The Mouse That Roared!! – Part 3 “The Next Issues and Period”

Editorial note: This is the third installment and will make little sense if read out of order. Please see earlier posts directly below.

Well once the members of SODE’ learned that Gary McCoy, company President had asked for more, we felt obligated to deliver. After all he was the boss.

We spend another week putting together the next issue. We continued and may have even upped the level of intensity. We attacked about 3 or 4 departments in this issue and even more in the subsequent issues. Since Gary had asked for “more of it” we felt we had been given a free pass.

We attacked and attacked, making less effort to cloud who and what we were attacking. Names of departments and certain managers was alluded to and in some cases spelled out entirely. This proved to be a poor decision. I believe if we had been less specific and left names out of the publication all would have gone as expected.

Another bad decision was that we as editors felt we could own up to our efforts. It wasn’t that we put our names on the paper but we didn’t keep our efforts anonymous either. If asked, we all agreed, we would admit we had been behind this. In hindsight it was a good thing that we had disassociated SODE’ with the paper because that would have put all of us, and maybe me individually, responsible for making Kandi cry a year or so earlier.

About 4 issues and 6 weeks later the word came down. Kevin, Bill, Ryan and I were “invited” to the ivory tower at the request of Gary McCoy. As we arrived at the admin office and looked at one another it was clear that no one really knew what was going on. But at the same time we were pretty sure that it had to do with our brainchild “The Mouse That Roared”.

When we stepped into Gary’s office that morning and saw all the past issues of TMTR our suspicion was confirmed. Gary invited us to sit down and then got right to the point. He held up the issues that were on his desk and said. “Enough, the only reason I don’t fire you here and now is that I stood in front of 45 managers and asked for more of this. However, it has gone too far. If you want to keep working for this company not another written word out of the four of you. Is that clear?”

Well I can’t speak for the other 3 members of SODE’ and coauthors of TMTR but I understood exactly what he meant and needed no further explanation. I reflected back on how foolish I had been in and felt really lucky that I hadn’t lost my job. I never mentioned this to Melodie. The SODE’ cartoons, the issues of TMTR or my brush with unemployment were not known to her until years after I left Mammoth

As we got into the elevator in the tower and headed down to “where we belonged”, there was no snickering or scoffing at how close we had come. We knew we had dodged a large bullet.

However, by the time we got ready to carpool home that night our spirits were lifted up and we came up with one last plan. We decided we needed to cease publication in a classy manner. We took our TMTR masthead and on the front page, just below it, put a large 4” black dot. The next day we sent out 10 copies as usual and let the Xerox crowd do the rest.

There was much speculation as to what it meant. Some thought it was a hidden message. Others thought it represented a hole that the mouse had crawled into. For us it was simply a punctuation mark, a period if you will, indicating that our work was finished.