I was once told by this he-man outdoors Last American Man type that, when there's a crisis that requires decisive action, the first thing you should do is smoke a cigarette. This would seem counter-intuitive, but his thinking went like this: The few minutes necessary to finish a cigarette won't make a difference to the outcome. If you're in a situation where those minutes mean the difference between life and death, you're screwed anyway. If you can take those minutes, then the time you take calmly contemplating the problem and all your available solutions will prevent you from making an ill thought-out, rash, and potentially disastrous decision. He called this the Cigarette Rule.
    I couldn't speak to the efficacy of this strategy in an actual Krakauer-grade struggle against Mother Nature in all her awesome fury. I can think of several situations where taking time for a quick nic fix could lead to, for example, a vicious mauling by an irate bear. "Well," he thought as he lit up. "We could run. But, then again, we could play dead. I don't know if we're all actors of the caliber necessary to pull that off. Maybe we could get some pots and pa – Oh God! My arm! Please Dear God! My ARM!"
    Still, he swore by it and, as far as run of the mill corporate disasters go, I've found the Cigarette Rule remarkably effective. When something has gone terribly wrong in my little corner of Company Y, rather than call a meeting where all the stakeholders can bemoan the incompetence of all the other stakeholders, I prefer to go downstairs, watch the traffic snake through SoHo, smoke a Marlboro, and consider the problem from a place of calm.
    "CRwM, Customer Service just reported that the new product launched and immediately sank several small South Pacific island nations."
    "That's not good."
    "It gets worse. The Pakistanis attempted to nuke the new product, which just made it bigger and stronger and angrier."
    "That is worse."
    "And now it breathes radioactive fire."
    "Great honk! Is that everything?"
    "Well, it's all over budget too."
    "Blast!"
    "We're thinking the best response to this is to get all the managers together in a windowless room and start assigning blame."
    "That is a good idea. You do that. I'll be outside if I'm needed."
    Then, without all the shouting and cursing and gnashing of teeth, I can break the problem down, create a mental checklist, figure everything out. (For example, the solution to the above problem is to summon Gamera.)
    Problem is that I no longer have my smoke breaks to myself. These quiet, perfect moments have been ruined by a deranged customer service rep we'll call Aello.

    Nearly a month ago, Aello caught me smoking out in front of the building. She has since decided that our mutual interest in inhaled toxic substances and cancer development means that we are BFF. This is, I feel, a profound misapprehension on her part.

    Aello is a thin woman of medium height in her late forties. She wears glasses (thin green plastic rectangular frames), this dark reddish/purple lipstick the color of a black eye, and has a mad tangle of fading red hair. In her gestures and speech, she's energetically spastic. As she talks, he arms flail about wildly, making gestures that, as far as I can tell, do not sensibly connect to the words that spew, incessantly and with great force, out of her mouth. I have a theory that her hand gestures are intended not to not illustrate the content of her speech, but indicate the presence of punctuation: a function that's devolved to her hands since her speech, which is an unceasing stream of high-speed inanity, no longer contains the stresses and pauses that would, in a lesser conversationalist, suggest commas, periods, semicolons, question marks, interrobangs, etc. The major flaw with this theory is that it seems, given the general level of emotional anxiety and drama that Aello brings to all interactions – she is a woman for whom all things are the very limit and every event, regardless of the significance less sensitive and thoughtful folks might erroneously assign it, is world shattering – I find it doubtful that she has need of any punctuation except the exclamation point.
    For all the crazed wildness of her way of speaking, what she chooses to discuss is drearily predictable. There's a simply formula to the content of any Aello word-boot:
    "I was [situation] when this [description of creep] asked me out and I told him [colorful way to tell somebody you're uninterested]."
    Try it out:
    "I was on the Path train headed to Jersey City when this one-armed overweight biker with a BO problem and a T-shirt that read "I Heart Naked Children" asked me out and I told him I'd rather make love to a habit-trail tube full of Mayan hissing cockroaches."
    The first couple of times you do this, it is actually entertaining.
    Around iteration sixty, it starts to lose its charm.
    Humor metrics reach nil at about 170, 180.
    Around iteration 250, you're beating a very, very dead horse.
    At this point, Aello's particular ex-equus is a red paste the consistency of baby food.
    I should point out that a tsunami of hyper-verbiage inevitably follows this ritualized introduction, but Aello's manner of speaking makes them somewhat irrelevant. About a week ago, for example, she showed up with her arm in brace. I stupidly asked what happened. She launched into a story that involved a guy approaching her as she walked through Washington Square Park. Then, and this was unclear, she was either injured using her kickboxing skills upon that dude or, alternately, she was injured by a co-worker who, while in the office, grabbed her arm in a fearful moment, worried that Aello would inform HR that he was hitting on her. No amount of questioning could untangle these two stories, though I did determine the two options were mutually exclusive. Which explains her injury, I haven't the foggiest.

