The first rule about working in an office is total fucking bullshit—don’t ever be nice to anyone, ever. I did my boss a favor and now I’m stuck in my cubicle and it’s always 4pm.
I ended up napping the first 57 minutes till my alarm rang and I found out the hard way I basically couldn’t leave my desk. By the time the second hour passed, I’d been playing solitaire and had started to tragically lose my sanity too. It turns out that you can beat Temple Run. Halfway through the fourth hour, I needed to find a way to the bathroom. Let’s…skip past that, though. It was the end of the sixth time it had been 4:43 that I found the email a month into my inbox; yeah, I’d just started catching up and working ahead of the rest of my project team, so checking my inbox was a necessary evil.
I’d dismissed the email as a regular insult from Kavey about how much of a bad fit I was for the job, etc., but it wasn’t. I read it, and I started thinking this could help me find a way out. Here’s what it said:
HELLO “u/Temporary_Pilot_4915”;
HAPPY THIRTY-NINTH JOB DAY. WE WOULD LIKE TO EXTEND A WARM WELCOME TOWARDS YOU AS WE HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO WELCOME YOU PROPERLY YET.
PLEASE CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO RECEIVE YOUR GIFT.
MANAGEMENT
I sure as hell didn’t want the welcome, but I didn’t think things could get worse at that point. I clicked the link, and one of those little sticky note gizmos popped up on my desktop.
LET’S PLAY A LITTLE GAME! HERE ARE THE RULES:
THE NUMBER FOR JENKINS FROM HR IS 972.
THE NUMBER FOR KUBIT FROM MANAGEMENT IS 334.
THE NUMBER FOR THE CUSTODIAN IS 999.
YOU MAY ONLY CALL ONE OF THESE NUMBERS.
ONCE THIS IS DONE, YOU WILL RECEIVE ANOTHER GIFT.
MANAGEMENT
This shit sucked, but I didn’t know what else to do. I’d exhausted every possible way to get out of my cubicle that I could think of: I’d tried to crawl over the three barriers, break the glass on them, look for a fake panel/opening on them or the floor, and every single time, I felt like every molecule of me gotten sucked into a vacuum and would end up sitting in my chair again. So I would play the “game” or whatever, because I was starting to think if I didn’t, I would never find my way out.
The rules said I could only dial one number. Based on the options I had, I ruled out HR, because filing a complaint never did anything to help me before. Fuck human resources here, theyre vultures. I didn’t know if I wanted to call management, because while they seemed to know about the situation in general, I also didn’t know if they’d help me or hurt me. In the end, I went with the custodian—not because he scared me the least or anything, but because I felt I could get him to come into the cubicle and maybe leave with him or at least get some keys to a door in the office that would help me if I ever left the cubicle.
So I dialed 999, and it was almost like someone on the other side was waiting for me to call. “Afternoon,” a gruff voice said. “What can I do fer ya?” I told them why I called and how I was stuck in my cubicle. There was a pause, and then I could hear something shake really violently, and then there was heavy breathing into the phone for like ten seconds before they replied to me. “I can’t come there to get ya out, I’m sorry. Management told me to tell ya this: there’s somethin’ taped atthe bottom of yer chair, and 9’s not yer lucky num—“ The voice cut off, and then I heard screaming. Then there was a sound like growling, and it was just…a cacophony of noise. I hung up after a few seconds—I didn’t think the custodian was alive anymore. This made me all the more desperate to get out of the cubicle and get home as soon as possible.
I practically threw the phone and the receiver to the far end of my desk and scrambled to see if there was anything under my chair. There was—a tiny brown package that was about the size of my hand. I peeled the tape and the brown paper off to see a credit card without any of the numbers on it. It had my name, and the standard stripe, but there were no numbers on it: no security code, no expiration date, no credit card number. I didn’t know what to do with it, and what I’d heard over the phone had started to make my heart beat like a jackrabbit, so I just put it in my pocket and started to see what shit in my cubicle could be made into a weapon.
Honestly, by the end of my panicky evaluation, I was just hoping to beat anything into submission with pure blunt force trauma. I should’ve called management instead, but I didn’t know what would happen if I picked up the phone again and broke the rules of the “gift”. Game. Whatever.
I walked around, turning every two feet. I curled up and cried. I banged my head against the edge of the desk. I threw one of my binders at the floor. Went through the five stages of grief and accepted I was probably gonna die here, either from insanity or whatever killed the custodian. I mean, I definitely felt like I was going insane, and you would too.
I couldn’t call them, so I emailed “management” or whatever the shit they were back. I won’t quote my email here. It was basically just a bunch of keyboard smashes and me asking 30 different ways for help after explaining my weird timeloop situation. I mean, it worked? I got one very, very short sentence back, and it was basically just management telling me to shut the fuck up and play “the game”. So I pulled the credit-card-that-was-not-a-credit-card out of my pocket and started to look at it again.
While it didn’t have any numbers or writing on it, it did have bumps that someone could feel, and my first thought was Braille. Thankfully, the internet was still semi-working, and after 30 minutes of buffering, I had a pdf that showed me Braille letters. Either the card said 100273, or I was fucked (even more than I already was).
And someone had to have had a camera on me, or something, because I got an email from management not two minutes later. This one just had a link on it, which I clicked to see six fill-in-the-blank slots in. I was probably supposed to put one number in each. There was a timer on the right hand corner of the page, and it was showing 25 minutes left. I didn’t want to be here after the time was up, because something bad would probably happen. I typed in 100273, and nothing happened. Then I tried typing in every possible combination, and with like 10 minutes left, 070231 did the job.
The screen of my computer turned off, and then on again, with three words highlighted with neon yellow in the ugliest font I’ve ever seen in my life. TO YOUR LEFT.
I looked, and I wished I hadn’t. I’d been so engrossed in trying to type in the right combination that I’d tunnel visioned; I hadn’t been paying attention to anything else, and while I hadn’t, someone or something had taken advantage of that. The metal wall of the cubicle to my left had largely been replaced by Plexiglass, and something’s eye was staring at me through it. It was ugly as fuck, and looked like a cross between Godzilla, a crocodile, and a man. Oh; unrelated, but I think I figured out what killed the custodian.
When I saw it, I had a full blown panic attack and literally fainted. I’ve never fainted before, but there’s only so much the human body can process before it shuts down for a bit, I guess. I’ve started writing this as a diary of sorts, and since my Internet still works even though it’s slow as fuck and management hasn’t literally nuked me yet, I think this is fine.
Anyways, back to the weird monster thing; I’ve named it Frankenstein Junior.
For some reason, it hasn’t been able to cross over into the cubicle yet—it could be because I beat the timer on the code thing. I’m gonna stay in the cubicle until I can either find a way to break the glass and kill it, or else, I’ll have to play more of management’s games, I guess.