I’m posting this one now as my internet connection is still up. Others will follow throughout the day, but between family demands and my ISP’s lack of cooperation, I can’t do them on a regular schedule.
The ads Willow found said that Ashiana Industries conducted walk-in interviews for entry level positions beginning with its 8 a.m. shift. So early the next morning, Buffy stepped off the Sunndydale municipal bus in front of the long, low, almost offensively boring building that housed the corporation. It was located outside of town, apparently to afford lots of parking space around the building and to make it difficult for people without cars to get to work. She stepped up to the large glass doors of the nearby entrance, to be stopped by a sign announcing, “Employees with security badges only.”
A few people who had ridden out on the bus with her leaned over to swipe the badges they wore around their necks against a small black box near the door handle. The door clicked and let them in.
Buffy grabbed the handle, but it had locked after the others. Another young woman hurried up and swiped a badge.
“Can you let me in?” Buffy asked.
The woman shook her head, shocked. “I’d be fired,” she said and hurried through the door.
Buffy was left outside, wondering how one got inside long enough to become an employee with badge and the right to be inside. A car pulled up in the space next to the entrance, and she turned to look at the driver, wondering why there was an empty spot so close to the door.
“Hi!” A tall, lanky young man jumped out of an elderly Chevy, his pimpled face shining with welcome. He was wearing a blue shirt emblazoned with the Ashiana logo.
“Hi,” said Buffy cautiously. “Maybe you can help me? I’m looking for Human Resources.” She noticed a sign in front of the newcomer’s car. “Reserved for Employee of the Month.”
“You’re looking for a job here? Sure I’ll help!” He waved at the sign. “This is a great place to work if you like to work. They give you all kinds of rewards and stuff. He tried to puff out his chest. “That’s how I got this shirt. It was a Customer Service Award.”
“Oh?” Buffy followed him down the sidewalk away from the door. “Where are we going?”
“There’s an entrance near HR with a security guard. Letting someone with a badge in any other door is Against the Rules. It’s Against the Rules to park without an employee sticker either. You didn’t do that, did you?”
“No, I came on the bus.”
“Really? Hey, if you get a job and you don’t have a car, maybe you can carpool with me. I’m working on some ecology stuff for the Citizenship Award, and I could get some points for that. I’m Harry, by the way.”
“Buffy.”
“Cool name.” Harry beamed at her. He seemed almost supernaturally happy for someone showing up for work before 9 a.m.
Buffy increased the space between them. “I hope I won’t make you late.”
“Not at all. I’m always extra early, just in case. Don’t want to lose points on the Attendance Awards! That gets you gift certificates for donuts, you know. Besides, if you tell me your full name, I can tell HR I’m referring you, and if I refer three people in a month, I get a Referral Bonus. Twenty dollars. Can I tell them that?”
“Sure. Buffy Summers.” Much to Buffy’s relief, they had reached the main entrance, where Harry presented her to a security guard and a receptionist as if she were a prize animal he’d brought for show at a 4-H Fair. He then went off down a hallway, nodding and smiling at everyone he met, and left Buffy to take a clipboard full of forms from the reassuringly bored receptionist.
Buffy shifted uneasily in the uncomfortable plastic chair provided for job applicants at Ashiana Industries. She tried to smile perkily and failed. So she mentally reviewed the previous night’s activities and tried again. She had learned that it was easier to act eager during job interviews when you felt truly desperate.
I don’t just need this job to investigate demonic activity. I need the money. And it’s almost a dollar more an hour than the last place!
The last place that had fired her, that was. And Spike had managed to get fired last night too. Which was kind of her fault. I didn’t mean to kick that gearshift thing in his cab. So it’s not really my fault. Spike shouldn’t have been, uh, distracting me. She felt an involuntary wince of remembrance pass over her features as last night’s spectacular crash rang in her ears. At least we didn’t hurt anyone who wasn’t already dead. And he said his leg would be better by this morning.
Now she had to figure out how to make the mortgage payment with both her and Spike out of work. She had resisted taking his money for a while, but he’d pointed out that he ate her food, watched her TV, used her washer and dryer, and—more recently—climbed through her window after the others had gone to sleep and used her bed. So it only seemed reasonable that he should pay his share, especially when Willow always seemed to have some excuse not to, like needing to buy a new textbook or grimoire for research, and Dawn was growing and eating like there was no tomorrow.
So Buffy forced herself to respond to stupid statements like, “Tell me about yourself.”
Well, I’m good at surviving death, which should be an asset in this company.
“Well, I have some college, and it wasn’t really my fault I dropped out. I mean, I’m planning on going back maybe part-time, but I need—I mean, I want to get some real experience first.”
That was stupid. Way to say, “I’m not going to stick around, succka!” But something about the non-blinking stare of the middle-aged woman behind the desk made it very hard to think of anything more positive.
The HR representive looked down at Buffy’s resume. “Why did you leave your last job?”
Buffy remembered green blood and someone shrieking at her to get out and never, ever come back again. “Uh—there was a restructuring after my boss, uh, also stopped working there.” Buffy shifted her position again, tugging down on her short skirt and thinking she might look more efficient and trustworthy if her clothes and her knees weren’t such strangers. But she couldn’t afford new clothes.
