Check shirt, check one two...

"Gentlemen, I think you're playing a very dangerous game here," The Group Editor said, peering over his glasses at Dane and I. It was a scene straight out of a bad high school teen romp, with Dane and I playing the jocks getting a rap on the knuckles for a prank we were clearly proud of, and would never feel sorry for. The Group Editor was playing the role of the stern-yet-understanding year advisor. Dane and I were dressed almost identically in blue, short sleeved check shirts, mismatched ties, tan cinos and black shoes. Both of us also had mobile phones clipped to our belts, and Dane had added a gold tie clip to his ensemble, attempting, as always, to outdo me. (It wasn't the first time we had come to work dressed the same. After walking past Lowes one afternoon, we both bought matching $4.95 aqua shirt and tie combos and wore them to work the next day. Dane outdid me then, too, by gelling his hair to his head like a helmet.) The Group Editor smiled at us, highlighting his resemblance to a much paler, much less "thinking woman's sex object" David Koch.

"Don't you worry that he'll notice what's going on?"

"He" was the reason Dane and I were dressed alike. He was the reason the two of us, usually proud of our status as The Young Trendy Ones From Editorial, had turned our backs on bespoke elegance for the day in favour of shirts better suited to lining a picnic basket than wearing to the office.

"Get out of here and just be careful about how far you take this" was TGE's final warning to us, dismissing us back towards the newsroom and the world-changing events we were covering that day.

"Check Shirt Day" had been months in the planning, originating over a few sly lunchtime beers at The Tourist Hotel. It stemmed from a desire to escalate our ongoing, yet covert, war against our office nemesis Paul. Over the last two years, Paul had slowly climbed his way from the level of "you are a minor nuisance to me" to the vertigo-inducing "everything you do, from the way you look to the way you talk to the way you comb your hair makes me want to vomit my internal organs out onto my keyboard" level of annoyingness. It had now reached the point of ridiculousness, probably exactly at the moment Dane and I entered the office wearing check shirts.

I felt I had the most reason to be annoyed by Paul, as he sat directly to my left in our open-plan office. Dane used to sit in my place, but moved the moment another desk became available, and now had the luxury of being outside the "I can hear all Paul's phone conversations" zone. About six months after Check Shirt Day Dane left, and I literally (ie, in the literal sense) leapt over Rosie's desk in my haste to secure his now vacant seat.

"Moving desks mate?" Paul asked.

"Yeah, umm, sitting under the police scanner is getting to me, and I need more room now that I'm Junior Advertiser editor," I answered, semi-truthfully- after all, taking on the Junior meant being entrusted with Dane's manilla folder full of clippings. I genuinely needed more room.

"That's exactly what Dane said when he moved, I don't mind the scanner. It makes me excited you know, like I'm part of the action," he said, little realising that out of everyone in the office, including Rossco, he was the least close to any form of action.

Paul was roughly 24 years old, and began working as a journalist after dropping out of the local Catholic seminary. During his training for the priesthood, he had spent a year in the Vatican. It was this experience that made him decide to leave, claiming he "saw a Cardinal stabbed to death in the street". I was reluctant to believe this claim, perhaps naively assuming that the brutal murder of a Cardinal was likely to be mentioned in at least one newspaper or church bulletin. He was hired by the old editor, another staunch Catholic, under the old hiring system which was based on knowledge of the rosary as opposed to writing ability.

He was a tall, stringy man, still gawky and awkward like a teenager. His resemblance to a teenager was perhaps appropriate, given his situation. Paul still lived with his parents. "So what?" I hear readers cry. Let me respond by saying what made this case particularly pathetic was that he still shared a room with his brother, currently studying Year 9 at one of Wagga's three public high schools. On learning this from Sara, the most attractive woman at the paper, who had recently had to warn Paul to stop telling people she was about to leave her boyfriend to start dating him, a few of Paul's other quirks began to make sense. For example, Paul arrived at work every day with a blue lunch box in a plastic bag. After some aggressive questioning from a belligerent post-four-beer-lunch Whitey, it emerged that yes, Paul's mum did pack him his lunch every day.

"Whitey, my mum packs me a lunch every day," I responded, at that time I was still living with my parents.

"Yeah, but you don't have to have it. If this big girl's blouse didn't get a packed lunch every morning, he'd just sit there and bloody starve to death, wouldn't you Paul?" Whitey shouted, lurching back to his own desk to write some lurid emails to the girls in classifieds.

Paul said nothing in response to Whitey's half-drunk verbal attack. It was obvious he wasn't comfortable dealing with confrontation, an attribute that made him almost useless as a serious journalist, and made Dane suspect he had been bullied constantly during school. Paul was a classic case of someone who desperately wanted to be "one of the boys", but didn't know how. He compensated by often engaging in hyper-macho talk, during which his obvious fear of women would come to the fore. Frequently Paul would finish a conversation with a woman over the phone, during which he would use a sickeningly sweet voice and obsequiously agree with everything they said, only to later slam the phone down, affecting a butch, gravelly voice and saying something along the lines of "what she needs is a good shag to calm her down, hey Lloydy?"

