Expert Cooperation in a Bad Economy

My employer has laid off 25% of our workforce at our branch, and besides the effect on moral, it's having other influences.

Our King of Electricity, I'll call him Louie, is a very important and sought-after person. Everyone needs him for various aspects of their work, so getting his time and attention is a bit of a task. I had an urgent assignment to finish. I got everybody's OK and all I needed was for Louie to OK the unit of measure — V AC — in a sentence.

For a week I ran after him by phone and email. He'd brush me off, tell me how busy he was, and outright ignore me. My boss was starting to get nervous.

I was getting desperate, so I wrote Louie a poem and sent it by email:

Louie, Louie,
Thou hast forsaken me
You don't reply
You elusive guy
Do I keep the V AC?

So, I won't be winning any literary prizes. But hey, no one ever wrote me a poem at work! I thought it was a nice touch. But Louie did not appreciate my poem and ignored me even more. My boss was pressing for me to complete my task.

In the meantime, two of my coworkers had filled up another guy's cubicle with balloons as a practical joke. The next day I took half of the baloons, wrote V AC on them, and left them all over his messy cubicle. You'd think something like that would evoke a response but NOTHING! Maybe he didn't even notice the balloons among the mess. My boss asked if he needed to get involved. I still wanted to handle it myself.

A friend of mine suggested offering him a blow job. This may have been a tactic likely to produce results, but now I felt it was only fair for my boss to do the honors. Suddenly he didn't want to get involved, go figure.

In the end, I left the V AC in and declared the item complete. No one questioned me.

Now, months later, when I sent Louie an email about a new item, expecting no reply, he shows up at my cubicle, tells me that we should set up a time and he'll give me the replies directly. I sent him a meeting mail. He didn't reply the same day, but comes to me while I'm standing on line for lunch, APPOLOGIZES for not getting back to me immediately cause he was sick, and then shows up on his own volition at my cubicle, sits for 20 minutes, answers all my questions, commiserates with me about the bad lighting, and advises me about my home electrical issues!

For a while this change in behavior was a total mystery, as I am not getting any hotter as the years go by. But I finally figured it out: All of a sudden he doesn't have much work due to The Economy and is trying to fill up his project hours!

Or maybe he heard about the blow job.