Ex-Man attempts camouflage by standing perfectly still.
Ex-Man is a strange creature. I have spoken of him before, and I find myself compelled to speak of him again. One feels sad for him, but one does not pity him. He is jobless, yet he can afford to rent an entire cubicle; he worked at a large IT company for longer than Go Go Girl has been alive, and yet there is no one in the Aquarium more analogue in thought and action than him. Ex-Man has just completed a Rust certification course online. A year ago, I had promised to rename him Rusty (or was it Crusty?) when he did, but I have changed my mind. His skills may have landed him an entry-level coding position in 2010, but not in 2025. And he knows that. He knew it when he applied for the course. He knew it when he clicked “Submit” on the final exam. He knew it when the congratulatory email arrived in his inbox. The certificate underlines his redundancy, just like the other certificate displayed proudly on his cubicle wall—Oracle for Managers—signed by Larry Ellison.
I have tried to calibrate my own emotions towards him by observing how others in the Aquarium treat him. Javabot offers only those courtesies that one gentleman extends to another as a matter of course. He does not like managers, and even though Ex-Man displays none of the parasitism and greed that defines the species, I suspect Javabot breaks out in hives at the mere scent of an MBA. I have never seen Go Go Girl and Ex-Man look at each other, much less speak. To her, he is little more than a banal curiosity: a lethargic bug crawling around a terrarium. Pool Pot, curiously, has shown no interest in him. One would think Ex-Man is precisely the kind of quarry he would chase: the sort who creates passwords like Name@Company12345 on a sticky note taped to the monitor. And yet Pool Pot passes him by. Perhaps he senses that Ex-Man has no secrets worth stealing. A man in hiding, yes, but hiding from nothing—his life is an open telephone book, its pages yellowed, useful only to those who have run out of bog roll.
Ex-Man, on his part, is stoically aware of his position in the hierarchy of the Aquarium. “He finds the hierarchy comforting,” said Javabot once. I nodded in agreement. Ex-Man eats alone, doesn’t chat with other managers (though SAMM likes to shovel shite at him about upskilling and lateral synergy), and actively avoids anyone resembling a developer—except me. We recognise each other as fellow stowaways on the SS Salaryman. I had jumped overboard and had washed ashore in the Aquarium; he had marooned himself here.
And so it was with some astonishment that I spotted, on the A-Frame sign for amateur stand-up night at a hipster pub, this: The Extraordinary Ex-Man.
The man who never ventured into the hot-desk badlands at the Aquarium had wandered into a different wilderness altogether: the stage. His camouflage in the Aquarium had been perfect, but here he was, volunteering to be seen, to be laughed at, to be judged.
Ex-Man thought he was funny, and perhaps he was, in the way a man marooned on an island is funny when he names the coconuts. The audience laughed politely. I assume that wrote the jokes himself. Of course he did—who else would bother?Here are the ones that made me smile:
“Why did the PowerPoint presentation cross the road? To get to the other slide!” (What can I say—I like chicken jokes.) “I asked my boss if I can come to work a little late today. He said “Dream on.” I think that was really nice of him.”
“What do you call a detective who just solves cases accidentally? Sheer Luck Holmes.”
The one about Holmes reminded me of his ongoing writing exercise. He said he was working on a detective novel set in a medieval temple. I wonder if it’s a comedy—a bumbling Inspector Clouseau character, perhaps? I’m not sure. I do know that the plot involves a sacred relic that disappears during a festival. (I’d read that. —Ed.)
For a moment, I thought he looked less like a man talking to a volleyball and more like one whittling an oar from driftwood, preparing for a journey no one else believed possible. The applause at the end was polite, and he accepted it gratefully. In his eyes I glimpsed the relief of being seen, however briefly, before the camouflage closed again, like a sail furled against the wind. He recognized me in the crowd. I raised my glass at him; he shrugged and smiled back.
Editor’s Notes:
- If you’re a first time reader of the Aquarium series, you might enjoy reading this guide to the principal characters in it. This article— The Cracked Bell Jar —was the first article in this series. All despatches from the Aquarium series are listed here.