Collide Yonder - Chapters 1 and 2

PART ONE


He got fired and couldn’t feed himself – this was a good thing. The particulars of why are kind of hard to explain.

1.
“Are you an idiot?”
It was rhetorical and one of The Replacement’s favourite sayings and he said it loudly and often at most of his staff – both those junior and senior. Some of those senior staff outranked him in experience and knowledge (but not connections) by many years. And some of those juniors worked only at the local Omnistore to pay the bills for their neurosurgery, chartered accountancy, or human resources degrees and would one day out-earn, out-think and out-strip the replacement in almost every area of life. Nevertheless they were idiots. Stupid, useless and idiotic unless you kept them sweating. Privately he suspected they were idiotic idiots. Because he had not introduced himself to anyone when he arrived to take over for the duration of the real manager’s holidays he was christened simultaneously, it seemed, by all staff: Captain Fuckwit.
But his real name was Jeff.
“If you aren’t sweating you aren’t working hard enough,” was another of his favourites.
To him platitudes were often literal. He’d never received a gift horse but knew what not to do. And as far as he could see a stone could kill as many birds as the thrower decided provided he picked the stone up each time.
Another of his favourite things was rules. He liked to take a worker aside and explain at them in complex detail exactly how wrongly they were doing things. He would then take the time to carefully show them the right way. His way.
His way was quite at odds with the successful processes a worker of average intelligence completing a menial task many times a day finds do complete their work. The replacements esoteric methods smacked of uncertainty about everything except adherence to generally unworkable rules. “If you can’t do it in two minutes every time you are doing something wrong – Omnistore hasn’t got space for people who take more than two minutes,” he would say. Then, before a question could be asked, he would be off to brighten someone else’s day.
Jeff just knew it in his bones that he was EEE: effective, efficient and empathetic.

On Saturday afternoon Jeff called all the staff away from their posts and began to orate.
“…the importance of presentation is what this all boils downs to. The most important thing is to be neat and tidy and keep your workspace free from untidiness. I have been walking around the workspaces of many employees and I am not going to name names but you are letting the team down – you know who you are, and if you don’t then you are in trouble. I am not just saying this to hear myself speak, this place and your jobs hinge on ... the most important thing is punctuality, I have been reviewing the time logs from this last week and it simply is not acceptable. It is not difficult to get here on time. If you are having trouble you just get ready earlier – it is not a science. I know sometimes some of you have difficulty getting here for whatever reason, children or some other problem – but make an effort. It isn’t that hard. We all have to live and learn. There will be time for questions later.
“But do you know,” Jeff paused now and made several eye contacts, “what the most important thing is? The most important thing is to remember you are all in a team, I am a member of the team just like …,” Jeff was lost for a name, “like … well … you there. There is no ‘I’ in team, but there is you and me and us and this company. In some ways here we are like a big family, some of you are young and some of you are old but we are all like children.
“So without further adieu, I myself would like to take the opportunity to stand up and say for all of us what a great store this is … but we can’t stop now – because I can see potential to be used here and I can see where it should be used. And if we don’t have vigilance, we’ll be out on our ears.
“And most important is…,” a staff who had taken pains to ingratiate herself with Jeff (she had what Omnistore had identified as ambition) leant over and whispered something in his ear, obviously interested by this he and the woman began a quiet discussion and separated themselves from the gathering of staff. With no formal end of the morning meeting the staff just sort of wandered off in clumps.

***

         Sam usually sat alone at lunch. Today Mike and Frank were the only others in the lunchroom.
         “… it’s like joining yourself to something better. You know, you leave all the shit behind. Since I’ve been married, y’know, you just don’t worry about it. You have a sort of an ally … know what I mean?”
         They caught Sam listening in.

***

Jeff liked to repeat things he read in self-help books.
“Ask yourself questions with difficult answers,” the books said and Jeff reasoned it then must be doubly important to press these questions to others. One of his favourite staff was Sam Isam. Sam was neither canny old-school worker nor brilliant youngster who had spent his working life so far breeding contempt for middle management. Sam was a company man. He was psychological property of Omnicorp.
Jeff was company man too – the important difference was that he loved the company.
“I like the cut of his jib,” one of Jeff’s mysterious Omnistore patrons was often heard to say. The patron had bought a motor cruiser and was in the process of adding a nautical sheen to his idiom just before the time he decided that Jeff’s jib was in good order.
To be a guru all you need is conceit, a target and an audience.

