Cleaned out

I can't recall why I went past FO's office, but he had the big recycling bin parked in his doorway, his floor scattered with the contents of the boxes usually stacked beneath and around his desk. He was crawling around on the floor, shaking plastic folders and collecting the business cards that fell out. It concerned me somewhat that he was doing this while the company's stock trading was halted. It's a strange time to be having an enterprise-level 'clean out', but then, the auditors had just been through, and this was an opportunity to officially dispose of anything that they missed. I guess I was wondering if something more serious was happening that I should know about, and I don't know which was worse: that I was thinking it, or that I had to ask to be sure.
He looked even more harried than he had yesterday when we were talking about critical survival objectives, as if he'd had some sleep, but not enough. The lingering malady that causes him to cough up an inordinate amount of phlegm at inopportune moments in meetings is unlikely to abate unless he takes a different outlook on life and winds down. In a past life, he took his job too seriously, and it cost him a marriage. He's a serial monogamistic executive, dedicating his life to one company at a time. Sometimes I suspect he's planning a coup, and Bubble had better beware, but at other times he's hiding behind Bubble, ready to leap out and stab someone else in the back - preferably with Bubble's knife. But then, I know who really pulls Bubble's strings, and it's not his wife, either.