NothingSpecial: gender-bending transformation stories, comics, and occasional poetry =^_^=
I was not happy.
"Okay, what's it doing now?" I asked, suppressing a groan. Why did these things always crop up at the worst possible time? Bad enough to have someone's computer stuck in an endless cycle of failing to apply and failing to roll back a Windows update, but when they were adamant that they needed that particular machine right now 'cause they had a meeting with a client in ninety minutes and their presentation was on it…
"Still spinning." I could hear the tension in her voice. The feeling was mutual, but mine had more to do with keeping myself from mentioning that it wouldn't even be an issue if she'd just saved the dumb thing to her directory on the office fileserver as per our policy. That was the hell of it: we could write up all the policies and "best practices" we wanted, for Bryce to tout to prospective clients, but if people didn't take them seriously, what good was it!?
Of course, it didn't help that modern software "helpfully" assumes it knows where you keep your files better than you do and requires extra steps to save things anywhere else; and whosever fault this was, it changed nothing about the current situation. We were already an hour into this, and I was gaming out whether it wouldn't be faster to drive out to her house, pop the SSD out of her work laptop, and pull the file off it than to go through another four or five boot cycles as she grew increasingly frantic…
"Oh," she said suddenly.
"Huh? What's up?" I asked nervously. It didn't sound like a bad "oh," but any time you're flying blind on phone support and something you can't see changes, there's that little jolt of dread.
"I think it worked this time."
I tried to hold back the rush of relief, lest I jinx it by getting my hopes up. I did not want to have to slog through lunch-hour traffic for this, even the milder post-pandemic lockdown kind. "It's booting the rest of the way?"
"Um, it's asking for my password."
"Okay, go ahead and log in." I muted myself and let out a long, heavy sigh. If we'd gotten this far, we should be fine; even if she couldn't log in for some reason, with it finally booted I could grab her stupid document with our remote-management tool and, I didn't know, set up the presentation on her home PC or whatever. This was manageable; it'd be okay from here…
"It's not there."
I bit my lip. "What's not there?"
"My PowerPoint. It's not there!"
I'd jinxed it. Damn it all, I'd jinxed it. I began running through the options in my head, but I wasn't optimistic; we didn't back up workstations since everything was supposed to be kept on the server, we didn't have licensing for any live-undelete software worth a damn, and the odds of me successfully walking a junior partner at a lobbying firm through using offline file-recovery software over the phone were, to put it mildly, not great.
Okay, stay calm, I told myself, but it didn't help much. There was really no way around this; I'd always hated doing abrupt, spur-of-the-moment runs to client sites, but now I had to wonder if either of us were carrying something that might turn the other's life upside-down to boot…
At least it wasn't the senior partner. He got bent out of shape enough over things like his Outlook calendar taking forever to load because he had fourteen million appointments on it, and had no qualms about making our lives hell until they were resolved to his satisfaction. If he got turned into a cat-woman after a site visit he'd demanded, I had no doubt that (s)he'd be screaming for our heads.
Alright, so I'd have to drive out there. That'd probably take about forty minutes, leaving me a half-hour or so to recover the file, put it on whatever she had handy, and get it set up for the presentation. I'd need a disk caddy, my laptop, my screwdriver/bit set…and a mask, now…
"Oh," she said.
I was afraid to ask – had things somehow gotten worse? "…What?" I said, after a moment's hesitation.
"I found it."
"Uh, you did?" I tried not to let myself get too preemptively grateful, lest I jinx it again.
"It was in Roscoe's share. He wanted to give it a once-over yesterday."
Okay, never mind gratitude; maybe I'd skip straight to tearing my hair out. The whole TIME!? I groaned, internally; I wasn't even going to bother asking why she'd removed it from her share rather than making a copy. "Oh, that's great," I said, keeping my emotions clamped down and my voice polite and pleasant, trying not to hiss it through clenched teeth. "Was there anything else I could help you with?"
"No," she said, a bit curtly. "I really need to get going."
I rolled my eyes; it wasn't like I wanted to have long personal chats with clients, but it always rubbed me the wrong way when they acted like they couldn't get off the phone soon enough after getting what they wanted. "Sure thing. Have a good one!"
