An Impostor In My Midst

I’ve been back at my job at the Department of Meat Products for just over three months now, and I think the nightly dreams about work are finally abating. The intrusion of tedious real life into the realm of fantasy was quite tiring for a while – it was difficult to feel refreshed after a night spent contemplating the ingredients of various lunchmeats, and composing media releases assuring the public that, contrary to recent scaremongering, polonium-210 is not an ingredient of polony.

It seems, however, that the mingling of the mundane and the fanciful is not a unidirectional flow, because lately I’ve noticed odd things happening in my office, as if the lovechild of Gumby and Thursday Next has been strolling around in the Harry Potter books displacing random characters and scenarios in a fit of plasticine pique.

Snape has been wandering our corridors for some time, although I’m pretty sure she’s not an embittered sadist of uncertain allegiance, with a penchant for black and an inadequate hair-care regimen. Then there’s L’Estrange, but I think he’s probably a lot more reasonable and easy to work with than a slightly unhinged, murderous fugitive. We even have a Justin Finch-Fletchley, or at least that’s how I’ve secretly thought of the poor boy ever since I discovered his name was Justin Fossington-Bligh or some such mouthful.

What’s really discombobulating is that someone seems to have cast a rather powerful Confundus Charm over my colleagues and supervisors, such that they seem to think I’m possessed of attributes that make me want to look over both shoulders before asking, “Who, me?”

“You’re a real people-person!” one supervisor enthused at a compulsory feedback session, while I tried to keep from scoffing audibly at his kind but obviously ill-informed praise. I always thought being a people-person meant you had to like people, and enjoy dealing with them on a regular basis, rather than being a solitude-loving homebody who writes vicious personal diatribes on an anonymous blog.

“You’re a very eloquent speaker,” a co-worker assured me after I confessed my nerves over upcoming talks my boss seemed (erroneously) to think I was qualified to give. This time I could not keep the scornful disbelief off my face. Had she not heard my last disastrous work address, during which the whole auditorium laughed at something I intended to be perfectly serious? Had she not witnessed me stuttering awkwardly to strangers at job-related functions, trying and failing to appear erudite by using words such as ‘panacea’, only to have them pause momentarily before gently correcting me to ‘placebo’? Of course not, or she’d never have uttered such an untruth.

Then there was this statement which issued, unfacetious and apropos of nothing, from the mouth of my befuddled boss: “You’re always so cheerful in the mornings!”

It was on hearing this that I knew with certainty something was awry in the Department of Meat Products. Seemingly the only one left clear-headed and rational, it is therefore left to me to ask:

Who am I, and what have I done with the real Lonie Polony?