It all started innocently enough. I had, apparently, regrettably displayed a burst of efficiency and competence at my workplace, and it had not gone unnoticed by my corporate masters. Since, as it is said, no good deed goes unpunished, I soon found myself appointed as the responsible party for all the CESAs in Wisconsin. (In a nutshell, the CESA organizations provide technical support to schools. Now it was my job to support all of them.) In a trice, I was made Wisconsin’s bitch.

It wasn’t long before the Cheeseheads started running my work life. They are nice enough folks out there, but before long, I was buried under so many requests from Wisconsin, I had less and less time to perform any of the routine engineering tasks expected of me. One day, to display my exasperation, I made my iChat status message read "CESA Slave". A colleague suggested that I get a BDSM-style icon to reinforce the concept of servitude. Apparently she’s a perfectionist, at least in matters of the slave/master dynamic. I didn’t pursue that line of inquiry any further, but instead went out and found a serviceable image.

Now, arguably, the most popular leather-slave image comes from Pulp Fiction’s "Gimp" character. Someone started bandying it about, after noticing my chat avatar, and the name quickly spread and stuck. So now I’m known in the office as the Gimp. Gimp life turned out not to be as bad as one would expect. I even learned to laugh at it, and others with similar burdens identified with it as well. Soon little gimps started popping up all over our IM buddy lists. After all, as long as you know where the next lash is coming from, you don’t fear the whip as much. I even made a small stable of holiday-themed Gimp icons to show my proper Gimpy spirit all year long. Life was OK.

Until, that is, my fame as Wisconsin’s bitch apparently leaked out to our sales staff, and my name—and personal desk phone number—started getting whored out to other clients. Most of them were other Wisconsin sites, but then it really started getting out of hand. I started getting calls from people I’d never heard of, from all over the Midwest. I wasn’t just the CESA Gimp anymore, even though I pointedly ignored as many of the unsolicited requests for help as I could. Even the most subservient ball-gagged submissive can only service the simultaneous demands of a finite number of masters. I was getting passed around like Paris Hilton at an amateur video convention.

I am now… an Interstate Gimp.