Can I have another piece of chocolate cake...

After roughly six months working in the general news desk at the Wagga Daily Advertiser, it was decided I would trade places with the other first year cadet and try my hand in the sports department. This involved packing up all my things (Inventory: one (1) notepad and two (2) black Bic (tm) biros) and moving across a walkway into the corner of what would be described in an American sitcom as "the bullpen". We called it a room. I was reasonably excited to get away from general news for a while, as I had grown tired of police rounds and "pic stories" and was keen to tear into regional lawn bowls reports and Leeton 3rd grade cricket results.
I was given a desk in the darkest corner of the sports section, facing the back wall of the office. The desk backed directly onto another, which meant my view of the bare red brick wall was obstructed by the balding head of 30-year Advertiser veteran Peter Baker.

"Why you sitting there, Lloydy?" Bake asked me, two days after I'd begun sitting directly in his line of sight.
"I've swapped places with the Goonman, Bake."
Bake had been working at the Advertiser for 33 years. He was a short, washed out man with completely white hair and a resigned look that indicated his favourite radio band was AM (My frst impression turned out to be right. I later learned he had asked to have the CD player removed from a new car he was buying because he only listened to the ABC). He spoke with an upward inflexion, turning every phrase into a question. His absent minded mumbling form of delivery also made it difficult to ascertain when he was speaking to you, or someone twenty metres behind you, because the volume of his voice never rose above a level that would be considered appropriate in a courtroom during a particularly tense sexual assault trial. Fifteen years ago Bake had been the sports editor, but was shunted in favour of Les, a journalist from the recently defunct Sydney Daily Mirror. It was on that day, as a thirty-something former sports editor with a potentially big future ahead of him, that people said Bake's will to live left him. This set a precedent, and his wife also left him shortly after and Bake began wandering the corridors of the Daily Advertiser like a ghost.

This backstory was told to me by Whitey, the racing reporter, a devil-may-care twenty-something bachelor being played by a man with artificially chestnut hair in his late-thirties.
"He's not there, mate," he said, tapping himself on the temple and pulling away a slightly dye-stained finger, "he's a f---ing moron."
Whitey didn't lower his voice to deliver this assessment, clearly unconcerned as to whether Bake heard him or not. On cue, Bake's head popped out from behind his computer monitor, his eyes framed in a pair of thick brown rimmed spectacles of the kind you see Indian government officials wearing in news reports.
"What was that Whitey?" he asked, apparently being roused out of his catatonic state by the mention of his name.
"I was just telling Lloydy that you're a f---ing moron. Dead wood. A waste of space. You sit there and you do nothing all day, mate. You look like you're just waiting to die. In fact, why don't you Bake, have you thought about it?"
"Not really," Bake answered, without a hint of irony. Rather than weathering the storm of abuse, or ignoring it, he seemed to exist in a parallel dimension where he could occasionally hear other people talking, and see them move, but only as one would observe actors on a television screen. For Bake, the rest of the world and the people in it were just a television playing in the background for company.
This imperviousness to abuse only riled Whitey more. Whitey (essentially a class bully except much older and much shouldknowbetterer) wanted a reaction, and failing to get it continued to bait Bake until he himself was so furious he left the office and didn't return for the rest of the day. Not long after he left, Bake approached the sports editor Les and mumbled something about going home and finishing his stories tomorrow.
"You can't Bake, it's a daily newspaper. Write the f---ing stories," Les responded, removing his glasses in order to let nothing obstruct the flow of contempt from his eyes.
"Oh, righto," mumbled, shuffling off in the direction of the kitchen. Four hours later, it was clear Bake wasn't coming back, and we finished his stories for him.
"That's why I f---in' hate this f---in' job Lloydy," Les said to me as we wrote Bake's stories for him, "I've got a bloke here for 33 years who was sports editor for 10 years and when it's my days off I have to make a second year cadet the editor because he's f---in' useless, and so's that Whitey dickhead."
Over the next few weeks I spent less time learning the art of sports writing (essentially an exercise in creating stories almost infinitely dense with cliches) and more time observing Bake. He was interesting material, particularly as I could only ever observe what he was like at work. Because Bake's time at work mostly consisted of lunch breaks and trips to watch entire games of cricket in far off towns, this only presented me with small vignettes of what I was sure was an almost heroically dull and desperately meaningless story punctuated with deep thoughts like: "Terrorists could bomb the Marketplace (Wagga's main shopping centre). What if that happened? Where would I do my shopping?".
I often noticed that Bake had wet hair on the mornings he actually came into the office. After asking around I discovered that in the deep dark recesses of the print hall there was a shower Bake used after his morning bike ride to work. Les told me that one day Linda from printing walked into the shower room to find Bake standing completely naked outside the shower.
"I suppose you're wondering what I'm doing," he said to Linda.
"No. Not really." was her response.
Eventually he told me himself, in an almost-conspiratorial manner, where to find the shower if I wanted to save myself some money on my water bill. This was symptomatic of something else I'd noticed about Bake. He was a massive tightarse. Whitey told me on good authority (he should know, his work output was only marginally higher than Bake's and others told me he was benefitting in almost exactly the same way) that despite being benched as sports editor 15 years ago, Bake never got a pay cut. Factoring in (sadly no longer) regular pay increases, Whitey estimated Bake was on "about $85,000 a year, can you f---in' believe that c--- gets paid that much to sit on his arse?" Despite That C---'s apparently large pay packet, Bake was obsessed with money. One afternoon I sat down at my desk with a sandwich.