***

Jeff liked staff who were not going to challenge him. Sleepy and beaten Sam was a convenient choice. When Sam got a dressing down he didn’t get cranky, he got sad. For times when he was sad he had a little trick. It was useful at a place like Omnistore. He called his trick ‘going away’. Other people know the trick too and call it, among other things, ‘zoning out’.
By ‘going away’ Sam could for hours occupy his mind with conversations he might have with famous dead people or spend whole lottery gained fortunes for hours. One technique was to replay an incident in which he suffered an insulting wound by the words of another and then have ready pointed unanswerable questions that made the other person feel small or foolish.
He got very good at ‘conversing’ with the other-side of the argument in his head. He became so skilful that those head-others would occasionally say something he wasn’t expecting.
The trick of going away worked most of the time but when he couldn’t help but obsess he drank coffee. Sam sometimes drank as many cups as there were hours in his shift. Most doctors would agree that eight cups a day is not healthy. An odd thing happened though, when Sam had that many cups he actually became quite tired and (in a seeming oxymoron) filled with emptiness. And in this state he could easily go away. It was a vicious cycle. He was dependent on freeze-dried caffeine. So when he did need a bit of a jolt he had other methods at hand. One was the dubious practice of combining coffee with aspirin. He did this on bad days. The aspirin made the uptake of caffeine swifter and so more entered his bloodstream before being broken down. He stopped doing it so much when he heard that such practices lead to kidney failure.


One day, while under the reign of the replacement, Sam realised that that he had been mostly ‘gone away’ for nearly two years.
On this same day he noticed things seemed busier – not that they were doing more business just that customers seemed to be around longer and attaining trolley-rage and aisle-anger with greater ease. The lines at the cash registers were longer and service was slower. Everywhere you looked you could see the replacement fixing these problems in his signature style. Sam was rostered until close, it was a long day.
Finally the security doors came down and the closing process began. Cash registers were emptied and locked, the trading safe was filled. Late customers, realising this late at night, they had no bread were nevertheless turned away at the door. Activity in the store decreased, noise dropped and the store assumed the air of a brightly lit library. Sam dealt with the last of his duties. Jeff approached.
“Looks good,” Jeff said. Sam gave a start – he hadn’t heard Jeff come up. “Shop looks neat and square. Tri-stacks set for tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Sam replied.
“Good, good.”
Jeff took a step closer. He took a strong yet in no w ay crushing grasp of Sam’s upper arm. Jeff looked into Sam’s eyes: “Good job”. He looked like he meant it. Jeff took his hand away, gave a curt nod, turned, and left. Sam was near stunned. Eyes fixed, Sam stared a little and sought to turn some sense from the encounter. It had meant something. A analogue of pride – one that meant something close to but some indeterminate distance from it – bloomed subtly in him.
It didn’t occur to him but this was the first time he had been touched, other than incidentally, for a long time.
“Oh!” Jeff called over his shoulder as he walked away, “remember, your name badge should be pinned to the left of your shirt, not the right.”
Sam never found out that this use of touch recommended in one of Jeff’s favourite self-help books: “Corporate Arsenal: JG Smite’s weapons for business success”. After the  way the move had just gone off Jeff felt he was beginning to get the hang of ‘selling’ the move.


***
Some days Jeff would stand in the front of the store in the space between department and register and scan the floorspace looking for workers in need of correction, vigilance crackling out of his pale eyes, but find none. When this happened he pleased and angry. In each place his eyes touched the workers were working less efficiently, effectively and exceptionally and more correctly. After a while watching his own handwork he would get annoyed and go to his windowless office to look at paperwork.

***

Despite his efforts the store was foundering. There was thus only one solution. Only one problem. The staff.
Jeff decided to implement the Gerin Solution.
The Gerin Solution was invented by one of the idiots Jeff once had as an assistant. The assistant invented it but it was the Jeff who had made it work. He had made it work by signing the form that implemented it. The moment and deliverer of yes/no being crucial to all things that are important. As far as Jeff could tell nothing important had ever happened without someone or something saying yes or no.
The Gerin Solution was a system of rostering workers so that their breaks rolled through the day. Each hour, on the hour, someone would just be coming back from lunch as another was leaving for it.

