The Bob Cave: Nerdy Hobbies Of A Middle-Aged Average American

Our CEO was an All-American looking blonde-hair-going-gray, blue-eyed, very fit man in his middle years. (Note: I am only referring to the CEO in the past tense to indicate Lil' Brad's past - Brad the real-life CEO is very much alive as of this writing.) As I looked at dummies on the various websites, I didn't see any that had the right look.  The entry level (<$100) pull-string dummies were generally dark-haired with dark eyes (e.g., Charlie McCarthy, Danny O'Day, Jerry Mahoney [w hy are they all Irish? another topic perhaps]  ).   Even at the higher price point of semi-pro dummies that had a control stick for the mouth and head movements, I did not see any blonde dummies.  [I believe the tendency toward dummies with dark hair and eyes is due to the most popular and enduring characters from the Golden Era 1930s, 40s and 50s having those kind of features. Light-colored hair and eyes would probably would not have shown up very well under the bright...

Lil' Brad's story began at my day job working in tech support at a large financial software company.  For those of you who don't work in Corporate Amerika, there are lots of conference calls.  My team had a daily call with our "partner site", which is a polite way of saying a call center we paid to deal with the unpleasant task of actually talking to our customers. Anyway, as one of the leads on the team, I would frequently ask questions of our call center agents during these calls.  Many times the response to my questions was..  dead air, crickets, nada. So to make the situation less awkward (or more maybe) when no one would answer, I started answering my own questions in a high-pitched, obviously fake voice " Yes, that's right Bob", "I completely agree Bob!", "We'll get right on that, Bob" , etc. Over time, the high-pitched voice morphed into a loose impersonation of our CEO , who was named Brad and had a noticea...