The Retirement Speech

The following creative work has been in the planning since mid-October. Was it time spent carefully crafting a work of art or time spent unwell molding under a faulty chair made of sausage in the back of the shed? You be the judge in this Under The Radar and Kaufman joint.



Dave Baxter tinged his glass in the time-honoured manner. “Order, order! If we could just have a little quiet? Thanks a lot!” He paused while the talk died down around the room. When he was satisfied with the noise levels he started speaking. “First of all I would like to thank you all for coming today. I hope you are all enjoying the wonderful food and copious drink.” A few drunken roars and wey-heys greeted this.
“Soon we will be relaxing over our Christmas holidays and spending time with our loved ones. I would like to encourage a few of you to do something embarrassing to liven the conversation at work in the new year.” Silence greeted this. “Anyway, there is another reason that we are all here today. One of us will not be returning in the new year. Bill, from IT support, will be leaving us after fifteen years. He will be taking early retirement this year and moving to the countryside cottage he has been doing up for years.”
Around the room a murmur spread and a few people looked over at Bill, who nodded a few times slowly. Dave waited a few seconds before carrying on. “Dave is a quiet guy, as I am sure you all know. However, I am sure he will break his silence just this once and tell us what he is going to do with all this free time he has earned.”
A few people in the crowd shouted “Speech!” and one particularly drunk person shouted, “Evolution!” but no-one ever got his jokes and this one was met with silence too.
Dave looked in mock enquiry at Bill and stepped from behind the microphone. “Would you like to say a few words?”
Bill put down his napkin, straightened his tie and pushed his chair back as he stood. There was a polite round of applause as he walked to the front, glass of wine in one hand, speech in the other. He stepped behind the microphone and paused for a few seconds to look around the room. He saw the beery-crowd in the back corner, the young lads at the bottom of the ladder who scrawled lewd messages on the wall. The upper managers looking bored but quiet. In the middle of the room were the secretaries and clerical workers who, judging by some of the faces around their table, were mid-bicker as usual. Off to the left were the operations and IT support group, including his friend Marcus, who was grinning. Off to the right were the financial types looking uncomfortable in their causal clothes and killing the atmosphere on their side of the room. Dotted randomly around the room were the odd few people who didn’t really belong to any department, including the cleaner who was still drinking with grim determination even at this stage.
The seconds stretched on. Bill stood up straight, put one foot slightly forward, then scratched his head. He relaxed, threw his speech onto the table and said, “I did have something prepared but it isn't really what I want to say, so screw that.” He took another slug of wine.

The floodlights, which had lit the room like rabbits fleeing the scene of coitus following a rare directional success with the hand-held spotty by a half-tanked and self-taught scholar of the shotgun genus, buzzed to a halt; their purpose had been quashed, like a gin quashes a tonic, as the throng gasped in unison at the indecision suddenly made available to them by the 100% decrease in visibility. Bill's words had made quite the impact as well.

Questions were asked by anyone with an inkling for the dramatic. How would the alcoholics negate the treacherous journey to the bar? Who would leap from the rafters to offer emasculated fire to the damsels in the throng who were incapable of fingering their lighters at the bottom of their purses to incinerate their Winfield Reds? Chips, dips, chocolate eclairs and confectionery of all manner was at the mercy of the overfed fat-fucks, thought Bill, whose predisposition with mind games was second only to his predisposition with skanks. What would the upper managerial types think and, perhaps even more realistically to those trained to handle situations as absurd as this, what would be expected of the second tiered upper managerial types to quell the storm as the inferno raged?

Bloated men and women of considerably sized neck girth headed to the buffet like dung beetles with masks and fins to a diarrhoea convention; they were white-collared SEALS trained for food reconnaissance missions of this very nature, and they were elbow deep in their element.
The house speakers, which were gift wrapped in gold-encrusted paper hand crafted by workers with disease of the metacarpus in a third-world country maligned by local media for its proximity to Arab states' political views, were donated by the Duke of Edinburgh following the inaugural and only indoor hunting exercise that resulted in the death of four members of the orchestra and two hares in this very same auditorium in 1984, erupted in a cacophony of extremes as, firstly, Aerosmith's Dude Looks Like A Lady blared from somewhere amidst the vast blackness, followed, as nobody would deny, regrettably, by The Sweet's Ballroom Blitz.
The chandeliers shook. The rafters rattled. The steel insertions in the Chairman of the Board's hips vibrated, this time, unlike those in the back end of his limousine, much to his displeasure; the old war veteran had paid many a Vietnamese lass/lad to perform similar acts of joy with various bony extremities and more fleshy parts of their anatomy at a time in his past, when his corrective eye lenses were less than five centimetres thick and when his definition of multitasking included juggling in his mouth a long-neck bottle of Tiger and the tongue of whomever wasn't hoovering his groin region. He yelped repeatedly like a canine during a routine debollocking when the steel insertions in the only remaining erogenous zone of his ageing frame which was still in working order slipped internally to his pelvis bottom.

