Total pages in book: 66
Estimated words: 62262 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 311(@200wpm)___ 249(@250wpm)___ 208(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62262 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 311(@200wpm)___ 249(@250wpm)___ 208(@300wpm)
In the meantime, they’d given me an honest-to-god pager, like it was 1985, which would go off three or four times a day. A typical message would tell me to report to Margaret in accounting. When I got there, a group of sixty-year-old ladies would gather around and ogle me while I replaced the bottle in the water cooler, or moved file boxes, or something equally vital. I overheard them calling me Thor behind my back. That figured, since I was a big guy with a muscular build and shoulder-length, dark blond hair. I was starting to wonder if my “unique skill set” was serving as eye candy for thirsty office workers.
When I wasn’t on one of those scintillating assignments or my daily fact-finding missions, I spent my time in the seventh-floor breakroom. This was the best of all the breakrooms, because the coffee tasted like sewer water, there was no refrigerator, and the microwave was broken. As a result, just about everyone who worked on the seventh floor used the break room on six, which meant I could put my feet up, eat snacks, and play games on my phone with few interruptions. It actually would have been a pretty sweet job, except for that whole working for the evil empire thing.
On this particular Monday, I’d just fetched myself a cup of coffee from the sixth floor and settled into my “office” when the pager went off. The message said: Report to HR.
I sat up so quickly that I almost spilled my drink all over my favorite Hawaiian shirt. Had someone noticed me poking around someplace I didn’t belong? Was I getting canned, or worse?
That was pure paranoia, though. If I was being fired or arrested, a guard would have come to get me, instead of letting me roam around unsupervised.
When I got to HR, I approached a guy in the first cubicle I came to and announced, “Sam Miller, reporting to human resources as requested.”
He’d been eating yogurt, and he made sure I knew he was annoyed at the interruption by sighing dramatically. Then he typed something into his computer by hunting and pecking with one index finger. I could practically feel myself aging as he moved at the pace of a geriatric sloth. After way too much time spent typing maybe three words and squinting at his screen, he directed me to another guy in an identical cubicle five feet away.
Guy number two, who was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a clip-on tie, told me to take a seat. I perched on the uncomfortable wooden chair beside his desk while he made the first guy look like a speed typist. I’d never thought of myself as a particularly impatient person, but this shit would push anyone over the edge.
After he told me to hand over my lanyard, he proceeded to closely inspect my employee ID. This took way longer than it should have. All it contained was SPAM’s logo, a photo, and four words—my name and job title. Finally, he ran it through a card reader on his desk, which began slowly printing a receipt.
But no, it couldn’t be that easy. The words on the receipt turned from black to red, which meant the ink was running out. When he left to get a new ink cartridge, I screamed soundlessly and pantomimed repeatedly whacking my forehead against his desk. This alarmed a woman with helmet hair in a shade of red that didn’t occur in nature. She paused to stare at me, and when I smiled at her, she darted down the aisle between the endless rows of cubicles.
Eventually, clip-on guy returned, replaced the ink cartridge, and printed another receipt. This took approximately elevendy billion hours. When he plucked my ID off the lanyard, I wondered if I was getting fired after all. But he produced a new ID card from an envelope on his desk, ran it through the card reader, and handed it to me with my lanyard. It had the same information and the same goofy photo they’d taken of me on my first day, but the stripe along the bottom of the badge was orange instead of yellow.
He finished by using a minor superpower to pick up a date stamp and press it to a form. Since he could have just as easily done that by hand, it was all I could do not to roll my eyes. I hated it when people felt the need to flaunt their powers.
“Your security clearance has been upgraded from level six to level seven, Mr. Miller.” His tone was perfectly flat, as if this was the least interesting thing he could possibly be doing right now. “Report to Anderson Chen downstairs in the archives. He has an assignment for you.”
Even though I was giddy with excitement at gaining access to the basement and its mysterious archives, I tried not to let it show… much. I did fire off a pair of finger guns while flashing him a huge smile and saying, “You got it, my dude.” But that couldn’t be helped.