Hermes Conrad

Hermes Conrad is a Jamaican Bureaucrat, and proud of it. He works at Planet Express, handling stamping, filing, collating, and accounting - all the fiddly little paperwork that only a true bureaucrat can handle properly. He claims, however, that he is only anal 78.36% of the time. He is also an honorary Globetrotter, and has worked for Mom's Friendly Robot Company as Inspector #5. He lives with his family in an apartment.

Personality
Hermes is a bureaucrat working for the Planet Express delivery company, under Hubert J. Farnsworth. He is friendly and hard working but can also be nasty at times, particularly to Dr. Zoidberg. Despite his wide frame, Hermes was an accomplished limboer. He has a rivalry with Barbados Slim. Hermes also has a habit of saying "Sweet (something) of (some place)". The show also hints that Hermes does not like his co-workers in "The Farnsworth Parabox". He first tells Leela to shoot Bender, Fry and Zoidberg, and second has to be begged not to eject the crew from the airlock.

Hurricane in Kingston town
Hermes Conrad was born to a fat ugly Jamaican woman in 2959 and soon after began to develop into a fine young bureaucrat, crying when his alphabet blocks are knocked out of order as a four year old and making friends and family file long applications to get into his tenth birthday party.

Limbo champion
During his adult life, Hermes became an Olympic grade limboer. It was around this time that he married LaBarbara, the ex-wife of his rival Barbados Slim. On his honeymoon, he limboed for 12 straight hours. When competing for the Earth team in 2980 a young fan trying to emulate him ran onto the field and snapped his spine, killing him, Hermes dropped out of professional limbo immediately after the tragic accident. Turning to his other passion, Hermes and his wife moved to New New York, home to the Central Bureaucracy and the couple had a son, Dwight.

Mom's Friendly Robot Company
Sometime after moving to New New York, Hermes got a job as Inspector #5 at Mom's Friendly Robot Company's Tijuana division (6ACV06). He lived in a rather quaint mission-styled house there, while it appears LaBarbara remained in New New York. There he was responsible for letting Bender live, despite him being a defective unit. After this he immediately quit the company and moved back to New New York.

Heroic Bureaucrat
Hermes, as a grade 36 bureaucrat, joined the staff of Planet Express. When his limboing skills alone could save the entire crew from certain death in the destruction of the space cruise ship Titanic, he overcame his aversion and rediscovered the sport he loved. After a few bad experiences with Brain Slugs, Hermes received a pair of letters from the Central Bureaucracy, the second of which informed him there would soon be an inspection - and a chance at a promotion. Unfortunately, his office was messed up by the angry staff of Applied Cryogenics and he was sent on the ultimate penalty of paid vacation. On returning to the Central Bureaucracy building, he was able to sort the master "in" pile and retrieve a disk containing Bender's brain. He finished the job with time to spare and was demoted to grade 38 as a result, but soon found an error in another bureaucrat's paperwork and earned a promotion to grade 37.

It's called parenting
When Dwight and Cubert Farnsworth started their own delivery company, Hermes and the Professor felt threatened, and rightly so; the pair soon took over the company, until they were revealed to not have been delivering their papers. Later, The pair of parents formed a Bender protest group, Fathers Against Rude Television, which successfully protested All My Circuits to get him off the show and remove his influence on their children.

Old Habits
In 3004, when the entire Jamaican limbo team was detained at the airport because of their "other interests," Hermes was called back out of retirement to defend his country's pride, but he came in dead last due to a freak accident with his flabbo-dynamic spandex bodysuit. Three years and three bureaucrat grade increases later Hermes, now grade 34, was decapitated when a decorative sword fell and sliced off his head after a limbo contest at Planet Express. Although he survived as a head in a jar, LaBarbara immediately left him and went back to her first husband. At Lars and Leela's wedding, he won LaBarbara back when he received a new body (his own, stolen from the past by Bender). Soon after, he was jabbed in the eye with a pen and his head is chopped off once again when a Chandelier crystal falls, destroying the time paradox duplicate body. His head then provides useful guidance in the war to reclaim the earth where, using his mighty bureaucratic mind to coordinate the human fleet, he defeats the remote-controlled solid gold Death Stars and wins LaBarbara back. He then regains his original body back and witnesses space ripping open.

Mysterious Destination
In the same year, he attends Kif and Amy's Fonfon Rubok and participates in "Deathball" to win the right to explore the Anomaly. He is one of the many people who live with one of Yivo's tentacles in his neck and joins everyone else in the universe in leaving to live on Yivo. After returning, Hermes comes to LaBarbara and the other Feministas' rescue, as they flee Zapp Brannigan and the Earthican legal system through a wormhole.

