Page 32.5

“You will contact me as soon as he arrives then,” said Lt. Jones.

“Yes Sir.”

Lt. Jones turned on his heels and returned to his office.

The fact that Maurice was not at work the very day he went to see him seemed odd. Upon arriving at his own office, Lt. Jones checked the employee database for Mr. Blue’s first name. No such name existed in Z-Tech’s M.O.B. computers.

‘Was it possible Ms. Skipper lied to me?’ he thought. ‘Surely not. Lying is specifically forbidden under section 43C-2M of the official Z-Tech Employee Handbook.’

One of Lt. Jones’ secondary functions in the M.O.B. was updating the Rules and Regulations of the handbook as well as adding new ones. When he began the job, the handbook consisted of a twenty page folder that collected dust in a dark corner of the M.O.B. employee lounge. Workers sometimes opened it just long enough to rip out one of the ‘intentionally left blank’ pages for use as a coffee filter. The current edition consisted of 457 pages of crisp, clean, double-spaced, MLA-formatted, waterproof, tabbed, 32-lb, 100% cotton paper complete with an atlas, glossary, and partial concordance.

In his free time, Lt. Jones was working on a final section concerning his suggestions about how employees could optimize their own free time while on company time-thus saving the company time by shunting personal time to work time. The new section would be called ‘Ponderations’ and was to be written in a manner similar to a telephone directory/Aesop’s Fables hybrid. It was a work-in-progress requiring his own specialized expertise that he believed…well who knew what the Lieutenant believed. I’m only the writer of this story and Lt. Jones was in another world.