Well, at least that was over with. I took off my headset and let out a long sigh, feeling myself deflate like a balloon. I pulled up the IM client, wanting to vent to my coworkers, but I was leery of letting too much bile spill out over company channels, even if they were purely internal.° I took my lunch hour instead; I usually waited 'til later in the day, but the queue wasn't bad right now and I needed a break after all that.
° (I had no reason to suspect that Bryce actually monitored what we said in private chat, but once, on a particularly aggravating call, I'd added a you stupid cow! not very under my breath after hanging up, and it'd become office lore among my coworkers; it didn't take long after cooling my head to realize that that'd probably have gotten me a talking-to if we weren't in separate offices.)
I punched out, went into the kitchen and set my leftovers reheating, and slumped into the recliner, trying to open YouTube on my phone for soothing ambient audio or something, but I was too close to Parker's apartment to have functional reception; based on all the geegaws he wouldn't stop telling me about, he might have two or three streaming services running in different rooms, plus the "smart" fridge, "smart" faucet, "smart" coffeemaker, "smart" lights, "smart" door, "smart" treadmill, etc.° (Plus all the videoconferencing he was doing these days…)
° (He'd yet to mention it, but I wouldn'tve been surprised to find "smart toilet" on that list.)
Honestly, I thought, I should set up an induction coil by the wall and harvest energy off him; if I made a tinfoil hat and wore it around the house, it'd probably glow. At least the cable hookup was in the master bedroom, so I could connect my computer directly and mostly circumvent the problem (aside from some light chatter on my work headset;) I hardly left the room anyway, lately, except to get food…
The microwave beeped, and I grabbed my lunch, poured a glass of milk, and retreated to my room, then donned my headphones and put on some music to chill out to while I ate. I thought about logging onto my usual MUD, but I was still too frazzled to properly get into it. I ended up browsing idly back through webcomics I'd already read instead, brooding slightly.
It'd almost been fun working from home, for the first week or so. I sure as hell didn't miss the commute, and it'd been easier on the Bug as well as saving me a pile of gas money; I could wear whatever I wanted outside of meetings and not feel weird; heck, if I didn't have to get up on-camera, I didn't even need to wear pants. And like 85% of my job was remote work anyway,° so it wasn't like it was an inconvenience. If it weren't for Bryce's insistence on client face time, I could've done this from the get-go and been no less productive…
° (10% was meetings.)
…except, well…it was kinda starting to drive me a little bit crazy.
Not in a chasing-the-neighbors-with-a-meat-cleaver way, but when I wasn't focused on anything specific, I increasingly got either twitchy and restless or bored and listless. I'd reflexively refresh webpages I'd just checked, fire up Minesweeper when I'd just rage-quit a minute before, get up and prowl around the apartment briefly before returning to what I was doing – or I'd sit there staring into space for minutes on end, start reading or working on things I'd meant to catch up on before losing all motivation a little ways in, et cetera.
Work helped a bit, in that it gave me something to focus on. I'd put in much more overtime than usual recently, just to keep myself busy – the automated-alerts queue had never been so clear, and in the middle of tax season our clients at the accounting agency appreciated me manning the phones after-hours – but that was hardly ideal; I didn't want to spend my whole life on the clock, and Bryce had gotten annoyed when my last paycheck posted. But what else was I supposed to do with my time? Socialize?
…It wasn't like I actually wanted to, but knowing I wasn't supposed to fraternize gave a weird sort of allure-of-the-forbidden to it. I knew it was one of those irrational counter-urges, and not what I really wanted, but sometimes I'd get to feeling a particular kind of twitchy and restless, and I worried that one of these days I was just going to tear out of the house and run manically down the street, accosting random strangers to say hi and ask how they'd been and what they were up to…
…and probably catching and spreading the virus across the whole neighborhood in the process. Was this how it got you? Had it evolved to exploit a design flaw in the fundamental human animal? CVE-2020-0123, description: Human beings are cripplingly dependent on other human beings for social interaction and will engage in erratic and risky behavior if left isolated for too long. Affected versions: Freaking everybody, apparently.
God, this couldn't go on. I had to figure out some way to keep myself busy, to engage my brain when I didn't have work to focus on and my usual reflexive time-killers weren't cutting it. I needed a hobby…besides the ones I already had but was getting bored of. Something that interested me in the abstract, but that I'd never really done before…?
