PEEPS AMPcopy; : 'Tude Dude

We have durable telephones in our offices and it's a damned good thing we do, because if they were fragile, 'Tude Dude would have gone through a bunch of 'em by now.

He slams 'em down at the end of all phone calls -- not merely the contentious ones.

When conversations get contentious, or when work isn't going exactly right for 'Tude Dude, it's stuff other than the phone that tend to suffer more.

Like his 21" Sony monitor. He won't say he tried to put his fist through it, but it DID get knocked off of its stand during a noisy episode when he was under a bit of stress. And he just happened to go to the Wellness Center (formerly known as the Nurse's Station) shortly after. And return the next day with two fingers of a swollen hand splinted and taped.

One morning, another peep dropped by my cube.

"You gotta see something in my cubicle."

I followed him and, looking where he gestured, saw that his lava lamp was missing its cap. The cap was sitting off to the side. It was cracked. A picture that had been hanging on the cube wall was no longer on the wall. The books in the bookshelf were slumped and disarrayed.

This particular wall of the cube adjoined 'Tude Dude's cube.

Then the guy showed me an e-mail he'd received. It was from Mouse. Mouse sits in the cube across from the guy with the broken lamp. In the e-mail, Mouse reported that he had been working late and heard 'Tude Dude start cussing loudly, then something slammed into the shared cube wall, causing it to shudder violently, which in turn caused the books to slide, the picture to fall, and the lava lamp, which had been right up against the wall, to get knocked off of its stand.

'Tude Dude fell silent, then a few moments later had come walking over to the disrupted cube. He had looked in, seen the fallen lava lamp, and put it back up on its stand. Then he hurried out again. He never saw Mouse.

Dude was upset. What should he do? I told him to wear an athletic cup and go ask 'Tude Dude what happened.

I don't think he elected to do that.

Lately, I've noticed that the guy has moved his computer and chair away from that shared wall, and is cramped into the small corner near the cube opening. I told him that wouldn't do much good if 'Tude Dude discovered projectiles and adopted a WMD program.