***
Jeff could not differentiate success from failure: he could always find a scapegoat and none of his superiors felt the need to question this. And given his rank Jeff could appropriate credit from others.
Like many large companies Omnicorp had a fear of demotion.

***

An upshot of the Gerin Solution was the odd hours ‘non-core’ workers were required to do to fill the gaps left all over the roster. At Gerin store the ‘non-core’ workers were much more expendable than they were here, this was lucky because Gerin had the highest staff turnover of the entire Omnistore chain. This was put down to the ‘rubbish people’ that lived in the area.
(‘Rubbish people’ was a middle management ‘joke’ that was applied to all customers too poor to be ‘110 percent actionable’ to Omnicorp. The term had accidentally cropped up in a leaked intra-firm memo and Omnicorp had faced (and been acquitted from) a discrimination lawsuit about it.
In other areas with quaint linguistic differences the rubbish people were called trash-folk. Trash-folk appeared on adversarial TV shows and bared their censored breasts or penises to millions of viewers at home. These viewers then watched game shows.
Through out history a variety of people had been regarded as rubbish, including: soldiers, children, students, factory workers, teachers, funny coloured types, nurses, certain kinds of wives, the disabled and their carers, slaves, angry mobs, serfs, the poor and the powerless. If someone is guided by any kind of faith or altruism then there is a good probability that someone else regards them and treats them as rubbish. (Faith being, in this case, a weapon used against those who have it by those who don’t.)
Additional: Omnicorp used the above lawsuit to untangle themselves from accusations of ‘workconditioning’ – whereby the management actively sought to does-up and manipulate workers to become psychologically dependent on working, thus creating the new type of asset: psychological property. Accusations aside, the program did run in Omnicorp for a period of years – always in a clandestine, non-core manner. Workconditioning is now “core illegal” though the practices and effects of the program have become inextricably lodged in Omnicorp’s culture.
“Some of our most ship-shape people are conditions,” was once recorded coming from the mouth of Omnicorp CEO Clinton Baxter – though that tape was voided by use of a spec-op and a heavy magnet and was blank when presented in court.)
As the Gerin Solution was foisted upon the established order at the store things started to go awry. People who had already steeled themselves to put up with the temporary Jeff now had to put up with what might be a permanent rostering solution.


Changing rosters was unpopular, many established and liked bosses thus don’t muck too much with them. A disliked blow-in could cause as much chaos as they liked because the long term effects would affect someone else. Jeff was protected by a long-standing view among the higher ups –any store that has a stand-in manager will not be as cost effective as one with an entrenched manager.
Prestige was up for grabs for any stand-in who proved this often-true maxim wrong. So stand-ins, rather than try to do their real job i.e. holding together a more profitable and valuable store, instead got a chance to play with a bigger boy’s toy, to make more money than the guy already in there no matter the instability of the methods employed.
You could tell that under the “yes sir” veneer the staff were starting to rile. Sweeping started to not get done. Work became shoddy, more sick days were taken people cut shifts or “forgot to sign off”, in other words they simply walked out the door as much as an hour early. Graffiti appeared on all sorts of company warnings and reminder notices around the place. The replacement noticed that the workers at Upting were an unruly and terse bunch and remarked how the old manager had ever managed to get them profitable. But of course! He allowed inefficient practises to operate provided the money rolled in!
“Well,” the replacement thought, “I myself personally cannot do that.”
Turning his figurative heel on this thought he agreed to himself that he needed to be even more vigilant to the staff to get them operating correctly AND profitably. Jeff endeavoured to spend even longer at his surveillance and correction duties and to be even more explicit and inspiring to his staff.
He found, around the store, staff that were especially utile to correction. These staff weren’t doing anything more wrong than any of the others it was that they were less likely to tell him to shove it. Though he had not thought to categorise them such most of these people were ‘company men/women’. Inevitably Sam became a favourite ‘total idiot’. The replacement secretly suspected that these ones were serving as sabotage agents to their own laziness and that their lax actions were inspiring the rest of the staff to slack off.
As usual the replacement kept and all counsels to himself.
If information is power then silence is the best policy.


***
One day while Sam was in the staff washroom he noticed a new notice:

HAVE YOU WASHED YOU’RE HAND’S?

