The Ministry for Communication Oversight

At the Ministry for Communication Oversight, our union is kind of shit. Not that it sucks completely, it just means our breaks aren’t as long as other ministries.

“Hey Joe, check this story I heard,” Generally everybody tries to be as cagey as possible about the communications we hear. Ronny doesn’t really care. Unless the district manager is inspecting, there’s no way you can keep his trap shut.

“Ronny, you really shouldn’t be telling me other people’s business…but go ahead,” I said, dying of interest.

“So there was this couple, I think. They clearly had some kind of split or divorce or something. I got assigned the call and I thought that I had been given the wrong call because they were arguing straight away.”

“Okay, I get five marital issues every day. What’s the big deal?”

“No, this is even better. I checked my other monitor and the call had been going on for as long as I was listening. These two somehow knew exactly what to yell at each other about the instant the call was started.”

I was taken aback, “Like…they just started arguing about the same thing straight away?”

“Yeah dude, it was insane. I’m surprised they were even splitting in the first place, they clearly know each other damn well.”

I chuckled as I sipped my coffee, “Maybe they’re psychic. I mean, if I could read someone’s thoughts 24/7 I would probably want to kill them as well.”

“Yeah, maybe.” In characteristic Ronny way, he started stuffing the communal office biscuits into his face. We spend a lot of money on biscuits, most of it goes to Ronny.

“What were they even arguing about?” I asked

“Well, honestly, I haven’t got the clearest fucking idea. It was something about forty strippers an-”

I snorted, spilling coffee onto the small worker’s table, “Wait, forty? As in, not four? Forty?”

“Yeah, I had to do a double take but I played it back five times, she said forty. There were also a lot of other weird details. She said he ‘killed’ their dog and then he was arguing he was a ‘casualty’ or something.”

I took a moment to think as he shovelled more biscuits into his face. What even? I asked myself, “What safety rating did you give them? How do you even rate that?”

“I sent it to the manager, no way in hell am I touching that again.”

My phone alarm buzzed in my pocket and I downed my coffee as quick as I could, “I gotta get back to it.”

“Wait,” Ronny said, standing up with me, “You got any good stories as well?”

“Well…I really don’t wanna-”

“Oh come on. Inspection day isn’t for another few months, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

I smiled, “Okay, fine. But my break is over so maybe when we’re clocking out, I also had a really weird one.”

Ronny pumped his fist, “Yes! You’re a man of your word so no takesies backsies.”

“Alright,” I murmured, leaving the tiny break room and Ronny, who was really getting in the habit of more loosely interpreting how long his breaks are. The familiar grey walls plastered with familiar grey cubicles greeted me. I walked the same distance to my cubicle I had since day one: Fifty rows back, thirteenth from the left.

I sat down onto an uncomfortable stack of papers where the uncomfortable seat of my chair should have been. Somebody dropped this off and knew I wouldn’t get to it if it was in my in tray, which was somewhere between overflowing and a complete disaster zone. I turned around and picked up the fat stack of papers, ‘Survey of Employee Satisfaction’…shit.

This had been going on for the last month now, as part of the ‘wellness’ program. It was bad enough I had to haul my medium-sized ass to the old office room repurposed as an exercise room every second day, but every week we had to fill out this stupid survey. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it was massive and all of our opinions had already been filled out.

It had the same ‘How have you been feeling lately’ and ‘Do you have trouble sleeping’ kind of questions, but all had been pre-filled with ‘Great’ and ‘Not at all, I love the Ministry for Communication Oversight’ answers. What we did? Sign and initial every page and send it back. If we did anything but sign and initial every page we would be sent to the weeklong ‘Happiness Acceleration’ program, which by most accounts has a 100% suicide rate.

Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Signature, sign. Sig- wait, that’s the desk. I rubbed out the black pen mark from my black desk and dropped the forms in my outbox. Jenny from HR, she knows I get more shit done if she drops forms off anywhere but my desk.

I leaned back in my chair with my hands behind my head. This is my small and only form of corporate rebellion: I take a few extra minutes after my break to sit back and listen to the sounds of nature. Not outside nature, god no. The closest window to my office is fifty cubicles away and about thirty eight floors up. I listen to the natural sounds of the office. The millions of tinny phone conversations bleeding out from our cheap shitty headphones, the clacking of keyboards making notes from voice and text conversations. The…wait it’s been ten minutes, shit.

I opened the work tool on my second monitor. Despite it being the present day, you would think you entered a time machine as soon as you entered this office. Our monitors are still bulky off-white CRTs that take up half the desk space. The program we use to work looks and probably was designed in the 90s; with it’s use of plain rectangles and terrible font and logo that the ministry is so fucking proud of that it needs to plaster it on every menu.

And, that’s it. That’s where my life will end, where most of my life probably will go. This little menu that can’t even go fullscreen. The one where I read or listen to conversations through the same shitty headset and give each person the same safety rating.

George is seeming a bit tired lately, 1.

Have you ever really LOOKED at your hands? 1.

I feel like I could eat an entire family-sized pizza myself right now. 2, possible drug use.

And then, I got one call. It was unusual because I mostly do IM stuff, I can’t really be arsed to do more than read and listen to music. Management knew this, and gave me IM conversations to graciously bore me to death with. But I got assigned a call, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of the phone number. I had never seen that area code in my life, and the rest of the number was just a series of symbols.

I turned the volume down on my music and started listening in on the call, and jesus fucking christ.

“YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A MAN-WHORE! YOU HEAR ME?”

“I HEAR YOU LOUD AND CLEAR, BITCH. WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO QUESTION MY AUTHORITY IN THIS HOUSEHOLD.”

“I WANT YOU TO ROT IN HELL, YOU HEAR ME? I WANT YOU TO DIE AND MAKE EVERYONE’S LIVES A LITTLE BIT BETTER.”

I started zoning out a little, trying to follow the weird narrative these people were shouting about. There were more colourful details, like how the man had maxed out their credit cards and the woman was carrying another man’s twins. They just kept coming like a machine gun firing things to argue about.

“AND JUST SO YOU KNOW, I WAS THE ONE WHO KILLED YOUR DOG,” Wait, what?

“I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THOSE FORTY STRIPPERS AT YOUR BACHELOR PARTY YOU CRUSTY MOTHERFUCKER,” This is Ronny’s couple, are they arguing about this again?

I was going to give this a safety rating somewhere between an attempted murder and a terrorist threat but in the end; I figured giving this any more thought may mean I lose my remaining brain cells and I sent it to the manager. Maybe he’ll get a clearer picture if both mine and Ronny’s conversations are played back to back.