My fingers skittered antsily across the keyboard as I turned it over in my mind. By the end of my lunch hour, I'd followed a half-dozen stray thoughts across whole chains of Wikipedia articles, opened a handful of Amazon listings, checked out several different introductory videos on YouTube, and—
It was when I opened up yet another new tab that I saw it. I'd forgotten to disable the suggestions page they'd added with the last browser update, and one of the preview thumbnails showed a map of the country – one dotted with fuzzy little splotches of red, like a Petri dish. I didn't have to look to know what it was, but I found myself clicking the link anyway; I found the view controls for the map, zoomed in on the state, the region…no. Not here…not yet.
I stared for a long minute, reflexively refreshed the page a couple times; then I closed the tab, set the browser to open up a blank page from now on, and tried to focus on what I'd been doing. Through the wall, I could hear hissing and spitting as two of Nicole's cats voiced their disagreement over something. This wasn't wildly unusual, but I felt myself twitch just slightly.
Not yet…
Not yet, damn it… My fingers twitched across the keyboard, refreshing the page yet again. Online tracking is a wonderful, convenient thing, but well has it been said that it also makes you crazy; turns out this is doubly true if you're already a little crazy from being cooped up in your house for weeks on end. I'd followed my package all the way from New Hampshire in five-minute intervals, except when I was asleep; not because I was that desperate to get it, so much as that I didn't have much else to occupy my mind lately, other than the thing I was trying to keep it off of.
It'd shown as "out for delivery" since 5:30 A.M., and it was now 6:15 P.M. "Scheduled" delivery was "before 7:00 P.M.," but I knew how good the local delivery apes were about punctuality and professionalism;° they were prone to ding-and-dash even before the pandemic, and now it was nearly the end of their shift, to boot. I'd been keeping vigil all damn day because, if I didn't catch them at exactly the right moment, they'd slap a we-just-missed-you-we-swear tag on the door and scamper off…
° (Not at all. Not even slightly.)
I glanced out the window, waiting to catch the tell-tale beam of headlights when a vehicle rounded the corner onto my street, but…nope. Nothing. I turned back to the computer, reflexively refreshed, and huffed in irritation. I wanted to put on some music, or zone out in a game, or anything, but I just knew that if I let my concentration lapse for so much as a minute, that's when they'd strike…
I scrolled through the new posts on my usual forums, keeping one eye on the window. So many movies getting canned or rescheduled or kicked to streaming due to the pandemic; well, that'd bother me more if there were anything in the pipeline I actually wanted to see… Over to webcomics I'd meant to catch up on, but it was hard to get drawn in when I kept glancing outside…
There! Headlights washed over the opposite wall; tires rolled across the concrete outside. I got up and sprinted to the door, ready to catch them the moment they set foot in my territory, but I could tell at a glance, through the window, that the vehicle parked next to the Bug wasn't a delivery van. I stopped, confused; who else would be coming to my house at this time of—
Oh. Right. I'd ordered out for dinner, so I wouldn't get distracted with cooking and miss my package. Restaurants were quick to expand their delivery/pick-up options once the lockdown hit, and even a lot of places that'd been dine-in only were getting into the game. It lacked in atmosphere, sure, but I was never much for that myself.
I donned my mask and opened the door, right as the delivery girl was about to ring the bell. We both started and jumped back a couple feet, and it took us a minute of awkward strangers-in-a-hallway dancing to sort out where our personal boundaries were; once we'd established a safe distance between us, the transaction could proceed.
"Uh, I have an order here for a Christopher Robbins?" she said, holding up a sack. I felt myself twitch slightly, but she gave no indication that she thought anything of it. No point in correcting her, I might never see her again anyway… I reached for the receipt she was holding out at arm's length, signed it, and we completed the handoff. She gave me the standard thank-you-and-good-evening and left.
I watched her go, thinking how uncomfortable even the most basic interactions had become the last few weeks. It was so strange seeing all your fellow human beings as a potential risk…I'd never been a particularly social animal,° but that used to mean I could just tune people out if I had no business with them. Now I had to actively avoid them…
° (Sporadic attacks of social urges due to pandemic-induced isolation notwithstanding.)
