There was an unofficial competition within the business, who was the biggest nutcase.
Season after season, year after year, Ashley claimed first place in the most coveted category: an infant of the year. His consecutive title defenses gained him a nickname, "Mad Ashley" and he was wildly recognized as pound for pound the finest of unhinged. He was a top-of-the-food-chain retard, an elite crackpot, one and the only reigning, defending, and unifying master of a disaster. His professional record included a driving license and two days management course for beginners.
Richard and Hooligan enjoyed arranging meetings between Ashley and his inner child. It was the least they could do for him.
Both of them treated work as an act of unfortunate interruption of what otherwise could be a paid social event, with plenty of free tea and free coffee and enough time to discuss everything they needed to discuss during long spells of boredom while supervised by a crazy man on his noble quest to spot the slightest signs of encircling him danger. The danger was imaginary and therefore real. It dilapidated Ashley's ramshackle mind into a state of permanent anxiety. With his head timidly tucked in between his shoulders he was either glancing frantically around or blinking with an expression of a perpetual surprise. The world was a strange place where strange things were taking place.
His face was like a neglected excavation site after months of intense raining, with its unprotected trenches, scattered digging equipment, and loose planks of timber drenched in free-flowing sludge. It was a grim picture with partly collapsed fencing and a warning sign "no unauthorized access" helplessly leaning down next to a chained-up entrance gate waiting to no avail for its absent owner.
A devoted death worshipper, in a good physical shape, with a set of glasses sitting at the far end of a long and spiky nose, Ashley had no clue that a large skulk on his forearm was a symbol of death and that it was a testimony to his direct subconscious believes.
As a classic passive-aggressive, he was passive against the aggressive and aggressive against the passive. Those two postures strongly correlated with two brain cells controlling his day-to-day operations. One of them was mostly inactive, kept as a back – up, in case the other one failed to cope with the rigorous demands of being an imbecile.
Opposed to the slightest even changes, Ashley lived in a constant world where everything outside his normal routine was confronted with outright hostility. A preacher of continuous improvement he could not comprehend mistakes with the exception of his own mistakes which he always blamed on someone else. There were three things he was really good at: Allocating blame, supervising guilt, and craving for a nipple. Ashley suckled on his lips from the moment he woke up till 10 am when the craving was over and he could squeeze his sandwich in a clenched fist, aggressively sunk large, nicotine-stained teeth in it while pulling off his head in one direction and the whole arm in the opposite, tearing up unfortunate snack apart.
The emotional turmoil was where Ashley truly excelled.
Every time he was in torment, which was all the time, devastating effects of accumulated anger, bitterness, and resentment swarmed his face with vicious agitation, straining muscles under his cheeks like a nest of restless vipers.
He made sashes for all his life and passionately hated every minute of it.
It was a simple process. All he had to do was to put a glass on his bench, pull a gasket on it, and ... get angry. He was doing it for so long, he was unable to fail. Sometimes he would get angry before he assembled a sash, most often during and almost always once he finished so that he could approach another sash already angry, bitter, and resentful. It could bring down even the most robust individual but Ashley had been balancing on the edge of an abyss for all his life. It was his bread and butter. As a member of the management team, he was in possession of some very important information. He knew everyone around him was an idiot. It gave him a very strong argument to claim, there was nothing wrong with him.
