Doug!

Emmett was bored, enthroned in the basement washroom below the Fussy Squirrel. No cell signal, no wifi, and not much left on his phone to occupy his mind after you factored in the lack of connectivity.

Someone had left a sharpie in the stall though. There wasn’t a lot of good real estate left on the walls, but he spotted a little blank enough space near the back of the left wall, just behind the nearly empty Whizzking double-roll toilet paper dispenser.

But what to put there?

He took a deep breath in, regretted that, then surveyed the work that was already around him. The So-and-so was heres weren’t particularly inspiring. The swearing was largely uncreative. The easy childhood rhymes that came to mind were already done.

Some of the drawings were pretty good. Smiley faces, flowers, logos, that dragon with the human arm. A surprisingly realistic looking oak tree.

He knew he couldn’t really compete with the good art in the space he had picked out. So, writing it was. But what?

The washroom door opened and he heard multiple sets of footsteps. He realized he’d been finished with his original reason for being there, panicked a little, wrote Doug! in the space he’d chosen, then wiped, did his pants back up, flushed, and got out of there.

Emmett cleaned his hands and went back upstairs. His date had left. The server packed a good amount of sympathy into the glance she gave him when he sat back down. Not so much that it felt like she pitied him, but enough to acknowledge that his situation sucked.

He checked the time on his phone. He’d been gone about 12 minutes, which didn’t seem too long to him. I guess that’s a long time to wait though, he thought to himself. And the date had only been going ok. Not great. Not a lot of chemistry between them, he and Suzan. He felt like he would’ve agreed to a second date, but she didn’t seem as into it, and her absence on his return really confirmed that.

The server brought him the cheque, for both meals, and cleared the plates. He paid, no complaints, tipped a little more than he usually would, downed the wine from both glasses, and left. He took a longer route than necessary home, so he could walk through a park he liked. He sat on a bench for a while, replaying scenes from the date in his mind.

His outfit was wrong. Too casual, and he knew it as soon as she gave him the up and down when he met her at the restaurant. His plaid, short-sleeved button-down was wrinkled. The cargo shorts were probably a mistake. Her summer dress, green with white polka dots, was lovely. They both had cream coloured Chucks on, and had a nice little laugh about that. The sweat socks sticking out of his definitely didn’t have the same impact as the legs coming out of hers.

The conversation was a little stilted, but not unpleasant. The only real highlight was when they had realized they’d both been at the same Van Halen concert a few years ago and talked music for a while. They didn’t find much common ground beyond that.

Well, he thought, that’s enough beating myself up for one night. He got up from the bench, and in doing so startled a couple of teenagers who were about to tag a statue of some colonial figure that Emmett couldn’t identify, and couldn’t be bothered to look at the plaque to learn about.

One of the teens dropped his spray paint as they fled. Emmett picked it up. He turned the can over in his hands a couple times. Berry pink. He looked from the can to the statue, shook the can and sprayed Doug! across the plinth. He stepped back, admired his work, then tucked the can into one of his cargo short pockets and carried on home.

~~~~~

A little before 6 the next morning, the sun hit his eyes and Emmett woke up with the realization that he didn't even know anyone named Doug. So where did Doug! come from?

He knew of Dougs, sure, but none that ever made much of an impact on him. He wasn't into Doug and the Slugs. He never had much time for Coupland. He'd seen The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy when it came out, the one with Martin Freeman, and he thought it was ok if a bit weird, and he had no idea it was based on a book written by Douglas Adams. Hadn't even heard of him. He knew who Douglas MacArthur was, and Doug Ford. And Tommy Douglas, but he wasn't comfortable with shortening someone's last name. And he wasn't really into any of those guys anyway. He was too old to know the eponymous Doug from the cartoon, and too young to know Doug McKenzie from SCTV, although he might have at least looked familiar. He remembered Dougie Gilmour, and thought he was a really good hockey player, but he was never someone that Emmett really cheered for or anything like that.

So why Doug!? That bothered him most of the morning. When he got to work he read the Wikipedia article for Doug, and the one for Douglas too, but neither helped. He stayed bothered until he got distracted enough by the bit of programming he was meant to be doing. He spent a few hours trying to sort out the logic of a particular function he was only half sure how to write, trying different ways to code it, googling the error messages and reading stack overflow posts that seemed to be similar enough to what he was trying to do. He was a mid-level manager, not a programmer anymore, and he was really out of practice with coding but wasn't about to turn to any of his reports for help. He eventually got the code working, snuck a Doug! into the comments, then put another on his desk in a spot that no one could really see and called it a day.

That night he took the Berry Pink spray paint for a walk and tagged an underpass and the brick wall of an old duplex. He went out every night until the spray paint ran out, adding a Doug! here and a Doug! there, on unobserved flat surfaces all through town. The paint ran out on the first line of a capital D, so he just walked a few blocks and ditched the can in a dumpster behind a coffee shop he didn't like.

~~~~~

A couple weeks later, Emmett found himself confused again. He hadn’t written Doug! anywhere since that night that he’d run out of spray paint. Not with a marker or a pen even. He hadn’t even typed it! But he did check out some of the places he had left Doug! Subtly, and never the same place twice. He’d been on his way to check out the first Doug! he’d sprayed, on that statue in the park after his date with Suzan, when something caught his eye. There in the park, on a garbage can not far from the entrance, someone else had sprayed Doug!