It was interesting that she seemed almost as ill-at-ease as I was, there. Was it just the human social instinct where acting awkward and uncomfortable makes everyone around you sympathetically resonate with that? Was someone in her household allergic to cats?
Or…was she genuinely uncomfortable with the idea? She wasn't risking quite as much of a change, but it'd definitely be an adjustment for her – and women might find the behavioral aspects just as disturbing, however blithe my neighbor was about the idea. And she could get more than just the ears and tail, I thought. How would it be to wake up every morning and see a face in the mirror that wasn't even human…?
I shoved that question to the back of my mind. It was cold out, and my dinner wasn't getting any hotter, corrugated box or no. I went in, poured a drink, and tucked in. I couldn't help but sigh; it was great that take-out options were expanding, but it wasn't always the same. I could've killed for a real quality hamburger about now, for example.
Pizza and pasta can be delivered in 10-15 minutes and be more or less right, but even in this day and age, nobody can keep a good hamburger in proper condition that long. Wrap it in paper and you squash it; insulate it too heavily and it gets soggy on its own steam; put it in a lighter box and it gets cold – and you can't just microwave it, or you're basically having McDonald's if it were made with actual ingredients. There's just no winning that one…
I felt like an ingrate as I idly batted a meatball around with my fork, watching it tumble and roll. It wasn't that I didn't like pasta, but it was easy to get so focused on what I couldn't have that the things I could lost their lustre. Part of me just wanted a hamburger, dammit… But this was pretty decent stuff. I twirled a forkful of spaghetti absent-mindedly; there was a loose strand, and I couldn't quite get it to snag on the tines, no matter which way I turned it. I had a brief urge to just bat the dangly end into place, but resisted; I'd get marinara on my fingers.
I was surprisingly hungry, despite the wistful hamburger cravings, and powered through half the pasta and all the garlic "cheesy bread" before I was somewhat sated. I glanced at the clock: 6:53. Yeah, no way were they coming, whatever their site said. I heaved a sigh, settled back in my chair, and took a long pull off my drink. Well, I had the evening free, at least; maybe I'd—
Out of nowhere, the doorbell rang. Oh damn it…! I lurched out of the chair, scrambled to my feet, stumbled and nearly tripped over myself sprinting out of the room, and got to the front door just in time to see a cherry-red glow of taillights° wash over the opposite wall as the truck lumbered out onto the street, and found a notice stuck to the door cheerily informing me that they'd just missed me – or more correctly, I thought, that I'd just missed them.
° (…damn it…?)
Gahhh. Well, nothing I could do now, though I briefly considered jumping in the Bug and running them down at the corner. And I'd frittered away the whole damn day for this, too… I groaned, shaking my head, and went inside. Might as well make the most of the remainder, now that I didn't have to keep an ear out; I put on some music and zoned out while I finished my dinner, letting it salve my irritation. Afterward, I took a minute to square away the dishes, returned to my desk, and fired up my MUD client.
I'd gotten into this back in college, for the same reason I sometimes played it at work: it helped fill my downtime but looked like work to the uninitiated. MUDs've always been fairly niche, and hadn't gotten less so over the years – these days, they were mostly a social hangout for furries and other fringe Internet subcultures – but my go-to was still fairly popular, and actually designed as a game.
I liked that, and especially the fact that it was much better balanced for solo play than modern MMORPGs. I didn't have to get involved with guilds or special events or anything else intended to coerce me into "social" behavior; I could just tromp around an imaginary world, living an imaginary life, tinkering with imaginary crafts, and tune out the stresses and concerns of reality…
…Or so I thought; but I tapped past the usual logon messages – reminders of upcoming events, the day's almanac for the magic-users out there, a notice about a mysterious scroll that'd turned up in my pack – to find myself standing in the town square with an argument going on around me that seemed to be approaching flamewar proportions. This was already unusual; the vibe here was much more low-key, good-natured, and relatively drama-free, which was another thing I liked about the place…
It took me several minutes of "overhearing" the public chat to figure out what was going on. Multiple players were arguing about someone else, who was absent but was being accused of breaking character (which wasn't a big deal, but was supposed to stay confined to private chat or designated areas) and dragging real-life drama into the game (which was considered to be in very poor taste, or even a bannable offense.)
