Futurama: People: Hermes Conrad
Organized. Perhaps the most fitting word to describe bureaucrat grade 37 Hermes Conrad. He manages, or should I say, micro-manages, the Planet Express offices.
Personal information about Hermes may be few and far between, but we have been let in on a few things in the course of the show. We know he’s a Jamaican former Olympic limbo contender, a born bureaucrat, husband to LaBarbara and father to Dwight. Dwight gets some time in the limelight later in the series as friend and business partner to the professor’s cloned son, Cubert.
Although Hermes rarely plays an up-front role in the series, he’s omnipresent in the background, helping to move the plot-line forward. His only time in the spotlight comes in How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back, when he has a nervous breakdown from missing a chance at bureaucratic promotion. Hermes is the classic example of someone so anal, if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, you’d have a diamond in five minutes. And don’t think he’d let it be anything less than a top-quality diamond at that.
We are bombarded with numerous examples of Hermes’ anally-retentive nature: he shreds documents to make more documents, monitors every aspect of the consumption levels in the office – from coffee and toilet paper to water and electricity and yet still finds time for an unreasonable hatred of Zoidberg. He only takes a vacation when he has a nervous breakdown, a brain slug, it’s Freedom Day or on Labor Day.
If you were to meet Hermes in a bar, he’d probably be the manager there too. But after finishing his paperwork in record time, he’d be up front watching the bartender to make sure no one got more than one cherry per cocktail, checking the jigger measurement, calibrating the aeration on the tap, looking over the doorman’s shoulder to make sure he didn’t pocket the cover charge … you get the idea.
Phil LaMarr provides the smooth, smooth Jamaican cadence of Hermes Conrad.
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