    There are two notable exceptions to this monotonous uniformity of topic. They are:
    1. The crazy Mets fan.
    2. The car wreck.

    I'll explain:

    1. The crazy Mets fan – or cMf – is a mentally handicapped guy who shuffles past the front of the building every weekday morning on the way to work. He works on Houston – there's a non-profit there that finds day gigs for those of us unlucky enough to be born with a couple of wires crossed. Now he's a friendly sort of guy and, if he recognizes you as part of the regular fixtures of the street, he'll stop and chat for awhile. It's always the same: he asks for a quarter and let's you know whether or not the Mets won their last game. The last bit is curious in that he doesn't seem particularly interested in baseball. He can't tell you who the Mets played, seems completely unfamiliar with the league system, and doesn't appear to be aware of things like seasons and the World Series. He only seems to know whether the Mets won or lost.
    Aello thinks this man –she affectionately refers to him as "the retard" – is hilarious. She enjoys imitating him, which she does poorly. Not because she can't do the voice (which she can't, but that's rarely the key to a good imitation), but because she apparently doesn't grasp the very simple rules of an encounter with the cMf. She'll launch into an extended riff on the importance of the new Yankees stadium or talk about some other franchise's' chances of a pennant. She rarely gets the amount of money he asks for right, and when she does I suspect it is by chance.
    I've never pointed out the irony of her condescension – after all, she's basically a crazy person with an obsessive communication pattern as well. At least the cMf has the excuse of a genuine impairment.
    Still, this is really the only time she isn't talking about herself, when she's doing a really uninspired imitation a man with some sort of significant mental malfunction discussing the just about anything but the Mets.

    2. One morning, while smoking and listening to Aello rant on and on about, oh, I don't know, probably a creep who tried to pick her up, there was a nasty car wreck in front of our building. A young man in a small four-door somehow popped his car suddenly into reverse. He was cruising along. Suddenly, a nasty grinding sound. His car came to a shuddering stop, and then started slowly rolling backwards.
    Into the big-ass truck.
    The truck nailed that car so hard that it actually jumped forward, as if it had been scooped up and lightly tossed.
    Sometimes Aello brings this up. She gets almost wistful. It's the calmest I ever see her get. "Hey, remember that time that car backed into that truck. It nearly killed that guy."

    This is an awful long way to go for a story, but since we've gone this far, I reckon that I better give you one or be thought of as a lousy host.

    Aello is kinda in a bit of shit, a condition directly attributable to her own vast stupidity.

    Aello, thinking she would be funny, wrote me an email. I don't have the actual email, but using the forensic evidence, I've been able to reconstruct it.

    It went something like: "Hey. Can you loan me five bucks? I think Zambrano's pitching is iffy at best. He doesn't have heart. Do you have any money? Granderson is the hardly the hardest working man in the game. Give me five dollars." Only it did that for several more inches of copy.

    You could be forgiven for think that the email above was neither funny nor particularly interesting. I probably would have thought that too, had the email ever reached me. And there's the interesting thing about the email: unfamiliar with my last name, Aello let the auto-fill function on Outlook do her thinking for her and sent it to the first CRw that popped up.
    That would have been CRwN, an important client contact for one of our bigger contracts.

    CRwN responded with a short email expressing his confusion. He asked Aello is somebody was using her computer without her knowledge.

    Aello, still unclear on the critical M/N distinction, wrote him back. She claimed that "a retard" broke into the office and hacked her computer. He also went through all the desks in the office looking for five dollar bills.

    Given the client-specific and highly-sensitive nature of the info we traffic in, CRwN was more alarmed than amused. Though he had no idea what Aello was talking about, she seemed to be describing a security breach of some sort. He was on the phone to his supervisors immediately.

    What will happen to Aello? Who cares? I'm out of here.