Now it might have been these sorts of incidents and the disruptive laughter that they caused about the office, or the fact that there was also a front counter to which customers often came to check their policies or pay their premiums and that circumstances were possible whereby this customer would be confronted with me. Or perhaps it was a case of genuine need and the right man for a job, but in any event, the chance came to distance the office from me and it was keenly seized.
“I want you to stay away from the customers,” Slimy Duggans ordered me one day. “They’ve been complaints.”
“What about?” I foolishly wondered.
“You. The way you look. Not the sort of image the company wants it’s customers to see.”
“What’s wrong with the way I look?”
“Haven’t you ever looked in a mirror? Your appearance is dreadful. The hair, the face, the clothes, everything. It’s all just wrong.”
Was it? “But what’s wrong?” I puzzled. I supposed I could comb my hair sometimes, get a better suit, smile more often despite my very uneven teeth…
“You just don’t look interesting.”
Oh dear. Surely there was no cure for that!
“Anyhow, problem solved,” Slimy Duggans enthused, “We’ve got a special job for you,”

Meanwhile the man began to mount the ladder, and Quasimodo now saw distinctly again. He carried across his shoulder a female, a young female dressed in white; this young female had a rope about her neck. Quasimodo knew her. She was the Egyptian.
  The man reached the top of the ladder. There he arranged the rope. The priest, in order to see better, now knelt down upon the balustrade.
  The man suddenly kicked away the ladder, and Quasimodo, who had not breathed for some moments, saw the unfortunate girl, with the man crouched upon her shoulders, dangling at the end of the rope within two or three yards of the pavement. The rope made several revolutions, and Quasimodo saw the body of the victim writhe in frightful convulsions, The priest, on his part, with outstretched neck and eyes starting from his head, contemplated the terrific group of the man and the young girl, the spider and the fly.
  At this most awful moment, a demon laugh, a laugh such as only one who has ceased to be human is capable of, burst forth from the livid face of the priest. Quasimodo heard not his laugh, but he saw it. The bell-ringer recoiled a few steps from the archdeacon, then suddenly rushing furiously upon him with his two huge hands into the abyss over which he was leaning. “Damnation!” cried the priest, as he fell.
Quasimodo—I might not have been a hunchback, but I certainly felt the way he looked, especially as played by Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, based on Victor Hugo’s great novel, Notre Dame du Paris. I was shattered. For the first time, life had truly managed to hurt me. I had always known that I wasn’t very bright but had compensated by carefully arranging my life to avoid having to do clever things. I had always known I was physically useless, but had accepted it and again balanced the scales as best I could. I knew too that I did not have an interesting personality, since whenever I was called upon to chat with someone, I always ran out of things to say straight after hello, and could never think of any answer to offer when they talked to me, except say yes and no in what I always hoped were the right places. But to look uninteresting as well? That was most devastating of all. Could I not even walk out in the streets without revealing my shortcomings? Did I have to hide meself away as well?
  I needed somewhere to hide, and, perhaps surprisingly, it was provided; in the office where I seemed most exposed of all places.