“How do you handle conflict?”
“Uh— Pretty well. It’s kind of my area of expertise, really.”
The woman seemed to expect more, but Buffy was unable to think of an adequate way to expand on this. Her interrogator shut the file, picked up a pencil, and started making notes on a pad. Buffy shrank down in her chair as the scratching went on and on. Just when she was prepared to get up and slink out the door, the woman looked up and said, “Oh,” as if she’d forgotten Buffy were there. But then she added, “We need a temporary worker on a special project. Fill out this packet and give the forms to Rachel at the reception desk. You can start this afternoon.”
“Oh, thanks.” Buffy had taken the papers and was halfway back to the waiting room when she thought to ask, “Um, how long does it last?”
The woman was perusing another file and didn’t bother to look up. “As long as Melandra Harbottle needs you and you can stand working for her.”
Well, at least I have a job. Buffy would have been more relieved if she hadn’t gotten the impression that the woman would have hired anyone who was still breathing. Buffy wondered if the assignment was that bad, or if it was just the attrition rate of the staff that made the recruiter desperate.
Several hours later, Buffy had been fingerprinted, drug tested, photographed, and submitted to a mind-numbing video that talked about Ashiana Industries at great length without actually explaining what it was the company did. Buffy gathered that that they performed various kinds of work for various other companies, but she still had no idea exactly what she would be doing at her job.
She had then been left to sit in the HR waiting room for a half hour until the mysterious Melandra Harbottle sent up a representative to show her around and bring her to her new work area. Sometime after Buffy had brought herself up-to-date on the latest marriages, births and divorces in the entertainment world and been reduced to reading an even more boring discussion of the problems certain corporations were having with their own mergers and acquisitions, a newly familiar voice said, “Hi!”
Harry was beaming down at her. “You’re going to be in my work group! They needed someone to get you so I volunteered!”
What a surprise.
He threw out his arm in a welcoming gesture. “I get to show you all around first. I would have been here sooner, but I was finishing up some work tickets. I have myself on a quota each day so that I can get the Productivity Award at the end of the month. Come on! Wait until you see the cafeteria! Do you have any change? They just put in a new machine that vends tacos and ramen so you don’t have to eat Snickers bars if you forget your lunch.”
Buffy followed him down the hallway, swiping her brand-new employee badge as they passed through a security door. “Can’t you go out for lunch?”
“I suppose. But it’s only a half-hour and there’s no place to eat near here, so you’d probably be late getting back, and you wouldn’t want that to happen.” At the thought of lateness, the first worried look Buffy had ever seen on Harry’s countenance appeared. Then he smiled again. “But everything you need is right here! There’s an ATM and even a dry cleaners that delivers here. And once a week, a pizza place delivers lunch. Just two dollars a slice, and if you have enough Promptness Points, you can earn gift certificates for those.”
“Gee, I wonder why you ever go home.” Buffy looked around, trying to get her bearings in a sea of identical cubicles. Every few hundred yards, these were broken by walls that seemed to contain blocks of offices. Then more cubicles, then more offices. As far as the eye could see.
He seemed to seriously consider her statement. “Well, sometimes I do too, but if I lived here, how would I use my special parking space? I’ve had it three months running, you know.”
“Well, that’s—special.”
Harry showed off the cafeteria, a bland room bordered with vending machines and populated with tables, plastic chairs, and a few depressed-looking people sipping cups of coffee. Motivational posters with pictures of places those people would never see and exciting things they’d never do covered the walls. “There’s a coffee fund too. Just fifteen cents a cup! And sometimes they push all the tables back to make a stage and there’s entertainment by the staff during lunch. There’s a Talent Show next week. I’m going to do my stand-up routine again. It’s won the past two years. I have my own rubber chicken. This year, the trophy’s even bigger, and the first prize comes with a gift certificate for an order of French fries from the Doublemeat Palace.” He peered down at her. “They let temporary employees participate.”
Buffy shook her head. “No, thanks, I’m kind of in a ‘been there, done that,’ place when it comes to talent shows.”
“Well, I always appreciate competition, but I understand if you don’t want to participate.” Harry’s voice sounded more relieved than disappointed, but Buffy didn’t envy him his stand-up glory. She trotted along behind him as he pointed at various departments for things like Marketing and Software Development.
But when Harry led Buffy past another wide doorway without commenting on it. Buffy slowed and stopped. In a huge room, dozens of workers huddled in the tiniest cubicles she had ever seen, each barely wide enough to hold a computer. Most of the people inside were hunched over their keyboards, talking earnestly into headsets as they stared at their computer screens.
Harry noticed that Buffy had stopped. “Don’t worry. If you’re careful, you’ll never have to go in there.”
Buffy heard a strange, horror-struck note in her guide’s voice. She continued to stare at the mumbling people with their dead, blank stares. She shuddered. Something in their expressions reminded her of the faces she had seen when she descended into Hell to rescue the street kids in Los Angeles.
“I don’t want to. But I have to know. What goes on in there?”
Harry shivered. “Telemarketing.”
Buffy moved hastily away from the doorway.
In Chapter Three, Buffy finds out what Spike’s been up to.
Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/26380.html
