“I used to be someone else.”
“Oh yeah, who was that then? Someone famous was it? Don’t tell me, let me guess. I bet you was Elvis. That’s it, you was Elvis Presley. You wait ’til I tell my missus I’ve been chatting with Elvis, that’ll make her giggle.”
“No, seriously, before I came here I had a name and a life.”
Continue reading “Number 135476 “
They gave me a certificate last Tuesday. Employee of the Month, February, laminated and everything. Karen from HR stood in the break room and started clapping, so everyone else did too, because that’s what you do when Karen starts clapping. The certificate has my name spelled wrong. Darryn instead of Darren. I didn’t like to say anything.
Continue reading “Productivity”
I arrived at the office on Wednesday to find that K. was gone.
This was not, in itself, unusual. People left. The department had procedures for this, forms which existed precisely because such things happened, and the existence of the forms suggested that they happened with sufficient regularity to warrant them. I found this reassuring.
Continue reading “The Reassignment”
I want to be clear that we followed procedure throughout. We always follow procedure. That is, in fact, the point of procedure.
She came in on a Tuesday. They nearly always come in on a Tuesday, I don’t know why that is, I’ve never looked into it. She had her form already filled out, which some of them do, and she slid it across the desk the way people do when they want you to know they’ve thought about it. When they want you to know they don’t need help from a wish processing clerk.
Continue reading “The Wish Granting Office”
Nobody booked Room 7. That was the first thing Diane noticed when she took over the facilities spreadsheet from Paul, who had left without notice and without explanation, which itself nobody seemed to find strange.
The room sat between the stationery cupboard and the second-floor toilets. It had a number, a handle, a frosted panel through which light was always visible. Not the cold flicker of fluorescents. Something warmer. Something that occasionally shifted, very slightly, the way light shifts when a body moves through it.
Continue reading “The Room That Is Always in Use”
The AI Grandad 