May Season Studio Archives
by Gintare O.
PRECEDING FILES
Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation
Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock
She waited until Tuesday.
Monday had felt too eager. She did not want to walk into the basement looking like a person who had come down twenty minutes after a problem showed up. She wanted to walk in looking like a person who had had a routine issue and was submitting a routine ticket. It was the kind of distinction that mattered downstairs. She had learned that the last time.
Tuesday morning she filled out the ticket at 8:32. Category: data integrity. Subcategory: Ledger records missing. Description, one line: records I reviewed last week no longer appear in the system and my activity log does not show I accessed them. She hit submit.
The ticket confirmed itself with an autoreply and an appointment window. 10:00 to 10:15. Walk-in okay if she got there early.
She got there early.
She rode the elevator down. The elevator was the only reliable route to the lower levels. Certain stairwells stopped at ground. Others stopped at two. Nobody had ever explained this and Genny had stopped asking a long time ago. She had, if she was being honest, stopped noticing.
The elevator opened on a hallway she remembered.
Cold air. A buzz overhead that was slightly louder than the one on her floor. Recessed lighting. A T-intersection at the end. She turned right, toward the Tech Bar. She did not look at what was down the other direction. She had never looked at what was down the other direction. She was not going to start today.
The sign outside the door read the same as it had a year ago.
MAY SEASON STUDIO
END USER SUPPORT
TECH BAR. WALK INS WELCOME.
The tired-eyed smiley face someone had drawn next to it was still there. It had faded a little. Nobody had refreshed it.
She pushed the door open.
The Tech Bar was doing what the Tech Bar did. Tall counters. Rolling chairs. Labeled cables coiled on hooks. The dented coffee maker was clicking. Fall harvest decorations were up on the wall, orange garland and a paper cornstalk taped to the side of a filing cabinet. Somebody had committed. The theme was more aggressive than it needed to be.
Three techs were behind the counter. All in slate sweaters. All calm. She recognized one of them.
Rowan looked up as she stepped in.
“Genny.”
He said it before she said anything.
“Hi.”
“Product Classification. Thirty lifetime tickets. Missing records. Should take fifteen minutes.”
He said it the way he said everything, in the register of a person delivering weather. He turned a screen toward the second tech, who nodded, and then he took her laptop from her without her having offered it.
“Sit,” Rowan said.
She sat in the rolling chair that had been slid behind her while she was noticing the garland. The shorter tech had done it. She had not seen the shorter tech move.
Rowan opened her laptop. He did not ask her to log in. She was not sure whether he needed her to. The screen woke to her home directory. She watched it populate as though he were watching it too, though he was on a screen behind the counter she could not see.
“Ledger.”
“Yes.”
“Frank’s queue.”
“Yes.”
“Records you reviewed last Monday.”
“Yes.”
“Gone.”
“Yes.”
“Your activity log for that date does not show them.”
“Yes.”
“On the local cache or in the backend.”
“Both. Neither one shows I viewed them.”
Rowan did not look up. He was doing something with his own screen. The keys were quiet, or he was moving fingers over keys that were not there, or he was reading. She could not tell.
“Anything else been not working.”
She thought about this before answering.
She thought about the card.
She thought about the calendar app that was not on her phone.
She thought about the photograph that had never happened.
She thought about the notebook that had picked up a smell it had not lost and gained a second smell she had not named.
“No.”
Rowan nodded, once. He kept working.
He finished whatever he had been finishing.
“The records are not recoverable,” he said. “There is no record they existed. That is not the same as their not having existed. It is a limit of what our systems tell us.”
He phrased it like a policy statement.
“I understand.”
“We will file the ticket as resolved. Cause. User reports missing records. Resolution. No recovery possible. Note added. Recommend user document important queue findings in physical form when possible.”
She looked at him.
He was looking at his screen.
She looked back at her lap.
He closed the laptop. He slid it back toward her across the counter.
“Anything else.”
“No.”
“Signature.”
She signed the handheld. He thanked her. She stood up. The rolling chair was pulled from behind her by the shorter tech, who she had again not seen move. She stepped out from between the counter and the chair and picked up her laptop and started to turn.
Rowan reached under the counter and pulled out a granola bar.
He set it on the counter in front of her.
“For the walk back,” he said.
“Oh. Thanks.”
She picked it up. It was one of the chocolate chip ones. Her preferred flavor. She had not told them her preferred flavor at any point across her thirty lifetime tickets. She had simply, over four years, eaten enough of the ones she liked and left the ones she did not that the Tech Bar had, apparently, kept a note.
“We see a lot of stress eating in your part of the building lately.”
He said it as if it were a maintenance observation. As if he were telling her the third floor east side kept running hot.
He turned back to his screen.
She said thanks again. She left.
The elevator back up was empty. She rode alone, staring at the ceiling panel, holding the laptop against her chest with one arm and the granola bar in her other hand.
She did not unwrap it in the elevator. She did not unwrap it in the lobby. She did not unwrap it in the hallway.
She sat back down at her cube at 10:23. Karen was in a meeting. Dale was on a call. Blake was doing the thing Blake did, which was to be at his desk in a way that suggested he had never left.
She set the laptop on the docking station. She sat. She put the granola bar on her desk in front of her keyboard.
She looked at it.
The wrapper was the standard wrapper. Yellow. The brand she recognized. The barcode in the corner. Nothing wrong with it that a wrapper could show from the outside.
She peeled the top open along the seam. She pulled the bar out an inch and set it back on the desk. She turned the wrapper over so the inside was facing her.
There was writing on the inside of the wrapper.
Pencil. Small block capitals. She recognized the hand.
It was Frank’s.
STOP OPENING FILES AFTER SIX.
She read it three times, the way she had read the card, the way she read anything now that mattered. It did not become five words. It did not become nine.
She turned the wrapper back over. She slid the granola bar back into it. She rewrapped the top the way it had been.
She did not eat it.
She got the notebook out of her drawer. She opened it to a fresh page and wrote the date at the top. On the next line she wrote, in careful letters: 6 PM.
Then, underneath: Tuesday. Tech Bar. Rowan.
She closed the notebook. She put the granola bar on top of the notebook. She closed the drawer.
She put her headphones on.
She did not play anything through them.
She thought about the fact that Frank had, at some point during the eleven years he had been at MSS, made friends with the Tech Bar.
She thought about what a person had to be doing to need friends in the Tech Bar.
She thought about Rowan.
She thought about the second tech, who she had not really seen, who had slid the chair behind her, and behind her again, and had written nothing on a sticky note the whole time, and had watched her the whole time.
She started her queue.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
at may season studio, end user support resolves the majority of tickets within one visit. technicians may add recommendations to the resolution note. these are advisory and are not tracked.
written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The Tech Bar has been visited before. The service is consistent.
Begin with:
Service Request - an earlier ticket, another trip to the basement, the same slate sweaters
Now Live: Incident Intake, Modernized - what IT Services says about its own systems
The Standing Order - the case for keeping the important records on paper
Part nine arrives next Friday.
Peter Thiel would be proud of the Tech Bar, and of Frank-stealthy Frank.