An Explanation of My Alias

Every good secret agent, activated or no, needs a good alias.

[Unless, of course, you're James Bond, in which case you go out of your way to very clearly enunciate your full name to practically anyone who will listen, but it's okay because you'll either up seducing and bedding them or killing them. Sometimes both.]

An agent’s alias says a lot about him (or her). For example, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (aka The Jackal) was a vicious assassin, while sexy saboteur Margaretha Geertruida Zelle just appropriated her stripper stage name, Mata Hari. So you know any secret agent worth his salt is going to spend plenty of time working out a really, really good alias.

Since I’m definitely worth my salt (I know this because for one reason or another everyone tells me they take what I say with a grain of salt; no, I don’t get it either) I think it’s safe to assume this is a good alias, even though I came up with it in about five seconds.

First of all, I was considering my present predicament as an agent of a clandestine terrorist conspiracy dating back to from before the beginning of the universe (cf. Organizational Charter, Letter to the Ephesians §1.4), deactivated against my will by the Higher-Ups. [Many of my fellow agents might take issue with my characterization of the situation as "forced deactivation," but seeing as my operational capability has been revoked without a voluntary defection on my part, I can only assume that the Triumvirate wants me on hiatus for awhile.] My first thought was about Job, a legendary agent who actually got a section of our Charter written about him. The eponymous briefing consists mostly of Job registering complaints through official channels, getting no response from the Higher-Ups, suffering through a kangaroo court-martial at the hands of unqualified psychiatric evaluators and eventually getting a thorough chastisement by Big Boss before being reinstated and restored to good standing.

Notwithstanding the general murkiness of the briefing (possibly the oldest in our Charter, its popularity stands in direct inverse proportion to agreement among Agency jurists about its meaning), we agents are fond of associating ourselves with Agent Job and likening our situation to his. However, after a little bit of thought, I determined that, objectively, my situation was probably less like Agent Job’s (he was, at least initially, not at fault for his situation, cf. §1.22) and more like that of George Oscar Bluth II, aka GOB.

Unlike the blameless Job, GOB [for the tragically uninitiated, GOB's nickname is pronounced like Agent Job's] usually gets into trouble due to some combination of arrogance, greed, stupidity, jealousy or haste, along with a smattering of his suppressed desire to earn some of the respect his father seems to reserve only for his younger brother, Michael Bluth. Although far from the most sympathetic of the characters in the Arrested Development pantheon, GOB may, in the end, be the most tragic: from childhood his parents have pitted him against his more intelligent, more talented and more likeable younger brother, to the point that his father makes him President of the Bluth Corporation only to manipulate Michael. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s not one giant [REDACTED]hole.

So. Am I Job: legendary field agent of our international terrorist conspiracy? Or am I GOB, ladies man, magician illusionist and aspiring comedic ventriloquist? I guess it’s up to you, anonymous readers of my unclassified briefings, to decide.