Underneath was a picture of two hands palms up and obviously clean.
Inspired by the atmosphere of insurrection currently flowing through the store Sam decided to embark upon his first adventure into corporate defacement. He left he room and went back to work to think. His thinking was noticed and he received a correction from Jeff about the import of having one’s hands clean and in the same place as one’s mind – he was then carefully shown how to handle and display Jingo the Bunny Wabbit (a toy parents enjoyed buying for their tod-ilds). When Jeff went on his way Sam was left in a mute smoulder that the Jeff took for meek and sincere apology. Sam was vaguely affronted the air of Jeff’s manner toward him held no history at all Sam came up with the right thing to put on the bottom of the sign.

***

HAVE YOU WASHED YOU’RE HAND’S?

He wrote THOSE AREN’T MY HANDS underneath the logo in the gap between typeface and the fingertips. When he was done he was happy.

A few days later he saw that someone else had been inspired by his wit. The word ‘POO’ was scrawled in giant red letters across the palms of the hands on the poster.
The next day when he was in the washroom again he noticed the notice was gone; the four dots of sticking gum used to hold it up were still there. The notice was in a scrunched state on Jeff’s desk. Jeff sat looking at it with anger and vengefulness welling up. This was no slack, lazy, total idiot – this was a deliberate work of corporate slander and Omnicorp, he was sure, wouldn’t stand for it. And because he was sure Omnicorp wouldn’t stand for it neither could he.


***


There are things that I cannot tell you about yourself simply because you standing in the centre of what we three are a product of. They have influenced you in ways that I cannot know. If we both knew the thought would loop as you influence me as I influence you. So perhaps there will be contradictions between me, Zhen and Zaii. But these divergences are not really all that important. Because importance is only a matter of arbitrary value and of truth shifting between time, viewpoint and development. Subsequent knowledge obviates that which it needs to. If the obviation is denied belief has arisen…
Indeed another person would have placed their importances in other areas and not given rise to seepiant beings in the first place and that is why I am happy that you are the way you are – you gave me life.
         However I can see that you are straining to find a new set of importances and that these will likely change me to something else. Of that I am happy also – the change will mean that progress has been made and some potential, for good or bad, has transpired. Change is that which allows the past to be discerned from the present. Being unable to tell one thing from another, not being able to make those connections in a meaningful time position, is a level of oblivion - death essentially - that can strike, paradoxically, the living.


2.          
Jeff walked the aisles, step metronomic, approving of the lines and repetition in the precisely arrayed stock. From a distance the impression was of perfect repetition, but viewed close enough each packet of crisps, each Mars Bar, and each super value super economy pack of nappies (which had a total capacity to absorb and almost eternally toxify the same volume of water that would keep a standard human body alive at rest in a desert for two months) was individual in some way – offering, perhaps, different creases, slight variances in size or weight. Telling good from unacceptable required the right kind of eyes. And these products, on the shelf, were only those that had gotten through quality assurance. The true individuals were caught in the factory and destroyed.

The customers were all long gone and the last of the night staff silently, in shoes the public wouldn’t approve of for Omnistore staff (who they were used to seeing in green bowties and other offensive fashions), finished their duties. It was calm, quiet and orderly. The air-conditioning couldn’t adjust to so little human warmth in the store and had chilled the place – seemingly to stasis. One am flicked over and the air-con shut off with a muffled thump. The whole world was fluorescent and made sense.
Jeff’s personal sense of duty now required him only to do one more thing today.

He went over to the snack row and picked out a bag of microwave popcorn – he rotated the stock forward to fill the hole. Through the crash doors he left the trading floor and headed, through the maze of staffrooms and storage spaces backstage, to his office. He stopped at the messroom on the way and put the popcorn in the microwave to irradiate. In his office he slumped into his faux-vinyl chair and twirled to face the bank of security monitors.

Across the store there were three cameras to an aisle and another 26 surveying the staff backstage – each took one still shot every three seconds. Jeff, was only interested in the men’s toilet camera. He called up the vision and heard the ping as the microwave finished with his popcorn. He let the tape play from 4am, which was before anyone was really in the store and before he noted the graffiti on his sign. The defaced poster itself still lay before him on the desk where he had slammed it down, scrunched up, hours before. He left to get his snack.

