"You know," said my fellow dog researcher, "I don't think French bulldogs really are French." This was the kind of cutting-edge discovery that we had to keep from the public at large, and I told her so. She responded by pointing to the microphone on my desk, which had inadvertently been set to "on" during the course of our conversation.
Any one of the thousands of people passing by had heard our argument from the highly-reputed Dog Research Tower erected above Times Square, which is not only an icon of our society's great respect for canine science but also a profitable tourist trap. That's when the shit really hit the fan.
When this kind of scandal breaks, usually the management will want to get out in front of it. They put me on leave, because they felt A) a coverup was bad for business, and B) I was kind of an asshole and they finally figured out a legal way to make me stop making their day worse. For the next couple of weeks, I sat at home and watched the world tear itself apart. CNN had already separated into both pro- and anti-French camps, its promise of impartiality eroding to a civil war, the point where even the anchors could not agree to cover both sides.
This is also when a special kind of person will emerge: the crisis management team. These highly-paid spin doctors love to parachute into a situation like the one that I had stepped into. Then, they figure out a combination of nice-sounding lies that we can emit into the public unconsciousness in order to numb them for long enough for someone else to fuck up at work. I was back on the desk within the week, ready to cover up another earthshaking discovery in the field of dog research.
My co-worker was back, too, having spent her unpaid time off developing an even more radical theory. German Shepherds don't do any fucking shepherding.
