#goddamn it and their customer service days are Monday through friday through a certain time

[puhpandas]

I stg I ordered possessed Fredbear but I checked my email today and it was the normal Fredbear and now I have to contact sanshee to cancel it so I can reorder the one I wanted😭

[originaldetectivesheep]

The Thirty and One Nights' Momentary Diversion - On the Graveyard Shift

Tonight's story goes out to all the other ground-down, worn-out on-call 'resources' out there who've ever had to put down their fork, tie their boots up again, and go back to work on a problem the customer should've been able to solve themselves -- please don't do this in real life.

On The Graveyard Shift

Dan rolled his beer in his hands, thinking.  He was still new, just at the end of his first week, barely done with his basic training, still not all the way through the syntax doc for Jokol Communications' proprietary scripting language, so he felt kind of weird about bringing it up, but it was Friday, and nearly everyone was packed into the kitchen, drinking; maybe this was how they did it back in Sweden too, and this wasn't just about taking some time to blow off steam and team-bond, but to make him less uncomfortable.  If that was how it was, it was working – two of the Lagunitas cans had definitely loosened him up, and it was just a question, right?  What was the harm in asking?

"I'm sorry if this is, like, weird," he said, kind of cutting in on the end of James' story about the truck his cousin had just bottomed out for the second time, "but I think I know everyone in the office by now – but I still don't think I know who has that office behind me.  Are they just on vacation this week?"

It was an innocent question, but it was like if he'd asked if anyone was up to shoot a bunch of heroin over the weekend.  Karen looked away and bit her lip; Yichuen slammed down the last of his Pacifico all at once and almost jogged around the refrigerator to pitch it in the trash and split; Allen shot a look over at Janak, who crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows to the sky like he was goddamn sure not touching this with a ten-foot pole.  Debbie was suddenly very interested in something on her phone, and Siba took a call or 'took a call' as an excuse to get the hell out.  Dan was left just looking around, stunned dead, not sure what the hell he'd done to kill the conversation or what he was supposed to do from here.  What the heck was this even?  And if this got back to Pierre or Ravi – would they like fire him on his trial period for screwing up the office chemistry?  What had he done?

At last, Brian spun around in the one rolly chair, looking him dead in the eye, knuckles tight around the neck of his Fat Tire.  "That office, don't worry about it.  Don't talk about it too much – it's nothing to worry about."

"But –" Dan was looking around, not sure what the hell to make of this, because it was sure as shit that everyone else at Jokol was worried about it or something.

"You live in Medford, right?  Meet me at P.J.'s in Teele tomorrow for the game; I'll explain it more there.  It's kind of wicked long, and I want to go home – I just come off on-call, and it's not healthy to stick around work longer than you have to."  He slugged the last bit out of the bottom of his beer and clunked it into the recycling bin.  "That's that; if you're gonna hang around to dry out, find something else to talk about – something lighter than that, huh? Isn't the Walking Dead starting up again?"  Janak threw out a reference in response, and Dan sat dumb as Brian left and his co-workers started discussing zombie dismemberment – as something lighter than whatever was the matter with that office that they weren't supposed to talk about.

Dan had no idea what 'game' Brian was going to be at P.J. O'Toole's for, and was surprised to find him already parked at the bar, most of an Irish breakfast gone and a second Guinness, at least, half-empty in front of him when he came into the bar at eleven.  He tried to contain his shock, but while Brian definitely noticed, he snorted like he didn't care, and motioned at a seat.  "Took you damn long enough; it's good that the second game's Chelsea kicking the shit out of West Brom, I won't be missing anything while we talk." He picked up a last forkful of beans, and Dan slid gingerly into a chair, looking uneasily at the Guinness that the dreadlocked Brazilian bartender set in front of him, apparently certain that anyone who was friends with Brian would be all about thowing down stouts first thing in the morning.

Dan picked up his beer and took a tentative sip.  "Then – right, about the office.  I'm sorry if I, like said something wrong back there – it's only my first week, and I don't really know anything yet.  Is there like something wrong with it?"