The defenders countered that the accusers were being hypersensitive and reading too much into a perfectly legal use of game mechanics, that there'd been no real indication that it was a reference to current events, and that anyway it was every player's right to decide what to do with their character, subject to the official content policies. Both sides, by this point, were so deep into the argument that it was totally impossible to determine the context; I finally had to ask a fellow bystander what on Earth they were talking about.
As it turned out, the accused was one of the better-known regulars; not quite a pillar of the community, but somebody pretty much everyone knew of. Like myself, he played a crafting/artificing build; but he styled his character as a burly barbarian blacksmith, and cut about as recognizable a figure around the mercantile quarter of the city as one could in a text-based medium.
I didn't know him myself, but I kept up enough, "professionally," to know he'd recently hit the level cap. There'd been some speculation on what he'd go for when he "reincarnated" – meaning, in-game, that your character level was reset, but your stats were boosted substantially over a genuine first-level player, and you gained access to the advanced races and classes – but he hadn't indicated any plans to do so just yet.
To make a long story short, he'd been AWOL for a couple weeks, which was unusual for the regulars, and when he returned, he'd reincarnated as a female enchanter of the game's catfolk race. The new character bio had "her" as a petite catgirl witch who used to be a burly human barbarian until an experiment with wild magic went awry, resulting in a complete transformation.
I didn't know what to think, frankly. It wasn't hard to see why people might interpret that as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the effects of the virus, and coupled with the fortnight AFK, it certainly raised some questions about what might be going on with him IRL…
On the other hand, it seemed too planned-out to be something done spur-of-the-moment in reaction to outside events; the catfolk race wasn't one of the advanced ones, but it was a good fit for an enchanter build, with a reasonable intelligence score plus high dexterity and luck, and the boosted stats from reincarnating would mitigate most of its weaknesses.°
° (Aside from the unique susceptibility to certain kinds of herbs…)
Plus, the bit about "wild magic" was a clear attempt to make things lore-accurate – it was supposed to be a thing in-universe, and the "wizards" – as the devs and moderators liked to call themselves – were supposedly working on an update to implement it in-game. It'd be hard to make a case that something which was officially canon represented an unwelcome intrusion of reality° into the game…
° (Or what passed for "reality" these days, anyway.)
On the other other hand, the specificity of it was hard to ignore. In the middle of a global pandemic, with the world turned topsy-turvy and everyone talking about it, what were the odds that a "reincarnation" which just happened to match its effects and a revised bio that just happened to link the player's "before" and "after" states with a story about getting unexpectedly transformed would be a genuine coincidence? It didn't seem terribly plausible.
I even felt myself getting irritated – was it not enough for this stupid thing to upend every aspect of daily life and dominate public discourse out in the real world? Did it have to worm its way into my outlets for escapist fantasy? God, what next, were my favorite bands going to start recording themed charity singles? – but I tried to get my emotions under control. It wasn't fair to jump to conclusions like that, and as far as I could tell nobody had actually asked him/"her…"
At any rate, it wasn't much longer before one of the "wizards" showed up on the scene. They preferred to take a playful approach to moderation, and ultimately all involved were slapped with a minor curse that rendered anything they said in chat as comic gibberish. That was the end of it for the moment; probably they'd have a talk with them in private later, but that was none of my concern.
I left town and headed down a quiet back road towards a favorite spot to gather materials. My mood had soured a bit at having real-world drama dragged into what was usually such a nice space to just relax and forget about the real world, but it'd pass; I just needed to get out away from things for a bit, mellow out, get lost in my usual activities, and…
…oh, right. I'd forgotten about the mysterious scroll, in all the hubbub. I checked my inventory and indeed, there it was. This was how the "wizards" usually rolled out their announcements; there was a notice board in the town square, but a lot of people (myself included) didn't bother checking it.
I opened it and was informed that the update they'd been working on was finally out of testing and into release. There was a short rundown of the new features plus a list of minor fixes, but given the circumstances, I was mostly interested by the part where the "wild magic" system was finally part of the game mechanics. Not that it was something I'd been holding my breath for, but maybe it might prove useful for enchanting…?