"I think she's about 50 mate, so I don't know if that's really an option," I replied.

"They all love it mate, even at that age, and you can imagine what it'd be like," he said, slapping the back of his right hand onto the palm of his left- a gesture that I'm sure had Freud clawing at the lid of his coffin to analyse.

I let my imagination run wild at the prospect of Paul, who was so obviously a virgin, having sex with a 50 year old woman. For days I couldn't shake the image of Paul standing, dressed in one piece neck-to-toe underclothes, sucking his thumb while a naked Camilla Parker-Bowles smoked a cigarette in a single bed next to another bed containing his sleeping 14 year old brother.

Misogyny aside, Paul's phone calls were a constant souce of irritation. Usually conducted at 1500 decibels, Paul would make most of his calls standing up, pacing aroud his desk, pausing every few paces to look around and make sure at least one person was listening in on how important his call, and consequently he, was. These looks were invariably accompanied by a large flourish and a removal of his glasses, which he would then wave around like Churchill's cigar for the rest of the conversation. The call was usually wrapped up with Paul promising to give the person "a tinkle" (that's right, he'd give them a piss) in the next few days. This process was the same whether the call was conducted on his desk phone or his mobile, the only difference being that he would stand for the whole mobile conversation, because he'd have to get up to unclip it from his belt.

But time to return to Check Shirt Day.
Dane and I both started work at 9am on Check Shirt Day, with Paul rostered on to start at ten. The tension was as palpable as Rossco's stench as the big hand moved towards 12. At 9.55am, Paul strode into the office with his lolling, almost John Cleese silly-walk style gait, wearing a blue check shirt carefully matched to a jet black skinny tie (secured by a gold tie clip [damn]) on a platform of baggy tan cinos held up with a brown belt carefully selected to match what were quite obviously his old chunky-soled black Bata school shoes. Completing the ensemble, Paul had carefully parted his thin brown hair on the left, presumably with the comb that was peeking out over the top of his shirt pocket. He approached his desk with a stern seriousness, removing his round rim glasses to look me directly in the eye and ask his usual "any messages?" I answered, as always, in the negative.

"That's funny, I was expecting a whole pile of angry messages after yesterday's shitfight," he said, grinning and wobbling his head from side to side in what was clearly a calculated attempt to make me crash tackle him. The "shitfight" he was referring to was a local council story of little to no importance that he had spent the whole day beating up before writing his usual insipid "impartiality is a synonym for boring" style. Paul hated women, but loved his stories. I would spend most working days with my hand clasped over my left ear trying to drown out the sound of Paul bragging over the phone to people about how big a "shitfight" he was involved in that particular day. Quite often this bragging would involve him spruiking his opinion on the story to the people actually involved in it, a habit he seemed to think fit perfectly well with the impartial stance we were theoretically trying to maintain. One classic example was a high-profile case in Wagga where a well-known criminal was beaten to "within an inch of his life" (the magistrate's words) by local police who later destroyed evidence to conceal the bashing. The case took about two years to unravel- two years Paul spent on the phone to various local councillors, police and the victim's family explaining how the police could never have done it and how the victim was a scumbag and deserved even if he did get bashed. You'll notice how I mentioned above that he was saying this to the victim's family as well. (As an aside, two police were eventually sacked and faced criminal charges over the bashing, while another was demoted for having the crime scene professionally cleaned.)

Paul's take on this story reflected another of his quirks. He was convinced that because he spoke to the police and the court staff at least twice a week, that meant they were friends. The rest of us were aware that we at the Advertiser enjoyed, at best, a frosty relationship with the local police. Paul, on the other hand, could often be heard speaking in outrageously familiar terms with senior officers (everything from "how's that wife of yours", to "spent the weekend in Canberra, myself", and "we should get together and have a beer and sort this all out") and frequently referred to the top ranking officers in the regions as My Mate (insert first name of officer here). This was a great source of amusement to Dane and I, who often fielded calls from members of the My Mate club who were "returning a call from that Paul dickhead".

We spent the whole of the morning waiting for Paul to notice we were deliberately mocking him using the medium of fashion. At about 1.45pm, Paul looked up, cracked a big grin and said:

"Hang on, we should start a blue shirt club today, we're all wearing them."

That was it. One sentence. Instead of being an outlet, Check Shirt Day had developed into another reason to despise Paul. Dane and I looked at each other in disgust, both realising that we'd already had our lunch break and would have to spend the rest of the day being silently ridiculed by our check shirts and our ridiculous ties.


Epilogue: Shortly before I left the Advertiser, Paul went on a holiday to the Gold Coast. Rumours circulated following his return that he had met a girl up there. I quizzed him about it, and he had in fact met a young lady, a registered nurse, who on the strength of their week together, was now moving to Wagga to live closer to him. This precipitated Paul making three or four calls a day to the girl, who he exclusively referred to as (I kid you not) My Little Nursie (the one-piece underwear is back in my mind). About six months after I left the paper, I received word that Paul and MLN had married, and Paul had moved on to a regional weekly in Queensland, to continue his unique brand of infuriating good humour mixed with mysogyny.