Time and time again I found myself at his mercy, and I couldn't figure out why. The workday ended, the sun was setting, and he would get onto email with the smack-talk to all of us peeps downstairs. "INSTAGIB!" the subject header would always be, and the body of the message was usually a taunting haiku like:

Join my server now
My Railguns trailing brightly
Gibbing you, mid air.

So I would join his stupid server, and then after a couple of rounds my hands would start to cramp up, and then pretty soon I'd be shivering and I wouldn't be able to hold the mouse steady, and he would just DESTROY me. Why? Why?

I'll tell you why! The creep flips on the downstairs air conditioner just before he sends off his email!

Well, I spent all weekend plotting his demise. My attempts to install a space heater merely blew the fuse down here. No, no, I needed to be clever. Clever like the nimble newfoundland beaver.

With a sharpened pencil behind my ear, I proceeded to draft a six-page scale model of our ventillation system and floorplan. Then, throughout the day Saturday and well into the wee hours of Sunday morning, I carefully constructed a complex network of hamster tubing from my air vent all the way over to his desk. It went through the ceiling tile and everything, completely stealth. At the end of it all the outlet was pointing right at Crenshaw's mouse hand, with a small nozzle so as to channel the output of six separate air vents right at him in a powerful gust. Like a stream of ice. Oh yes. I couldn't wait until that schmuck got a taste of his own, Mortal Kombat Sub-Zero style!

After constructing my apparatus I couldn't find my pencil. It must have slipped from behind my ear. I thought nothing of it.

Monday afternoon rolled around and I was baking in my own sweat -- partially because there was no climate control during the noonday hours, but mostly because I was nervous. Then ... I got the email:

Lonely server waits
Where are the chumps to fill it?
I will 0wn j00 all.

Suddenly I heard a clanging noise, like something hitting plastic. The hamster-tubing groaned and shook. Clang! Cling! Clung! Something ricochetted from tube to tube, like a marble getting sucked up into a vacuum cleaner. I wasn't there to see it, but I understand that when the pencil shot out of the nozzle above Crenshaw's desk, it sounded like an 18-wheeler backfiring. Wood-shavings flew everywhere. You could hear his scream of pain all the way from accounting. The paramedics later told me that the biggest difficulty wasn't removing the pencil from his hand, but getting it out of the mouse.

That night I won.