Reborn
Exiting the wormhole, only to crash land outside their workplace, Hermes and his colleagues are given new bodies by the Professor, as the old ones were reduced to skeletons. A few months later, Bender learned that he had been approved by "Inspector #5" despite lacking a backup unit. Hermes accompanies Bender on a quest to find the responsible party, allowing him to continue hiding the fact that he had been that inspector, and to protect Bender from any dangerous Killbots. By this time, Hermes had been demoted back to grade 36.

Family

 * LaBarbara Conrad, wife.
 * Dwight Conrad, son.
 * Granny (deceased), a zombie.
 * Mamma (deceased), fat, ugly, and possibly promiscuous, she promised Hermes that he would never be attacked by tentacles when he gave up diapers.
 * Unnamed father (possibly deceased), he promised his son that he would never be attacked by tentacles when he gave up diapers.

Semblance


It is pointed out at several times that Hermes is overweight, perhaps this is why Fry mistook Hermes as an outer-space potato man instead of a rotund Jamaican (2ACV11). For example, when a sword cuts off part of his belly while limboing (BBS) and a High-Powered X-Ray is fired at him (6ACV05), he realizes that he is not, as he presumed, big-boned - he's just fat. When he asks Amy to switches minds (6ACV10), she says she'll destroy his body too (already having made Leela's obese), he solemnly replies, "three decades of the munchies already beat you to it". Amy, however, helped him lose a lot of weight, by losing her appetite after seeing Leela and Fry make out in the bodies of the Professor and Zoidberg, respectively.

Trivia

 * Apparently Hermes has head lice. Probably due to how dreadlocks are made, and near impossible to wash.
 * Age is revealed in ""Bender Breaks Out" (US#020)", when he dies in an alternate timeline.
 * In Cornwood, a universe created from Bender's imagination, Hermes counterpart is a hermaphroditic centaur.
 * In "Proposition Infinity", Hermes was coming down with Circusitis.
 * Has tasted toxic waste, that he claimed tasted like delicious fig pudding, but had a distinct after taste of toxic waste.

Catchphrases and running gags
Hermes' basic catchphrase is "Sweet [something] of [some place]!" (the 'something' and the 'some place' usually rhyme)

Variations include the following:
 * Sweet llamas of the !
 * Sweet lion of !
 * Sweet three-toed sloth of ice planet !
 * Sweet bongo of the !
 * Sweet Yeti of the ! She's gone crazy-eddy in the heady!
 * Sweet guinea pig of !
 * Sweet gorilla of !
 * Sweet manatee of !
 * Sweet giant anteater of !
 * Sweet squid of !
 * Sweet sacred boa of Western and Eastern !
 * Sweet honeybee of infinity!
 * Cursed bacteria of !
 * Great cow of !
 * Sweet lamprey of !
 * S-s-s-s-s-sweet something of... some place.
 * Sweet coincidence of !
 * Sweet topography of cosmology!
 * Sweet dodo of !
 * Sweet tornadoes of !
 * Sweet File-not-found of !
 * Sweet Robot Swan of.
 * Sweet candelabra of, LaBarbara!

A recurring joke involves Hermes about to eat a manwich, until it is stolen by Bender or Zoidberg, at which point Hermes cries "My Manwich!" (His son Dwight also has the same habit.)

Hermes usually refers to LaBarbara Conrad as "wife", supporting his bureaucratic nature by referring to her by title.

Hermes sometimes mentions green snakes and sugar canes including:
 * Our electricity bill is climbing faster than a green snake up a sugar cane!
 * I'm hungrier than a green snake in a sugar cane field.
 * Fry, no! The pressure will crush you like a green snake under a sugar cane truck!
 * That's flatter than a green snake under a sugar cane truck.

Another running gag is that he shows hatred to Zoidberg for no real reason at bizarre times. For example, after witnessing a temporarily blind Leela destroying the ceiling of Planet Express, Hermes turned to Zoidberg and said "That's coming out of your pay!", which brought Zoidberg to tears. Also, when Fry suggested Zoidberg had a parasite, Hermes followed up with "Maybe he is a parasite!". Plus in the episode "The Deep South" when the Planet Express Ship is under water, Hermies made a suggestion to eat Dr. Zoidberg. However he secretly thinks that Zoidberg is "pathetic but lovable".

Hermes has been shown nude more times than any other character in the series.

Appearances
While Hermes appears in most episodes, films and comics, these categories may be of interest:


 * A plots focusing on Hermes
 * B plots focusing on Hermes
 * The Conrads