The contingent of obese opportunists continued their penguin like march to the trestle-tables, having deprived the buffet of all but the prawns' trails; bowls and dishes of all sizes were raided and/or pillaged as glimpses of jiggling arses unearthed minimal light into the theatre. An opportunistic builder's labourer, who wasn't on the guest list and who had army issued night vision goggles from one lucky day at eBay, absconded with an entire roasted pig beneath the pit of his arm, citing concern so grave among the rotund and the chunky, whose senses centred on their ability to smell bad shit going down from a proverbial mile away, that they followed him to the exit with the intention of rolling the living fuck out of him the second they were in the car park.
Bill had remained calm and collected throughout the ordeal. Having the power to harness light sat well with him. The mystery woman under the desk, whose eagerness had caused her to perform one of several sexual acts she was well versed in before acceptances (her award winning fellatio was supposed to occur after Bill's speech, on the member of the Head of International Distribution as a personal joke concocted by and collectively paid for by the IT Help staff), also ensured that Bill wasn't about to vacate his post prematurely.
Several seconds later, as he exhaled satisfactorily, Bill pulled up his zipper and tapped into the microphone three times; tell me why I like Mondays, thought he.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic," he ventured to the blank canvas of deafening chaos that had lived as a multi-dimensional beast of sin for close to ten minutes. "I am able to restore order with the simple push of a button," he continued, threatening to do the opposite should the rabble fail to cease, with a dash of post haste as a chaser, with the infernal racket.

The threat was enough to get the majority of punters, minus those who were still scoffing food, to shut their traps and stand blindly to attention. Most of them didn't understand why.

Bill touched one of several buttons on the underbelly of the desk. With another movement, he depressed it with his index finger until it clicked into the other of its two positions. Floodlights beamed to all corners of the expansive room, making their distinctive buzzing sound, to welcome the prognosis that normality was springing back to life. It was a religious awakening for the contingent of desperados who didn't want to take responsibility for their own actions; to those who did it was a light switch being flicked by a prankster-cum-insubordinate during his last hurrah in order to restore some semblance of order in the disorder that he had caused.

The room's state could officially be labelled with a sticker marked "in disarray". An SMS to the head of the custodial team later in the evening would result in shock waves filtering through the ranks of the entire mop-up squad and their men-in-waiting back-up team. The people standing stationary and gawk eyed, however, looked like remnants of their former selves on the third day after having attended a Nick Cave and The Birthday Party concert or some other event that had captured their imaginations and will to live.

Bill reached into his pants pocket and withdrew a device with the care usually reserved for handling dodo eggs. He held the tiny gadget aloft in both hands like the holy grail or some other sacred symbol alluded to in a Steven Spielberg motion picture.

"As some of the more astute of you are aware," began Bill in his holier-than-thou pseudo-pisstake-pseudo-echo tone, "I've been working on a portable memory restoring device, or MRD, with a built-in truth assimilator, or TA, so that our defence forces may have a means of working with Prisoners of War, or POWs, who have returned from behind enemy lines, or returned from BEL, and who continue to suffer the effects of brainwashing and other forms of non-torture related shenanigans, or BOFNTRS."

The room gasped as it often does in moments without room for cliche.

"Indeed," Bill continued, lacing the fart-inspired air with an insipid dose of intrigue. "This lil baby is not only the prototype but the only actual type ever likely to see the light of day," he continued nonsensically, now hunched over and cackling into the microphone like a super villain seconds away from a monumental blunder. "And woot's more," he enunciated poorly, "moi aibileetee to drabba wabba dooooo..."

With an astoundingly loud thud for a man of no more than five-feet and six-inches, Bill's body slammed sideways to the hardwood floor. The truthamy-gadget-thingamy slid across to where Dave Baxter's Italian shoes were tapping while the rest of Dave remained seated. All eyes were transfixed on Dave; Dave's shoes tapped and continued to tap.

As it became more and more evident to all present that no-one knew what the fuck ought to be done, Dave Baxter hoicked his collar and saluted the fallen body of his comrade with a pointed index finger, a signature move made famous at one time or another by Elvis, the one and the same Elvis of Graceland and war movies fame.

Bill's flaccid body was in the middle-to-latter stages of metamorphosis.

"Wait for it!" Dave Baxter shouted while his finger and collar remained pointed and raised respectively.

And then it happened; a living, breathing stegosaurus rose from its hind quarters where the vanquished Bill had lay. A splutter from its lungs and a prolific dose of whiparse from a flamethrower guided by the capable hands of the head baker ensued, killing the beast in the most spectacular homicide since the death of four orchestral members some two decades earlier.

With the revolutionary gadget now in his hand, which he flayed demonstratively in the mode of playing a really fucken great big air guitar, Dave Baxter proudly proclaimed: "That's one less dinosaur to contend with."

The strumming gyrations continued as he added, "Don't be surprised next month if Tim Leonard's retirement speech sounds reminiscent of a grog-bog fart. Once more unto the breeches!"


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