we’re all the way to the end of the episode and you still don’t know the name of the dude or his company. 

You’re not going to either. Because I’ve been on that side of the deal and I know what it’s like to be the guy in the field who screws up. That kid’s gonna punish himself way worse than anything I could ever do. He’ll learn, and he’ll do better next time. If he doesn’t, well then he won’t be employed very long because his boss doesn’t pay him to be a liability.

And if neither of them figure that out, well they deserve each other and the market will sort it out. That’s capitalism in action. Because not everyone is as chill as I am.

I can’t control where the groundhog chose to curl up and die, nature is a mother and I’ve spent way too much time on a boat even think about picking a fight with her. 

I can’t control that sometimes people are genuinely dumb, and make honest mistakes that create problems that I have to deal with. That’s just how the world works. 

But what I can control is how I chose to feel about that. Anger is easy. It’s a comfortable default emotion and it’s a really trivial thing to piss people off if they lack the ability to think even a couple steps ahead. The news figured that out decades ago and has been making a booming industry of emotional ad revenue ever since.

One of the most fundamental lessons I can ever teach you is this one simple fact. Emotions work in balance with your Intellect, and the fulcrum of that balance is your Attitude. Attitude is a choice. Either you choose to control your emotions, or your emotions are going to control you. Either way brings consequences, good and bad.

But you have to choose, and there’s an immense power in that choice.

We have a world largely run by lawyers and insurance companies. There’s a reason for this. We keep feeding them. Sure, there’s a time when their services are worthwhile, but just like cops, those times are far more rare than too many people seem to believe. This is exactly why we’ve replaced parenting with policing and modern people scream “I’m calling the cops” with the same tone I grew up hearing 4th graders scream “I’m telling mom!” on the playground. 

Get some grit and get a grip.

Could I make a couple phone calls and start a whole circus of lawyers and insurance companies? Sure. I could raise all manner of fuss and fight and start a flurry of emails and paperwork. The process would drag on for months and nontrivial sums would change hands. A whole industry would profit and in the end, nothing of substance would be accomplished. Nothing would actually change, and it would all be an exercise in headwind micturition.

The attitude you bring to work every day will have a massive impact on not just your productivity, but also on how you feel at the end of it. Attitude is infectious, and the power of your attitude will have an effect on everyone you work with. There are extremes in either direction, and they all cause problems. The trick is finding the right balance that works for you.

The first step to this is simply developing the habit of taking a moment to stop and think before you react. Because the first reaction is always going to be an emotional one, and it’s almost always not the one you want.

Develop that habit and it becomes character. Do that long enough and character becomes reputation. Everything you are as you walk through life is nothing more than the combination of a million choices. But over half of those choices all begin with simply choosing if you’re going to let something you cannot control, take control of your emotions.

That is a choice that only you can make. You can choose to do better. You can choose to be better.

And that’s pretty cool.