"Fuck! Fuck! Heal me!" Someone shouts loudly.
Her ears twitch under the beanie and she turns to the source of the noise. He's several cubicles down and out of sight. She hears someone grumble a vulgar response and then the same man shouts a loud:
"Thanks, Fucker."
She grimaces and the man guiding her avoids her eye steadily, moving with slightly more stilted motions ahead.
She chews the inside of her cheek and keeps her thoughts to herself. It's just her first day at work. She doesn't want to get in trouble for ratting out her colleagues. All of them seem to be engrossed in the same game. She scowls at the man guiding her to her cubicle and wonders if he's into the same game. If she was a stranger coming down to visit, she would've thought they were some sort of Beta testing center for new games and these people were looking for bugs in the games. But no, they're supposed to be her colleagues.
Maybe their shifts haven't started? Or they could just be sharing the same work space and these aren't actually her co-workers.
She keeps her thoughts to herself as he points her to her desk. It's like all the other desks, except this one hasn't been personalized and there aren't empty cups and takeout containers in her work space. It's clear that the computers they've been equipped with are top of the line but based on the job description, she doesn't think it's necessary at all. It's all very curious.
"You should've been emailed the instructions?" Mike asks, jolting her out of her thoughts.
She nods curtly.
"Do you need help understanding anything?" At her brisk shake of her head, he says, "Right. Then, let me know if you need any help."
And she's left alone. The cubicle she is assigned couldn't have been better if she had chosen it on her own. It's situated in the very end of the room in a corner with a bird's eye view of the entire room, making it so that she would be able to tell if anyone's coming her way. The moment she's logged into her account and put her headphones on, the backlog of trouble tickets pop up onto her screen and she knows she's in for a long day of work.
Chapter Two: First Contact
Her suspicion her first day of work was entirely accurate. Her colleagues are more interested in their game than getting work done and it shows. That's not to say they don't do any work because they wouldn't have been able to keep their jobs otherwise, but they're specific in which jobs they accept. They answer to trouble tickets from the higher ups, but the tickets from employees and assistants, people who can't get them in trouble? Those tickets gets pushed to the back of the pile.
She has a ticket that is dated from three years ago and upon further research, the employee hasn't been working in their company for two years, and yet the system had never updated that either.
She sorts the tickets into problems that she can fix from behind the desk and those that require her to emerge from the basement and actually show up physically. There are enough troubleshooting for her to do behind the desk that sh
e would be busy with it for years before having to go fix anything upstairs and thankfully, she's not completely bereft of hardworking colleagues either. James is more than ready to leave the basement to fix up whatever problem the people upstairs have with their computers, and Jenny doesn't mind the trip either.
Most of her colleagues confounds her. While she knows now that not everyone is playing games on their computers, it's also clear that most of they aren't doing the work they should be doing either. The computers down here are top-notch but the systems upstairs are outdated. She isn't skilled enough about computer systems to know how to fix things but she knows the men here are fully capable. Her work is pretty much automated with a list of instructions on what to do with each troubleshoot number that the computer spits out.
She suspects that's why they couldn't be bothered with updated the system upstairs. Right now, all she needs to do is get the person on the other end of the phone to read out the error code, flip to the page in her book on which buttons to press on her computer and the problem goes away. On the rare occasions that it doesn't, either James or Jenny would go upstairs to check.
They could make the system run smoother, given the time and resources. They just couldn't be bothered to do it.
The problem is the man in charge, Mike Tohemsky. Mike has no idea what he's doing and he's hired a bunch of what appears to be his college frat brothers who has grown older in age, but not in mentality.
The people who do actual work tend to burn out rather quickly for good reason. There should be fifteen people working together, but right now, only five of them are doing it. James, Jenny, Lilith, April, and Omi.
James has stayed there longest. "Two years," he tells her when she asks how long he's been here. "I'm handing in my resignation tomorrow."
She looks up at him in shock.
"I'm handing mine in next week," Jenny murmurs without looking up from her sandwich.
A part of her wants to ask what's going to happen to the rest of them when they leave? Jenny and James do the bulk of the work around here and she's nowhere near qualified enough to handle.
"You don't have to look so devastated. Omi is still going to be here," James say, catching her expression.
She looks down quickly. She doesn't like Omi. He lingers near her cubicle even though he should be busy doing his own work and he likes to pat her head like they're friends even though they're not.
"Couldn't we talk to HR?" Lilith pipes up after looking around to make sure there's nobody to overhear them. She's six months April's senior and the stress of the job is beginning to show in her darkening eyebags.
"How do you think Mike got the job? Head of HR is his mom."
That makes too much sense. April sighs into her own tuna sandwich and tries to ignore the heavy feeling in her chest. James and Jenny are the first friends she's ever made and she'll be sad to see them go. It'll be hard to adjust not having them around during lunch.