Well who would do that? he asked himself. And he left the park without checking the statue. He just stopped, pretended to look at his watch, turned around and walked out. He hadn’t worn or even owned a watch in years, he just looked at his wrist quickly.

He went back home, and got into bed early. He wasn’t tired enough to fall asleep so he watched a generic action movie on his phone, then got up for a snack and started to watch the sequel. He shut that off after about half an hour because he thought it was stupid and managed to fall asleep not long after.

~~~~~

Doug! started popping up in more and more places, and Emmett was still confused about how he'd become a trendsetter. He started googling Doug! during meetings that he didn’t really have to pay attention to. He found lots of pictures of Doug! on various walls around town, but no real information on who was Doug!ing the place up. He found some stuff about a Doug! conspiracy, and an Instagram account devoted to Doug! sightings.

One day he found a short news article about a bar that had been repeatedly Doug!ed and got so tired of cleaning it off that they just devoted a wall to it, even adding a Doug! of their own. I don’t understand it, the owner was quoted as saying, but people seem to like it. Another bar, in response, hired a local artist to do a mural centred around a Doug!

A few weeks later he caught wind of a local band called The Roaches releasing an EP called Doug! and decided to check that out. I’ve inspired music!, he thought to himself. He looked up their Bandcamp, popped in his ear buds, and hit play.

Ok, inspired is too strong, he thought a few bars into the opening track. He left it playing, but wasn’t paying much attention. He paused it when Prakash, one of his best up-and-coming developers, poked his head into the office to quit. Prakash was taking a position at some start up in Toronto.

Outwardly, Emmett was happy for him and recognized that it was a good opportunity. Inwardly he cursed a lot because there was a hiring freeze on and he wouldn’t be able to bring on someone new to replace Prakash until at least the next quarter, and his team was definitely going to need to deprioritize some work they’d been hoping to get done. While he was saying congratulations and they’re lucky to have you he was mentally reassigning Prakash’s work to Jasmine, who could definitely get up to speed on it quickly, and most of Jasmine’s work to Mel and Amir, and Amir was starting to get more confident and assertive, so maybe it was a good time to try giving him some more responsibilities, and…

When Prakash left his office, Emmett jotted down what he’d been thinking on a series of sticky notes, then put his ear buds back in. He was about to hit play when he saw the title of the song was Females Don’t Like It. When you call them females, he thought, then hit play.

And he focused on the music, and what he found was not good. Not good at all. Uninspired three chord rock, with no interesting flourishes and not enough self-awareness to just be a punk band. The lyrics were somehow worse than the music.

Females don’t like it when you expect them to pay
Females don’t like it when you only wanna play
Females don’t like it when you hang with your friends
Females don’t like it when you don’t got a Benz

Oh. Oh no, he thought. He stopped the terrible incel music, closed the bandcamp page, and cleared his browser cache. Then he caught sight of the Doug! he’d left in his desk and and decided that he should really get rid of it. Then he remembered the Doug! he’d left in that code he’d written that day, started to sweat and feel flush. He’d checked that work into a repository that his team used, which meant that not only could everyone see it, but if he just quietly removed it, the Doug! would still be visible in the repo’s history.

The desk was easier to deal with, so Emmett went to the cleaning supply closet and got to work on scrubbing that Doug! It took him about an hour, because of interruptions and scrubbing at a sub-optimal angle so that anyone doing the interrupting wouldn't misinterpret his repetitive forearm motion and heavy breathing.

After he was satisfied with that work, he returned the cleaning supplies to their closet and got a glass of water from the kitchen. He drank that down all at once, poured himself another, and headed back to his office. He sipped at the second glass while staring at the code comment, trying to sort out what to do about it. After an hour of sipping and staring and no ideas, he just deleted the comment, wrote I had no idea in the commit message, and called it a day.

~~~~~

Emmett drove two towns over the next weekend, and bought a few cans, never more than one a time, of berry pink spray paint. He went out every night after dark to unDoug! the city. He transformed Doug!s into Doughnuts, No Doug!, Daughtry Sux!, Daughters, and Doughboy, depending on how much room he had to work with. Some of them he just sprayed over, or drew a circle around them with a line through it.

Within a few days, he started to notice other Doug!s were being painted over or transformed. Businesses that had previously embraced Doug! were now quietly getting rid of them. It wasn't long before Emmett could go for a walk and not see an intact Doug! anywhere.

He ran into Suzan amidst the produce at the grocery store one day a month or so after he'd seen his last wild Doug! She apologized for ditching him, and he told her he didn't blame her because he hadn't been much of a date. They wished each other well and after she walked away another woman approached him and handed him a slip of paper with her name (Gina), number, and in case you want to try being a better date written on it.

He smiled at her, said his name was Emmett, and he'd like that very much. She smiled back, said she was looking forward to hearing from him, picked up a bag of carrots and walked away. He looked at the note again, smiled to himself, and folded it in half so it would fit in his wallet. He nearly dropped it when he saw that Doug! was written on the back side of the paper. He looked around for Gina, but she was nowhere to be seen.