The Office of DOOM

It had been a largely unsatisfying day on the mezzanine floor, and as such, normal. Customers or "marks" had come and go, picking up tidbits of information and the odd white laquered bathroom cabinet. Frankie wandered amidst the poorly constructed display furniture, utterly untouchable by those punters ever desperate to just take the stuff home. "Four to five weeks" had become his motto, the standard delivery time, emblazoned on the catalogues yet reiterated countlessly throughout the day, reputation security, customer service as condenced blurbs of off-putting information, profit protection in the extreem. He knew that he had put people off, but not enough, his goal it would seem, was unconscious sabotage. At least that's what he imagined the others to be thinking, cogs turning neath those awful uniforms, ill fitting to hide the evil, which in his oppinion manifested itself in hairy bulbous swellings that were 50% suckling mouths, or orifices that are comporably malevolant. They watched him, as he flitted between tables and couches, acknolwedging passers-by with an unitelligable outburst, a condenced and abbridged version of howareyoudoinfolkscanihelpyouwithanythingjustgimmeashoutifyouneedahandokay, it sounded like HFlRuPp.... to the untrained ear.

Frankie paced frantically, caught between the vain hope he looked busy and his inability to occupy his mind with things fruitful in character. A stumbling block had been reached again it would seem, an imaginary precipice from which he looked down fretfully, unwilling and unable to budge but wanting nothing more. "Is it my own stupidity" he mused, "or just unhappiness that stops me from learning this shit?" His inner snob answered the question for him, "selling is an abhorent career, fit only for crooks and gypsies or their desperate, grubby progeny." Accented for him, like some alternate universe's version of Steven Fry, wit flavoured with malice, he managed a smile for the first time that day, at his own absurdity. He did, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, think that selling was an abhorrent career. It made him think of slime and every time he did in fact make a sale, he didn't experience the emotional ticker tape parade or glorious trumpeting he had once imagined but rather he felt like showering, or brushing his teeth with a powerdrill.

The "shit" that he referred to was the countless streams of information thrust at him by a management, colleagues and customers. He felt snowed under by everything he had to recall, faces to remember, appointments to schedule and reschedule and reschedule.... product knowledge, workplace pratice, procedures for this and that, paperwork for everything except wiping his ass, which, he suspected, was currently under review by some sub-committee. What pained him the most was not the level of information he was expected to vomit into the lap of an inquizitive mystery shopper or a honcho descended from on high, nor was it the random customers names/dates/conversational preferences he had to clamour for each time a stranger addressed him with recognition. It was that he felt he had lost more information than he had crammed in, and stuggled to remember anything unaided these days. Catalogues were messily stored away, a squirrels bounty of crib notes and measurements scrawled illegibly over them at ever more wavering angles. frankie thought he was losing his mind, for just above the minimum wage, and worse, much worse, he was beginning to suspect they could tell.

He managed to make it through most days on sheer personality, despite, in his oppinion, the lack of one. He wasnt particularily outgoing, certainly not in a way remotely sufficient to survive a sales job, but he had a way with people. He could empathize with them and understand, or look like he did, even the most trivial of quibbles they might have. And he was self depricating, very. Those closest to him throughout the course of his life attributed it to worryingly low self esteem, but up there, on the mezzanine, it made him one of the people, just a poor schlub trying to do his job. He forgot things, and had to check things and got things wrong, but he laughed at himself and in the eys of most people that made him an ok guy. Most people. In the eyes of those in the upper eschelons it made him a flake, an idiot and worse, a liability. None of this was said of course, not overtly. But it was in their eyes, always taunting him in his paranoia and worsening it with every passing day. They mentioned figures and targets and Frankie's heart butterflied. They mentioned absences and clock card discrepancies and his stomach squeezed as if to release dirty dish water. He went to the bathroom eight times a day, out of actual need. The situation, to him at least, was deteriorating rapidly. He felt a short stumble away from a fully fledged freak out, complete with swinging chair legs and broken tiles.