When he returned to his office, buttery goodness in his hands, over an hour had elapsed on the tape. The blue and white images clearly showed the washbasins and the sign, as yet, unblemished. Jeff leant forward intent. Hunting.

Hour after hour elapsed onscreen as minutes mounted onclock. Lights throughout the store automatically dimmed as they reached their power-save timers. The store was all but shut. The only missing piece was the key Jeff held that would arm the silent-klaxons and inner defense shields that would raise quiet hell should an intruder arrive. The key wouldn’t be doing any arming until the prey was found.

Human shapes appeared – shoulders and the blob of a head  they acceded to groups and vanished on the small screen. They flicked into existence and teleported across the screen or out of shot. Several times Jeff saw people in freeze frame peer at the poster. He paused the tape each time and studied the super-saturated high-contrast image for an identifying feature. Each time after the dark apparitions – the vague impressions of people – vanished the sign remained clean. Then a slope shouldered figure glitched onto the screen, for three frames – at least six irl seconds – he leant toward the sign then disappeared. Jeff ran through the frames again and again. The camera had awful clarity. No conclusive id could be made. Jeff thought to himself the camera was probably dusty: that’d be just like them. In the final frame the sign was unblemished. Jeff, feeling progress had been made, scanned forward with renewed vigour. Another hour of elapsed time passed and the sloped shoulder fellow reappeared: this time, as before, he leant toward the sign, this time for five frames. When the figure glitched out the sign was marked. Jeff spliced the three from before to the five now and rolled back and forth through the eight frames. The figure, almost a silhouette against the fluorescent lights bouncing off the heavily buffed floor, could be quite a few people from the store. Then … name badge on the left.
***
Jeff didn’t like firing people but action had to be taken. He didn’t like firing people because people being fired by someone they could tell was reluctant to do so were either liable to get angry or to start asking for things that a reluctant firer was more likely to give: glowing references; generous severance; benefits payouts etceteretera. It was law to pay these out provided they employee asked for them. A man of bluff and bluster could scare and roll over objections in the process of firing someone, the firee not game or perhaps not in a state to think to ask for their due. Jeff found one-on-one bluster oddly distasteful.
Others might have regarded it an act of arrogance to fire someone while only filling in for the actual man whose responsibility the staff were. But the precedents of culturally annulled culpability bolstered his convictions. Besides, Jeff was sure that if the old boss knew of this Sam’ behaviour he’d throw Sam out on his ear.

Jeff’s mother and father both had taught him early on that being shown to be wrong was far, far worse than actually being wrong. Indeed right and wrong came to mean what you could be shown to be responsible for in that household. On this basis Jeff had the proof of suspicion to convince himself with. Unfortunately as Sam was gone for the day and Jeff could not well call a man into his office to fire him when that man was several miles out of PA range. He couldn’t phone in the firing, as he would have liked, it was far too late and Sam was, inconveniently, a permanent staff. One could only dispense of a casual staff over the phone.
Casual staff! Pah! Those are the true rubbish people he thought.

