I’ve been at this paper for thirty years. I have seen reporters come and go. I have never seen one come and go and come and go and come and go like Dennis Culpepper.

The kid — and I call him a kid because anyone who does what he did this weekend is operating with the judgment of a child — was fired Tuesday morning for the fourth time in twenty-seven days. If you’ve been following along, you know the drill. He shows up on a Thursday, writes one article, does something inexplicable, and is gone by the following Tuesday. It’s like a law of nature at this point. The sun rises, the lake is cold, and Dennis Culpepper gets fired from The Windy City Dispatch.

This time, he rearranged the entire newsroom.

Not a desk. Not a chair. The entire fourth floor. He came in over the weekend — how he got past building security is a question that several people are currently being asked to answer in writing — and reorganized every desk, filing cabinet, bookshelf, printer, and potted plant in the newsroom according to what he later described as “classical feng shui principles adapted for a modern open-plan media environment.”

I got to work Monday at 7:30, same as always. My desk was facing the window. It has faced the wall for nineteen years. I liked it facing the wall. The wall and I have an understanding. Now I was looking out at Lake Michigan like some kind of executive. My filing cabinet was across the room next to Rachel Kim’s desk, which was itself rotated forty-five degrees and positioned, according to a hand-drawn diagram Culpepper had taped to it, in the “wealth and prosperity corner.”

“The energy in this newsroom was stagnant,” Culpepper said when reached by phone Tuesday afternoon, roughly two hours after his fourth and presumably final termination. “I could feel it on my first day. The chi was blocked. You had desks facing walls, printers in doorways, a cactus in the relationship sector. I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing.”

Managing editor Linda Choi arrived at 8:15 to find her office furniture had been rotated 180 degrees, her desk facing the door “to welcome opportunity,” and a small tabletop fountain placed on her filing cabinet. The fountain was running. It was plugged into her desk lamp outlet. Her desk lamp was on the floor.

“He left a note,” Choi said. “It said, ‘Dear Linda, your office now faces the direction of career advancement. You’re welcome. — Dennis.’ The note was on a Post-it stuck to the fountain, which I’m told he bought with petty cash.”

The facilities team spent Monday afternoon restoring the newsroom to its original layout, a process that took four hours and required consulting a photograph from the paper’s 2024 holiday party to determine where several desks had originally been. One desk has still not been located. IT confirmed that Culpepper also reorganized the server closet, unplugging two network switches to make room for what he described in a separate note as “a contemplation alcove.”

I’m not going to pretend I understand Dennis Culpepper. I’m not going to pretend I understand how a man gets hired four times in one month, or why anyone thought the fourth time would go differently. I sat at the wrong desk for an entire Monday. I filed two stories from a chair that wasn’t mine, looking at a lake I didn’t ask to see, next to a plant that had been moved from the break room to what Dennis’s diagram labeled the “creativity zone.”

Choi confirmed that Culpepper will not be rehired. “We have a new policy,” she said. “It’s called the Culpepper Rule. I think its meaning is self-evident.” When asked whether the tabletop fountain would be kept, Choi said nothing for several seconds, then said, “It’s actually quite soothing,” and closed her office door.

Dennis, if you’re reading this — and you probably are, because you still have the building’s Wi-Fi password — it was something, kid. I don’t know what it was. But it was something.