"What's that, Lloydy?"

"It's a sandwich, Bake."

"How much did it cost?"

"I dunno, about four bucks..."

"Where'd you get it?"

"Down the road, Bake."

"Is it good? That's pretty good for four bucks. Where'd you get it?"

"Down th..." etc etc etc.

The only times I saw Bake truly animated was when a communal cake was cracked out for someone's birthday. As "Happy Birthday To You" began echoing around the office, cries of "whose cake's that?" and "whose birthday is it?", and "where'd they get the cake?" would emanate from Bake's corner of the office. Any leftovers would be wrapped in tissues and taken home.
My time in the sports department coincided with a momentous upheaval in Bake's otherwise comfortable rut. It all happened one morning when I was doing a "special report" (code for "tie the cadet up for a day while we do the important stories") on local sporting clubs and needed a contact for the Ganmain Bowling Club. Les told me Bake would know someone to talk to. Bake gave me a contact name, and I placed the following call:

"Hello Mrs Jones, my name's Stephen Lloyd, I'm calling from the Daily Advertiser. I'm doing a story on the bowling club and I was wondering if your husband George was still club president."

"George died about 10 years ago. I'm sorry. I don't know who would have told you he was still club president."

"Oh...ok. Sorry to bother you."

I looked around my computer monitor at Bake, who was sitting with his hands in his lap, staring blankly at the screen.

"Bake, George Jones is dead."

"What? What did he die of? Did we run anything in the paper? I didn't see it."

"It was 10 years ago Bake."

"Oh."

After hearing this news, Bake reverted to his reverie, appearing lost in his thoughts. After a while he stood up, looking at no one in particular and said:
"I don't want to work today. I'm going home. I'm retiring."
Les, without looking up from his desk was the only one to respond, saying "righto".
Bake walked into the editor's office, then shuffled out of the building.
Les swivelled around on his chair to face me and said "he hasn't written any stories today, has he? Just like that c--- to walk out without doing anything. See ya later Bake. It hasn't been a pleasure working with you, don't come back."
The next day as I walked down the long corridor towards the editorial department I was stopped by Les, who was grinning cheekily.
"Guess who's here."
"I dunno, Les."
"George F---in' Costanza," he said, making reference to a Seinfeld episode where George resigned, changed his mind and kept coming to work. "Bake's just sitting at his desk, hasn't said a f---in' word to anyone. He's just carrying on as normal."
This arrangement continued for two weeks before Whitey asked: "What the f--- are you still doing here, Bake?"
"I changed my mind," Bake answered, as if saying that would completely end the discussion.
"Well, you are a f---in' idiot aren't you," Whitey said, only half under his breath as he turned back towards the softcore porn film he was playing on his computer.
Unfortunately, two months after his phony retirement, Bake really retired. Our times in the sports department ended on the same day. I went back to general news, and Bake went to an afternoon tea held in his honour. Everyone stuffed as much food into their mouths as possible (after all, journalism is a low-paid game, unless you're Bake or Whitey), and stood in silence as Bake, previously the most expressionless man outside of Easter Island, broke down and cried all through his farewell speech. The awkward silence was eventually destroyed by a comment from the back corner of the room, which could only have come from Whitey's lips: "Jesus F---in' Christ, what a f---in' carry on. Just piss off."

Epilogue: I later bumped into Bake at the local shops, dressed in what looked like his old work clothes, topped off with a filthy Greg Chappell cricket hat. When I asked him what he'd been doing, he replied: "Nothing."