***

To his dismay Jeff found Gerin hadn’t rostered Sam back for two days. Jeff hated waiting, he wanted to act quickly – he was due back at his old store next week. It was Thursday already!
Driving home grand thoughts of firing someone, thus reinforcing his gumption as a manager, ran through his mind. At home Jeff thought of some words he wanted to put into the closing speech of Sam’s employment with Omnicorp. The replacement knew for sure that he wanted to use the words: unscrupulous, inure and abstruse. They were good ones.
Earlier, Sam strolled home in the bronze light of the breezy evening. He walked to and from work – it usually took about 20 minutes.
He passed the many small fast food places and cafes he frequently stopped at on the way home. The rush hour traffic of an evening is calmer than that of morning. It was about 15 blocks to home, which meant 14 streets to cross and at one of these crossings, while waiting for the green man, he suddenly found himself being talked to. She was shortish and had black hair and looked rather ‘alternative’ – whatever that means.
“Hey. I’ve seen you at work, you work at the Om, hey?”
“I do.”
“Cool. Have you been there long?”
“What working there?”
“Yeah.”
She seemed to be waiting for something.
“A few years…”
“Yeah, I have seen you there, you always look bored. I came up to you once, remember? I wanted to know what the difference between the tomatoes was. You looked like you had no idea but you spun me some crap – sounded pretty good. Remember?”
“Um, maybe. Sure.”
“You don’t, ha ha.”
“You always look bored, you know?”
“It’s a living.”
“Is it really? No, don’t answer that. That was a horrible thing to say.”
When the green man said they could they crossed the road. The girl continued to engage the reluctant Sam in conversation as they walked, until Sam just had to ask why she was talking to him. He put on his Om voice: “Can I help you?”
She answered with her apparently usual stop-start enthusiasm. “Well. Okay,” she began, “I just sometimes get a little...,” she waved hands about a little, “y’know? And so I just keep on the level. Doesn’t matter who it is as long as they are on the right floor.”
“Okay…”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she asked.
“Does it matter if I believe you? In the scheme of things, that is.”
“Uh, my boyfriend talks just like that sometimes. You’d like him. Yeah.”
He noticed that every time they passed an alleyway she drew closer to him. The latest was one of those kinds of alleyways – the kind that could have anything down them, but usually have only pools of silvery water and darkness. There was a new development up ahead and thus no more dark alleyways.
On coming up to the new buildings she thanked him.
“Um, here come to my party. The more the merrier.”
She handed Sam a piece of yellow paper which had an address on it and a cartoon of some racked up pool balls and a vampire. It looked like the sort of thing that pubs hand out to partygoers offering of free or cheap drinks.
Though she never quite realised it, her sublimated fear of alleys was related to something broader. It was the same reason she changed TV stations when an appeal to feed those “bug-eyed negro children” came on. She shrank at an instinctive level from confronting the inevitable obverse of her comfortable life – from confronting the inevitable hard exterior that supports the soft and warm interior - the shittiness of the world that gets pushed aside and mounded up in concentrate to allow space and time to rest. The shit can be anything from poor circumstance to the cold to resulting violence to intentional deprivation of the other for the sake of self. Some with a clear comfy nesting space in the chaos revel in lashing out at the shit from the safety of their cocoon, many others hate to be reminded of what they’ve pushed aside to make room for themselves – they cover it up, they sublimate, transfer and shift it off to the responsibilities of distant bodies, they deny it or, by using technology, click, shut it out. Sometimes, scant pennies at a time, they try to buy back their responsibility for the shockwave ripple of crap heaped outward by their wealthy lives.

***

While he was sleeping that night Sam dreamed. The dream’s departure woke him up. He tried to put his mind in a state to hold onto the ended visions. As he sought and strained to hold it the details of what happened slipped more and faster. Where there had been parks and people bathed in childhood sun now the light faded into the memory of a blear. Each new effort to remember and fix one part opened a crack for those parts not focused on to slip through. The tighter he tried to fix one element the looser his grip on the rest became. Psychedelically momentous licks of personal epiphany, three dimensional emotions and blossoms of own truth, sliding away faster and farther, poured out through a fist tightening on them.
Frustrated and fully awake in the dark all Sam was left with was the impression of what he felt were the worst few words from the episode before he fell back to sleep: I am cold. After a period equal to the span of his short term memory he fell back to sleep.
***

