Well that just sucked. If the highlight of your artshow is the response of Michael Gary Scott, and you're thankful for that, it officially means you've hit rock bottom. Between being upstaged by all the rest of her classmates, the critical panning of her work by Gil, and no one else from work coming out to support her (especially Jim), things were looking pretty down for Pam.

When Michael is the only saving grace of your night, you know things suck the big suck.

She couldn't even doodle anymore to while away the hours. The feel of taking pencil to paper was now almost nauseating. And to top it all off, Dwight was standing there, looking at the wall, scrutinizing her watercolor of the office park that Michael had bought and hung up for everyone to see. That was just great. Now, thanks to Michael's act of kindness, everyone would get to see what a colossal failure she was, and criticize her every day - until they finally got bored with it.

After two minutes of careful study, Dwight approached her desk. She braced herself for the condemnation that was destined to come.

"I hear that Oscar's homosexual boyfriend, Gil, tore a strip out of you last night," he said, in that annoyingly overprecise way of his. She nodded, halfheartedly.

"I don't know much about art," Dwight admitted, in one of the rare occurances where he would confess to such a shortcoming. If Pam had been in a better mood, she would have squirrelled that declaration away for possible blackmail purposes. Instead, she just willed him to finish what he was saying so she could just go back to her Sudoku. "Your painting looks fine to me, however, as I said, my art knowledge is limited. If you need analysis of beet farming, hunting, paintball, ninjitsu, muscle cars, or Battlestar Galactica, then I am the authority. For art matters, I would tend to defer to Gil's judgement, his gayitude providing him with an innate deep understanding of fashion, hairstyling, choreography, purse-dogs, and fine art."

That was neither the strangest nor most offensive thing that Dwight had ever said. She stared at him, blankly.

"It's a good thing you're not PMSing right now, because I can tell this has got you down. But I think I can improve your mood. So maybe you're not cut out to be a famous painter. So what? October, 1907: a young Austrian man was barred entrance from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Like yourself, he too had dreams of becoming an artist. But they said his test was 'unsatisfactory'. That his drawings incontrovertibly showed his unfitness for painting. They said his pictures were stilted and lifeless, and the human figures he sometimes added to his landscapes were so bad as to remind one of a comic strip. They called him pitiful. He tried and failed and this left him destitute on the streets of Vienna."

Pam rubbed her aching brain. "Dwight, do you have a point?"

"I'm getting to the point. Have patience, for I'm trying to impart wisdom on you. The point is, that even after your dreams have been crushed, you can still go on to bigger and better things. For that young Austrian vagrant grew up to be Adolf Hitler. Well, he was Adolf Hitler at the time and had been since he was a little boy, but he clawed his way up from the gutter to become leader of the Third Reich. So, you see, there's nothing stopping you from carving your own empire out from your ungrateful neighbour states."

"Dwight, he was the bad guy of World War Two."

"Well, to you, maybe..." Dwight scoffed, indignant at Pam's little outburst against Hitler. "Remember what I've told you," he said, and walked back to his desk.

"I think Dwight just told me to annex Canada..." she mumbled to herself, letting her mind wander to the possibilities...

***

Spring 2045. Her empire crumbling, her forces defeated on the battlefield, Füher Beesly commits suicide with a gunshot to her head inside her underground bunker as Russian troops storm the capital. The reign of history's bloodiest tyrant has come to an end...

***

"Nah," Pam shook her head. "Not very likely."