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Let me clarify a few things some people find confusing. When most people first hear that I’m a human-shark hybrid, they immediately assume I’m speaking metaphorically.

“I’m part shark,” I say.

“Yeah, you’re a killer!” they say, and clap me on the shoulder, viz., thinking that I’m speaking metaphorically. Then I clarify that I’m literally part shark, which I do by biting off their hand. “Aagh!” they say, or words to that effect.

Even when they understand that I’m being literal, people have these funny ideas about how I got this way. Just so it’s perfectly clear, I am an engineered human-shark hybrid. I came out of a lab. Not like that action-film star whose mother was accidentally impregnated while surfing. I volunteered for this.

Lots of people have the impression that I’m one of those amphibious assassins from that experimental DARPA-Navy program. False. Many of the techniques they used on me – shark collagen implantation, behavioral training, the dental work – were pioneered at DARPA, but I’m actually with the startup that got to commercialize the tech, Sharkitectonics Inc .

I’m in Sales.

You see, there’s this management jargon around “dogfooding” your own products, meaning that companies should use the products that they sell. I don’t get the metaphor, personally, because do the marketing guys at Purina eat a lot of Puppy Chow, after all? And Purina seems to do pretty well. I don’t know, maybe they do eat a lot of Puppy Chow, who knows.

Not me, though. I prefer it when my food is actually cussing, fighting me off.

So anyway, my CEO went to some management seminar in, like, Acafuckingpulco, and came back raving about eating our own dog food, and, lucky me, Ed, VP of Sales sits right outside his door. “Hey, Ed!” CEO yelled to my boss. “One of your people need a little injection of the old killer instinct?”

Seconds later, probably, my phone rang. Internal call, CEO’s office. “Bob, we’d like to make you a really interesting offer. Completely volunteer basis, no obligation, you can totally say no,” said my CEO, meaning, “Do this or you’re fired.” So after eight weeks of almost-not-agonizing shark-collagen implantations, four weeks on an IV drip recovering from a totally survivable engineered viral infection to augment my previously human-normal DNA, three days of training in the capabilities of my new physique, and a half-hour overview of my new ethical obligations as a predator living among herd mammals, I returned to my cube and headset with a specially-designed set of quarterly goals and incentives for making them. Savory incentives.

Did I mention the dental work? Ninety-two straight hours of dental work, all of it covered at 80% reimbursable under the corporate dental plan. Ed, my boss, even picked up the 20% deductible out of his own personal expense account. He’s a prince of a human being, my boss.

He used to be a prince of a human being, I mean. A little stringy, maybe.

My first day back to work after all the surgery was great, everybody really appreciated it that I’d gone the extra mile for old Sharkitectonics, yessiree. They always told me so. “That’s great, Bob, really great. Can I use you the next time my guy at Oracle asks me for a reference? Thanks!” Jeff backing away while he spoke, arms kind of fending me off, maintaining eye contact the whole time. It bugged me at first, the whole fear thing, but then I really started to enjoy it. I used to need a couple cups of coffee just to get through the afternoon; after the operation, though, I would just take a quick walk down the hallway, terrifying my coworkers with my two-hundred-tooth smiles. Mmm, tasty.

Except for Jan and Jean, the porpoise girls in Payroll, though. They weren’t literally porpoise girls, of course, no implants or nearly-fatal engineering substitution viruses in their generation of the tech. Just behavioral conditioning. I’d never noticed any difference before the procedure, but it got pretty hard to pretend I didn’t notice how differently they treated me once I got back. First day, in fact.

“Jan, now that I’m back, I — hey, can you sit still for a moment?” Jan was backing away, hiding behind chairs, tables, stuff like that.

“Sure, Bob, no problem,” she called out in her squeaky voice. “What’s up?” she said, hiding behind a torchiere lamp about twenty feet down the hall.

“OK, but this isn’t helping me feel like a productive member of the Sharkitectonics team, though,” I said, following her down the hall past Jean’s office. I sort of saw Jean’s head perk up as I passed, but I didn’t really notice until she ran up behind me and rammed me in the small of the back with her head.

“Ow! Jean, what the fuck?” I said, turning to see what the hell had just happened.

“Oh, nothing, Bob,” she said, hiding in Patrick’s office with only her head sticking out.

Then fucking Jan ran up and rammed me right in the spine with her head. Right below the dorsal fin, which is getting sore already from all the chafing under my shirt. “Fucking hell, Jan! What is with you guys today?”

“Oh, nothing, Bob,” said Jan, cowering behind the shredder. “Something I can help you with?” I can only see her from, like, the nose up.

Bam! “Aagh!” Now it was Jan again with her head, but I was catching on. It was th porpoise conditioning, Jean and Jan collaborating to drive the predator, me, out of their territory. Which is fine for porpoises in the ocean, but sucks when it’s half of the Payroll department driving you away when you’re just trying to get your mileage reimbursement straightened out.

But sharks are great can-do people in this kind of situation. “Jean, I just want to get my mileage straightened out. Ow! It’s thirty-seven cents a mile, fuck! Isn’t it?” I inched closer, holding out my mileage check.

Jean can’t resist it, reaches out a hand to look. “That’s right, Bob, let me take a look.” She reached out her hand for the check.

As soon as she got close enough, I ate her. Jan screamed and ran away, but then, that’s the brilliance of the porpoise defense strategy. One on one, they were no match for me, but when they teamed up, one of them was always able to escape to propagate the species. In this case, Payroll people.

Once I had this figured out, I just had to keep my Payroll personnel consumption at replacement level or below, to be careful not to eat them faster than they could hire or breed more, and eventually I got my mileage reimbursement straightened out.

That’s the benefit of my human side – planning like that, figuring things out. Regular shark would have just eaten everybody in Payroll, you know?