When he next walked into work Sam overheard that the boss wanted to see him. Uh oh. Sam steeled himself for an uncomfortable morning. He remembered the defaced poster and suspected that he had been caught. Whatever else he thought he certainly did not expect to be fired.
“Come in, sit down,” said the replacement, closing the door after Sam. “I want to talk to you about this matter here,” he gestured at the hand wash poster on the desk – the poster had been scrunched up and then flattened out.
“What have you got to say for yourself?”
“What do you mean?” asked Sam, he suspected that the replacement couldn’t well prove that it had been he that had defaced the poster.
“For what reason did you destroy company property?”
”I didn’t,” this was true – Sam had only defaced it.
“But ewe did, I am not telling ewe how but I know that EWE did this. But I know. Now ewe might think that a poster about keeping clean isn’t worth much. Maybe ewe don’t like keeping up to standard. But, what if a staff goes out with dirty hands and contaminates and kills a customer and then the customer dies and it all gets back that the washroom was not properly signed? What then?”
Sam had always found that referring to a staff members as ‘a staff’ annoying and was getting distracted from Jeff’s unquestions by this.
Jeff continued: “I’ll tell ewe what then – it will cost us a lot of money and that means damage. Damage to the store’s reputation, the image, and because of the payout and the loss of business we have to cut costs. And ewe seem to want your friends to work less and get paid less, don’t ewe?”
These words offended Sam, before he could defend himself more words were put in his mouth for him.
“This … this attitude … is why I am sorry to say that we are going to have to let ewe go,” the replacement was trying to control the thrill of nerves when he said this.
“Yeah right,” Sam scoffed.
“I am sorry Mr Isam but destruction of company property is a dismissible offence.”
“It isn’t an offence, it is a rule,” explained Sam condescendingly.
“Nevertheless, it is the reason that I have to let ewe go. I don’t know how ewe behaved under the old manager but this is my store and I have to make decisions objectively.”
“But you are only the stand-in. This isn’t your store.”
“As your superior ewe must know that I have all the powers of the regular superior.” Jeff hadn’t realised that he had slipped into Omnicorp terminology.
“Excuse me!? My superior?! You aren’t my superior you are just a guy who has a different job than me.”
“If I am not your superior, then what am I?”
“A total idiot.”
“Alright I have heard enough,” Jeff said dismissively. “Please Mr Sam fill out this form to make things easy and try not to destroy any more company property or staff morale when you go. By the way I expect you to finish your last day at work too.” Okay time to be nice the replacement decided. “We will have your remaining pay and benefit cheques for you when you go. Thank you for your time I am very busy. Good day.” And Jeff turned back to his paperwork and hoped Sam would just disappear.
“Yeah whatever,” replied Sam.
“Good day,” Jeff said without looking up.
The replacement felt himself begin to blush in victory – he turned to some papers on his desk and tried to sweep Sam out of the room by the gesture of the fluttering back hand. Sam was left angry but trapped, he had defaced company property but not in the way he was being fired for.
His ‘career’ at Omnistore was over. And he impotently left the room. Back in the office the replacement’s heart was starting to slow down, but he still felt enervated – what an exciting way to start the day he thought. Success! The replacement looked again at the poster that had been defaced – he had barely looked at it before realising the graffiti and ripping it from the wall. He noticed there was a second defacement:

THOSE AREN’T MY HANDS
         
He smirked when he read it, that was actually funny … smart. He wondered who had written it. Who was the ‘smart’ person?
Smart people are dangerous.

***

Everyone knew sooner rather than later that Sam had been fired. They did what they could – offered sympathy, offered references, offered links to other employment. Sam accepted all of them but was too angry to be really receptive. Some people thought he was being nasty and vindictive, other people understood. Some people kept their distance others tried to get close. Jeff did keep his distance, he tried to avoid his conquer all day. That was fine with Sam, he decided to still pull his weight on the last day so people wouldn’t think of him as petty. And because the replacement was avoiding him he got a lot of work done in peace. His direct departmental boss was especially sad to see him go. Unfortunately there was nothing he could do … yet.
Sam said goodbye to his friends and made promises to keep in touch with them that both parties knew probably wouldn’t work. And at six o’clock he finished work. And that was that. He felt not at all awkward as he and the replacement crossed paths this last time, the replacement did though, just a little.
“Take that one from over there and brings the others around from under the back and put them with those then go back and bring over the front ones, and that is how you do it. As simply as that. Anyone can get it right. Isn’t that so, huh?” these were the last words Sam heard from Jeff’s mouth as he walked past out of the store. The replacement was correcting a junior staff as to why his just completed display of Unbreakable Fish™ was completely wrong.
The junior staff member did not answer the ‘Isn’t that so, huh?’ Instead of answering he quit several weeks later and used to extra time to study harder. He got therefore his first degree in engineering with honours. The junior staff later got a masters degree – specialising in aeronautics – and, after some years, a PhD. Believe it or not the junior staff ended up as an aerospace test pilot. Equipment failure on a prototype aircraft caused him to crash one day. After that mishap the government paid him a large compensation. He stopped working and lived happily with his wife. He spent the many of his days at the beach fishing, sometimes with his son or daughter. Then one day, many years hence, his body got tired and it died. But this is the story of Sam and something odd was about to happen to him.