Basically, it was another approach to spellcasting with the potential for much more powerful effects, but much less predictability. Normally, spell failure for magic-users meant nothing happened; or with a really critical failure, it might blow up in their face. But according to the lore, when you invoked raw, wild magic even successes weren't necessarily free of surprises, and with failures anything might happen to you…
Obviously, in-game that'd be limited to whatever the developers felt like implementing, but they were a creative bunch, and the rumors of possible consequences in the lore ranged from accidentally teleporting to a desert island to having your treasured armor set exchanged for a frog costume to your component atoms being scattered across the entire universe to turning into—
I stopped, glanced a little further down, blinked, and looked again. There, at the end of the message, was something that, I realized with a sigh, would never have been necessary six months ago:
Trigger warning: involuntary transformation.
"Of course, this'd be strictly voluntary," Bryce was saying. "It's important that we meet our commitments to our clients, but I want you guys to know that I'm—"
"—going to prioritize that over our own well-being." The audio glitched briefly; I was pretty sure there was supposed to be a "not" in the gap, but it hardly mattered. He was talking in concretely hypothetical terms about what we'd do if/when there was a reliable rapid-test kit for the virus, and how we could "safely" achieve a "return to normal" in our work arrangements and get the all-important site visits and client face time scheduled.
But no such test existed yet – though there were rumors of progress towards one – and we all knew he didn't have the stones to try and make us defy the lockdown orders, however much noise he made about "best practices." And, again, most of our clients were telecommuting these days and didn't need anything done on-site anyway…
(There were exceptions – we'd onboarded a building contractor just before the pandemic that had the single worst, most certifiably insane office network I'd ever seen, and half the work required us to be on-site as a result. I dreaded the day when anything went seriously wrong with them, because it'd probably take the better part of a week to sort it out.)
Curtis started on a long and winding trek towards actually saying something in response, and I tuned back out almost completely. That'd easily be the next few minutes, and this wasn't even a crucial meeting; it was the monthly financial/management overview, easily the least important thing we ever did, but Bryce insisted on wasting our time with it in the name of "transparency."
He seemed to believe it'd make us feel more invested in the company and somehow improve the bullshit metrics the golf buddies measured each other's (discreet cough) performance (discreet cough) with; but in reality, none of us saw this as anything more than a paycheck. We did our jobs, were compensated accordingly, and it paid the bills, which was all I really needed out of it; why did we have to pretend it meant more than that?
Hell, it even covered a few little indulgences here and there, when I decided I wanted them; one was sitting in my lap at this very moment. After missing it on Saturday, I'd been on high alert Monday, and caught the delivery ape at the door before he could bolt. One signature later, and I was finally in possession of a cheap but reasonably well-built Korean Telecaster clone.
I ran my fingers along the neck of the guitar; it felt good in my hand. With the strap off and my webcam angled upward, it was hidden from view, and if I kept myself muted and my poker face on, I could spend these wasted minutes/hours of my day picking out awkward attempts at familiar tunes instead of trying not to crack a smile while browsing Internet comedy sites. (Plus, it was easier to get into work mode afterwards if I wasn't caught in the depths of a Cracked binge.)
My fingers idly plucked at the top (bottom?) few strings; nope, that wasn't it. Close, but not it; so close that it'd be admitting defeat to just turn to Google for the iconic intro to "Stairway to Heaven…"°
° (So sue me – everyone does this when they first pick up the guitar, and if they say they didn't they're a dirty, dirty liar.)
I wasn't sure why I'd settled on this for a new hobby/cabin-fever suppressor; it'd better not be a sign of impending mid-life crisis, not when I'd yet to hit thirty. It was the first time I'd tried to pick up an instrument since a couple years of fumbling through piano lessons in middle school; that'd gotten me a basic grounding in music theory and a haphazard sense of rhythm (and a complete flameout of a recital at our church,) but that was about it.
My dad had tried to teach me, back in first grade; we'd never gotten anywhere, less because I wasn't interested than because I was a diminutive six-year-old trying to hold an acoustic guitar nearly as big as I was under my arm, stretch my little fingers across a neck about a mile wide, and hold down strings with enough tension to slice cheese on. I just couldn't do it; Dad was understanding when I gave up, but I always felt like we'd missed out because of it…
I was surprised how little trouble it gave me now. I was still stumbling my way around an unfamiliar layout and forcing my fingers through positions and motions I hadn't even attempted in decades, but the thin wooden slab sat comfortably under my arm, my fingers stretched around the neck with ease, and the strings didn't cut too deep into my flesh. Was it just because I was a grown man now? Or would it maybe have worked out, back when, if only I'd started off on an electric…?
