the saga of dashing don part VI: don's marbles go missing

in january of 2005, the cold cowboy is finally promoted to leg. assistant and vacates his front office post for a spot in the back. no more smiley cowboy greeting visitors. no more screaming cowboy shooing away irate larouche youth with lean and hungry looks in their crazy brainwashed eyes. now the slumpin' can begin.

in my new role i am responsible for advising the MC on certain (undisclosed) legislative issues, meetings, writing policy letters and press releases and talking points and speeches and working with the city, state and other groups to secure fed funding.

by now don has clearly lost it. even his love for the pain of others seems to have cruelly subsided. he no longer speaks to his staff, even when spoken to. he arrives in the office around 11 if at all, leaving by 3. he takes all meetings out of the office, to avoid 'eavesdropping' presumably. he has not spoken to the MC in months.
no longer does he even ask for money. this is generally regarded as a good thing by the cowboy and his ilk, since dislike of don has reached previously unheard of levels and willingness to take part in his greedy carnival of crazy has reached an all-time low.

paranoia appears to be the most obvious feature of don's psychosis - the eavesdropping fears have driven him to seclude even the most mundane of lobbyist meetings from the insidious ear of the cheerful new front desk girl (who knows what cruel plan she may have for the trade secrets to be offered don, like a trophy of platinum-and-gold, by the nervous-and-stuttering-lower-east-side-new-york-jewish washington representative of 'americans for acupuncture'?!) the cave of terror grows ever thick and creepy.

in my new role i have allowed myself the luxury of avoiding don's madness. i have quite a bit of work after all - immediately upon taking the new position i am charged with securing federal funding for local district projects matthew lesko-style. this takes up several weeks, meeting and calling with folks in the city to make sure everything adds up and is germane to the bill. finally i'm done and i've talked to the MC and we've set the priorities and allotted the funding appropriately. but when i submit it on the due date i get an immediate call back. why, they ask, have we submitted two requests? and why, they ask, did we simply ignore over $20 million in available funding the first time around?

the answer, of course, is that don secretly sent in his own jolly request for his buddies back in the district, leaving out those projects that might go to those he knows not! and who could conceivably be plotting his doom and are most likely in cahoots with "the fat one", after all, whose feculent lard is by all available calculations some kind of brain wave receptor channeling don-thought to the underground soviet army which even now approaches don's suburban villa in upper marlboro, maryland...

he even went so far as to intercept calls destined for me and tell lies to the committee staff. which leaves the cold cowboy to make up equal and opposite lies to mask the fact that he works with a certifiable lunatic crazy man who nearly cost the city, once all calculations are complete, $22.5 million in project funds. after the cold cowboy saves the day the MC has raked in by far the most funding in the state and is the envy of her peers. one can smell the boggy stench of seethe pumping in billows from the looney cave.

i know i'm a wanted man by now. nevermind that his pals still got their funding (albeit in slightly smaller amounts): nobody treads on don! never more did a word leave don's mouth in my general direction. for the first time i become concerned in a corporeal sense. would don's hysteria stop before physical pain was wrought at the cowboy's expense? i decide some sleuthing is in order.

and timbuktu comes to mind. timbuktu is a program that allows a user on one computer to remotely connect to the desktop of another with full control of the cursor and full access to all files therein. since our systems support contractor (a giant arms manufacturer) operates out of virginia, this allows them to manually fix most problems without coming across the river. every workstation in the office is equipped with timbuktu for this purpose. in case of a problem, tech guy asks for your ip address, you give it to him, a window pops up asking if you'd like to grant them access, and all of a sudden they can control your mouse too. you see what they're doing and when they're done they log off or you kick them off and everything's back to normal.

not knowing the program well, i open 'er up and do some sniffing around. there's an activity log. many of the entries are years old. they aren't in chronological order. i arrange them thusly. i see five entries attributed to the computer named "don". they are marked "control", meaning he did not merely observe my computer, but gained the use of my mouse as well. from the cave, don was snooping around on my harddrive. i further discover that he has set himself as a permanent user to be accepted at his own whim at any given moment in time, without the obligatory accept-or-deny option granted to us when dealing with the war-profiteer tech guys. the latest entry was from the day before at 3:30pm. i was in the office but had gone with the MC for votes on the bill containing our projects. she was in her wheelchair following that accident and i had to accompany her... remember the "you go, girl!" run-in with my former MC? same time.

so i discover how to delete this capability and alert the rest of the staff to his plot - of course he has set himself up on every station in the place -- including the MC's -- and we go through one-by-one to delete them. upon completion we remember that he knows everyone's password anyway, having given them to us upon hiring and denied us the ability to change it, which naturally violates house ethics codes.

and within two days i know that don knows that i know about his little secret and therefore that everyone else knows about the secret including the MC, who as you can imagine is ready to bust some genitals. that's when don disappears for a few days...

...and turns up in china...