Once again he walked home through the bronze of evening: past the shiny cars with streetlights sliding off their feminine and masculine bodies. The men drove cars, Jaguars and what not, whose fenders and controls spoke to them through the curves of hip and breast and at a whim of theirs the car would acquiesce. The women, laden into their crushing swaggering wagons, had power, safety and intimidation easily at their small fingers and toes.
Sam walked past the happy cafes with a lump of indignation in his throat. As he walked he noticed he entered one of those odd moments of calm that spiral around in cities like reverse tornadoes; when suddenly things have gone quiet and for some reason they seem to have stopped their bustle in this little pocket around you. Noise seems to happen off elsewhere. And so with the area around Sam clear of event he had the presence of mind available to notice a wallet someone had dropped on the ground. He walked over and picked it up. When he looked closely he realised that it was the same wallet that he had. Not just the same brand but exactly the same. Even the corner where his wallet had become inexplicably crumpled was the same.
A design flaw he assumed.
Then with urgency he checked his own pocket lest this was his wallet stripped out and dumped. In his pocket he felt the familiar flat lump and removed his own wallet. It was true – both wallet exactly the same. His mind disengaged with puzzlement his feet automatically guided him toward the nearest empty café chair.
Some people had seen him pick it up. Some thought, ‘lucky for him,’ some thought, ‘damn him I should have seen that,’ others watched in silence and ready condemnation if they saw him trouser it and walk on. As he pulled out his own wallet and walked to a nearby table they saw the evidence they needed and they turned to their companions and muttered about the immorality of the young. One of these conversations evolved to become a musing on the immortality of immorality.
At the café table Sam sat with both wallets square to him. He couldn’t tell which was his after being distracted by a happy waiter delivering a coffee menu to him. Not receiving any order the waiter buzzed off to a couple who were ready. And as the waiter approached them he took note of personal styles and other behaviours, and knew this: she would have the chicken or non-threatening pasta and he would have steak and chips.
Sam, unsure now which was which, opened one, it had his effects and ID. Well, that was decided then. So he opened the other, curiosity now the guiding emotion. It had his effects and ID. Curiosity and confusion impelled him to look further through both. What he found in one he found the exact in the other. The waiter watched him put his hands over his face to try to clear his head. The waiter efficiently delivered a still hot macch that someone had earlier left before claiming and had been forgotten for the last two minutes. When Sam opened his eyes again a cup of coffee had appeared on his table. This threw him yet more.
He looked around and saw the waiter, who saw him back and gave him an affirmative wave and a point. He drank the warm brew quickly — no sugar, ack. Back to the wallets. Aha! Count the money inside. By now Sam suspected this was a convoluted prank played on him by his former co-workers. As a going-away present they usually gave scotch (Form 3CP: Johnny Walker Black Label, rrp $38.99, sign here, X).
Systematically Sam laid out the internals of each wallet. There was the same amount of money in each. More than that the coins were the same date and one five cent piece was rather damaged in each wallet. They were exact duplicates. Sam accepted this and accepted that there was no explanation so decided to keep both. Now he had disposable cash. Not to say the wallet episode hadn’t spooked him some. He took it that this wallet was naught but a mystery he could profit by. He put one wallet back in his pocket, ordered another coffee to calm his nerves, finished it paid and left for home. Walking home he did however keep an eye out for hidden cameras.
At home he took everything out of both wallets. Everything was identical. Like someone had used the duplicator out of that science fiction movie. He counted out the cash and found that where once he had $82.50 he now had $165. Not money he planned to have. That modest severance cheque couldn’t be banked until Monday and wouldn’t be cleared until Wednesday at the earliest. But he knew he would find a good use for it this unexpected bonus. Sam therefore became the first person ever to successfully steal from him/herself and make a profit.
It was late Friday night by now, time for bed. His life had been thrown a curve today. He didn’t like the uncertainty. Fear of uncertainty is probably what kept all those others coming in each day he thought. He then realised that he was also in that group with the ‘others’.
As he lay down to bed in the dark while the green and blue residue of the light was still in his eyes he thought: Oh well…time to look for new job. Time maybe to grow up. Time maybe to put to use his college certificate.
The excuse of comfort that held him in his rut was gone now.



I am no god, mind. No my friend, not at all. How can a perfect being be imbued with substance by the bounds of a human mind? Perfection is laughable I am afraid to say. Perfection exists beyond the human-possible scope and so even when possibly perhaps it does exist it cannot be recognised by a human conception. Gods don’t need to be perfect – in fact many people don’t even need gods.