Well, no point fretting over it.° Whatever it might've been, once upon a time, it was an interesting new exercise for my brain to tackle, a fun little way to entertain myself during boring, soul-crushing meetings, maybe even a new means of expressing myself (to…myself, I guessed.) Plus, I had to admit, I got a little frisson of illicit joy out of knowing I was doing it in a meeting and nobody was the wiser.
° (This was, at least, not any kind of cat pun, but my anti-pun reflexes were quick to fire lately…)
I felt a little guilty about that, but only a little; it wasn't like I had anything to contribute here anyway (besides staring and nodding,) and I wasn't letting it impact my actual job. If anything, it was good to keep my brain active so I could jump right back into the real work afterward, right…?
…okay, that last was a transparent excuse. But it was true that I was still doing my job, and from the way people talked online, I wasn't the only person struggling to stay good against the unique challenges of a work-from-home environment…
After considering that for a moment, I reached over to my personal laptop and quietly minimized the browser window with all the webcomics in it. Alright, it was a challenge, and I wasn't perfect, but the point was that I was keeping on top of things, and not being a distraction to—
"Mr. Robbins? Kit?"
I started. "Huh? Yeah? Oh, uh, hang on…" I said, realizing I was still muted. I reached up to un-mute myself and shifted in my chair – but I'd forgotten that I was balancing the fulcrum of a two-foot wooden lever on my lap. The headstock of the guitar banged against the underside of the desk, and I winced and clamped my other hand down on the strings to stop them vibrating.
I glanced back at the screen; the guys were struggling to keep from cracking up, but Bryce just looked mildly stunned. "Mr. Robbins?" he asked, in a bemused tone. "You okay there?"
"I'm fine," I said sheepishly, ears burning. "Chair just went funny on me. Nothing injured." Other than my pride… "Uh, what was the question, again?"
"Well, we were just hoping that you might have your car fixed by the time we're ready to start scheduling our BPAs again." He gave me a thin smile. "Any news on that front?"
It's not broken! I thought to myself, mild annoyance replacing my embarrassment; but I only shrugged. "Well, I've got a rebuild kit in the mail – should be able to get that knocked out one of these weekends, assuming shipping doesn't take a million years."
Sam chuckled. "I hear ya, bro. I'm still waiting on my new GPU."
Bryce nodded impatiently. "Great, great. It's important that we maintain our flexibility in uncertain times; we never know when our services will be needed. Remember that incident with Yuen's last summer."
I wasn't sure whether to object that A. Yuen's had temporarily shuttered their most problematic restaurants anyway (the problems for us were old buildings and old wiring, but now their problem was small buildings and dine-in restrictions) or B. that "that incident" was entirely due to someone (Curtis) working around a dead battery backup by plugging stuff into the wall and then forgetting to order a replacement 'til the power went out months later; so I said nothing.
It wasn't like we could talk him out of this fixation on things just magically going back to "normal" ASAP, after all. Not that I didn't want to – but anyone who identifies as a CEO is, by nature, the kind of person who thinks that if reality doesn't conform to their expectations of it, then reality should just get with the program already. I might as well argue my case to the wall as try to convince him that "normal" wasn't coming back any time soon…
Really, he'd probably be glad if we got hit, just so we could do on-sites again. I paused for a moment, surprised at my own bitterness, but…it wasn't meant personally. I didn't think Bryce was a sociopath, just permanently unmoored from reality, incapable of viewing events through any lens but the one that showed him what he wanted to see. If one of us ended up getting transformed, he would doubtless be offering "heartfelt" words of condolence and support in one breath, and asking when we could schedule those overdue BPAs in the next. Hell, I thought, he might give me a raise if I went out and—
I flinched, nearly knocking the guitar into the desk again; fortunately, I was muted this time, and nobody paid me any mind. I sighed; maybe I should've taken up some other hobby, something like philosophy or classical dialectics that might help me make sense out of a world which seemed increasingly mad. I felt the headstock gently, relieved that I hadn't damaged it. Well, I thought, at least this is cathartic…°
° (Damn it.)