Brian arched an eyebrow over his beer.  "That office?  Yeah, it's cursed.  That's why it's empty – and people don't like to talk about it."

Dan's face flattened out, unbelieving.  "Cursed?  Cursed?  Like –"

"Like whoever takes it leaves.  The last guy Pierre sat in there was this guy Rich, a cold-call sales rep. He got zero hits in two weeks in the office and quit out of depression.  Before him there was a project manager called Wade – he made all kinds of shit undeliverable promises and nearly fucked us out of our biggest customer, so he had to go. Before him it was one of a couple Chrises – and that's the other curse, if you don't know it, that there isn't ever more than one person with the same name at this company, so if there's two, one's got to go.  They put the good Chris who was on track for the architect position in the office, and he got a better offer from Tetradyne and quit two weeks in, so we were stuck with the bad Chris who boat-anchored the support team for three months until Piotr caught him abusing sick time and canned him. One or two of these might have been an accident: all of them, one after the other, it's got to be a curse."  Brian took a deep drink from his beer.  Dan's head was swimming, and he hadn't hardly drunk anything yet.

"But – cursed – it can't always have been cursed – the place is just, like, a normal office building.  Was it that way from the start, like when you moved in?" As weird as this was already, asking about previous tenants doing voodoo rituals in the office was just borrowing trouble, and he couldn't be sure that Brian wasn't just lying to him.

Brian looked unexpectedly reflective, elbows on the bar.  "I don't know.  It was before my time, but probably not much.  Go look up the Employee of the Quarter plaque, if you can find it – last I saw it was covering a hole in the kitchen wall over the fridge, because the brass doesn't want to make a big deal of it.  That plaque's got two names on it, two quarters only, and it stops in 2007 Q2 for a reason.

"The second name, Merzahd, he's the one who was in support before me.  He got on the plaque for doing three weeks of 24-hour call in a row, and he quit the month after he got the award.  Burnout.  Burnout gets you.  The first name is the guy he replaced, a guy called Warren.  He did the same stuff, met the same fate – as far as I've gotten anyone to tell me.  Merzahd, people have him on LinkedIn, they sort of know what he's doing; Warren, he finished up his back to back to back and had some stupid hand-holder prod ticket at five on a Friday and he just lost it.  He finished the case and got it Pending Close, but he grabbed up one of the permanent markers – not even the whiteboard ones – and chalked up FUCK THIS SHIT on the back wall of that office in foot-high black letters, left his security badge on his laptop, and just walked the hell out.  Nobody ever heard from him again, and when the janitors found what he'd written on Monday, they had to chisel it off the wall and repaint – there was no getting that off."

Dan stopped and blinked, beer hanging in midair.  "So – then –"

"Yeah, that's about the shape of it," Brian said, plugging back the rest of his Guinness and signaling for another.  "Hell hath no fury like a support engineer at the end of his rope, and you're new yet, and in Services – you don't know that over by us we make suicide jokes to whistle past the graveyard.  Whisper it, but like as not Warren got sick to fucking death of the fucking customers and killed himself, and he's haunting that office with frustration and despair down to this day."  He picked up his new beer and took a long pull off it without letting the head settle, ignoring Dan's horror-wide eyes and hanging jaw.

"But – but – but –"

"But it's a crazy story, and there's no ghosts and no curses?"  Brian cocked an eyebrow back over his beer, leaning away.  "Sure, fine; believe whatever you like.  As long as you don't get posted up in that office, and as long as you keep the door closed, you'll be fine.  Probably.  I mean, I've been here ten years and change, and I haven't heard about it getting out and jumping on anyone outside. Well.  Yet."  He leaned back, glugging away at his beer, and Dan looked down at his hands.  Maybe Brian was putting him on, the grizzled old veteran hazing the wet-behind-the-ears newbie.  Maybe – or maybe every single person in the office wasn't in on the hazing plot and there was really something weird through the glass behind his cube.  Maybe Jokol was really cursed.  Maybe.  Whatever.  He couldn't deal with this, not like this right now – but maybe the Guinness would help.  Dan leaned back, eyes closed, and tried to get all of the beer down in a single swallow.