The cubicles of Detroit Munitions' logistics department, during business hours, are forever engulfed with the sounds of shuffling papers, interdepartmental phone calls, and percolating coffee pots. An office floor of nigh on a score of pencil pushers, not to mention the handful of usually-lackluster interns hired via temp agencies and Liberty colleges. Among these myriad cubicles works a woman of 36, once divorced, and twice fired – first from a small accounting firm on Los Angeles where she worked for five years, next from an insurance company, where she worked for eleven years before its collapse and subsequent buyout by Interspace Commerce.
Caroline Gladstone, queen of spreadsheets, countess of the supply closet, and secret user of hair dye to cover her early graying hair, works an eight hour day at the cubicle closest to the elevator and farthest from the coffee pots. Today, she has a to-do list six items long or longer depending on how manager "Old Man" Kenneth Porter is feeling today, and the biggest bullet point is verifying all outbound shipments to Newcastle, New London, and Cambridge arrive at the destinations specified on their manifests.
Ten shipments are outbound today, and so far Caroline has confirmed five. The other five are still in transit, or are yet to depart. Next on her list for the meantime is fetching the department mail, so she takes the elevator down a level to the mail room and retrieves a rather heavy basket of envelopes to carry back to the elevator. The mail room staff, as usual, are temps and interns too preoccupied with slacking off to bother using their idle moments to assist busier employees. None of the eyerolls, dirty looks, or exaggerated straining sounds Caroline could muster have ever been enough to budge them from their rolling chairs.
Upon her return to the logistics department, she lowers the mail basket onto a table near the elevator, and picks through the basket for her mail. Addressed to her, she finds a card inviting her to the yearly department potluck (not going, Old Man's a dick and Marcus from across the office floor is creepy and greasy as all get out), a notice reminding her to change her company database password (as if they couldn't just send this to me via NeuralNet), and a small, unadorned box. She rings a small bell to notify the other desk jockeys that the mail has arrived.
Caroline returns to her desk and furtively opens the box and sees a bottle labeled Genuine Luster® Chestnut Brown, and quickly closes it back up. I really hope no-one downstairs has been looking through my mail. I really ought to get a more private mailing address. She stows the box in her desk drawer.
"What's in the box there, Caroline?" sneers a voice from behind. Jenny Barrows, on her way back from the mail basket, is on the hunt for another confidence snipe to boost her ego, it seems. Today's target is Caroline, like many times previous.
"Oh, nothing really," said Caroline, caught off guard. "Just a trinket I bought off the NeuralNet. Did you get anything, Jenny?"
Jenny frowns. Caroline's first few months working in the logistics office were a struggle, having to combat Jenny's unrelenting nosiness and nasally West Central Manhattan brogue, but now she's armed with, among other weapons, the tactic of prematurely changing the subject. "No, just a card for the potluck and some database boilerplate. Nice talkin' to ya." Jenny shuffles off.
When that bridge troll finally gets fired, I'm throwing the wildest party Sirius'll ever have seen.
Caroline returns to her work, and makes a confirmation call over the NeuralNet to the Ark Royal in Newcastle. The shipment arrived on time with all arms accounted for, and the big bullet point at the top of her list got a little bit smaller.
Four more shipments and four more bullets to go.
A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
