May Season Studio Archives
by Gintare O.
PRECEDING FILES
Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation
Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock
Onboarding / 08 / The Tech Bar
She followed the warning.
She was already closing everything at 4:55. She was already logged out of Ledger by 4:57. She was already standing up from her desk at 4:59 and out of the building by 5:04. She had been doing this for weeks. What Frank’s note had asked of her was not, therefore, a new habit. It was the habit she already had, in writing, from somebody who had thought she needed to keep having it.
She kept having it.
She did not log in from home. She did not check her work email on her phone. She did not open the notebook at her desk. The notebook lived in the drawer, on top of the granola bar, which sat there wrapped as she had left it.
She did not think about the loading dock.
She did not think about the truck.
She did not think about Frank.
She did think about him. She thought about him quietly, at home, at the kitchen counter, with the notebook closed in front of her. She thought about him the way a person thinks about somebody they had known well enough to feel bad about not knowing better. She had not thought Frank was her friend. She had thought Frank was somebody she worked near. Both of those had been true and neither was fully true anymore.
Nine days passed.
At the office nothing happened.
Karen worked on Blake. Karen worked on Dale, more gently. Karen worked on her queue, which she did on the days when she was not working on other people. Dale was doing well. Blake was doing what Blake did. The office ran.
On the sixth day of the nine, Karen came to her cube.
Genny braced. Karen came to a cube for one of three reasons and none of them were pleasant.
Karen was holding a printout.
“Genny.”
“Yes.”
“This is the Halloran deck. The section on cold weather packaging.”
“Okay.”
“You used Helvetica for the section headers. I would use Helvetica Neue Light. It’s cleaner. I think it will land better.”
Karen said this gently. It was not a lecture. It was not a correction. It was an observation from one professional to another.
She waited for Genny to respond.
“I’ll change it. Thanks.”
“Great.”
Karen left.
Genny sat with her hands on the desk for a full minute after Karen was gone.
Karen being gentle at her was worse than Karen being sharp at her. Karen being sharp at her was, at least, Karen. Karen being gentle at her was somebody else operating a Karen.
She put on her headphones.
She did not play anything through them.
She did the font change.
On the seventh day, a calendar invite arrived at 11:14 AM.
Sender: Christina.
Subject: Wellness Check-In.
Duration: 20 minutes.
Location: Conference Room 4C.
Time: Friday, 3:00 PM.
Body: Hi Genny. Just a quick touch-base to see how you’re doing. Please confirm.
Genny read the invite twice.
She did not confirm.
She opened the shared drive. The MSS building had five floors. The floor plans, printed as PDFs and kept on the shared drive, showed all conference rooms on each floor. She opened the floor plan for floor 3. It had 3A, 3B, 3C, and 3D. She opened the floor plan for floor 5. It had 5A and 5B. She looked for floor 4. The shared drive had a placeholder PDF for floor 4, but the PDF was a page-sized outline of the building footprint with nothing inside it. No rooms. No labels. No hallways.
Conference Room 4C did not appear on any floor plan that existed.
She closed the PDFs. She still did not confirm.
At 2:45 Friday, the meeting rescheduled to Tuesday at 2:00 PM.
At 1:47 Tuesday, the meeting rescheduled to Thursday at 8:00 PM.
She read the update twice. Then she opened a reply.
Hi Christina, she wrote. 8 PM is outside my usual hours. Would it be possible to meet during the workday? Please let me know if there’s any flexibility.
She hit send at 1:49.
Christina replied at 1:51.
Hi Genny, so sorry for the shifting. Unfortunately the earlier windows are all booked through end of month. Thursday evening was the last availability I had. It should only take twenty minutes. Thanks for making it work.
Genny read the reply.
It was a reasonable email. It sounded like the emails HR people sent when their calendars were full. It sounded, in fact, like every reply to every calendar conflict Genny had ever seen at any company where she had ever worked.
It was also, she noticed, the most Christina had ever said to her in writing.
She thought about pushing back again. She thought about asking whether the check-in could move to next week. She thought about how a person who was hiding something looked when they declined a wellness check-in after two reschedules and a polite email exchange. She thought about the fact that meetings do not usually move, and about the fact that this one had moved twice, and about the fact that Christina was, for the first time, being wordy.
She confirmed the Thursday 8:00 PM slot at 3:41 Tuesday afternoon.
Thursday she left the building at 5:04, drove home, ate dinner, and drove back at 7:15. She parked in her regular row. The parking lot was mostly empty. She badged into the building through the side entrance, which was open until midnight. Her badge worked. That was, in a way, information.
She sat in her car until 7:40 with the notebook on her lap, unopened.
Then she went in.
She took the elevator up to floor 3. She walked the third floor from end to end. There was no Conference Room 4C. There was 3A through 3D, exactly as the floor plan had shown. She checked the meeting room reservation panels on the wall next to each. None showed a Wellness Check-In at 8:00 PM. None showed her name.
She took the stairs to floor 5.
There was no Conference Room 4C. There was 5A and 5B, both dark. She checked the reservation panels. Nothing.
She stood in the hallway of floor 5. It was 7:53 PM.
She thought about pressing the elevator call button and getting off between floors. She thought about how you would do that. She did not know how you would do that.
She got back in the elevator. She looked at the panel.
The panel had buttons for 1, 2, 3, and 5. It had a button for G, and a button for B. Between 3 and 5 there was a gap where a fourth-floor button would have been, if the fourth floor existed on the panel, which it did not, and had not, in her four years of riding the elevator.
There was a mark in the gap tonight.
It was not a button. It was not raised. It was a faint discoloration in the metal, roughly the size and shape of a button, exactly where the fourth-floor button would have been.
She looked at it.
She did not touch it.
She pressed 3.
The elevator went down to 3. The doors opened. Nobody was in the hallway. She stepped out and walked to Conference Room 3B and looked in. It was empty. She walked to Conference Room 3D. Also empty. She turned around and went back to the elevator.
Her phone buzzed.
Meeting cancellation. Sender: Christina. Subject line: Wellness Check-In has been withdrawn. Time stamp: 8:00 PM.
She stood in the hallway of floor 3 with her phone in her hand. It was 8:00 PM on her phone.
She got back in the elevator at 8:01. She pressed G.
She was going to look at the mark just once and then not again.
The mark was glowing.
Not brightly. The kind of glow you noticed only because the elevator was dim and the mark was slightly warmer than the surface around it. A faint softness, the way a phone screen glows through a pocket.
Nobody had pressed anything.
She had not pressed anything.
The elevator started down. She watched the mark. She was going to stop watching it. She kept watching it. She was going to look away. She looked at it.
The doors opened at G. The mark was no longer glowing.
She stepped out.
The lobby clock said 9:02.
She had gotten into the elevator on floor 3 at 8:01. She had ridden three floors down.
She checked her phone. Her phone said 9:02.
She walked out to her car.
She sat in the car for a while before she started it. She did not feel afraid, exactly. She felt the specific quiet that came from something having happened that would not fit in any of the categories she filed things into. She had, in her life, lost fifteen minutes on occasion, or twenty. She had never lost an hour and been able to say where she had lost it.
She drove home.
She stood in her kitchen with the notebook open on the counter and did not write anything for a long time. Then she wrote the date and, on the next line, only: elevator, 8:01 to 9:02. She closed the notebook.
She got in bed. She lay in the dark for a while and eventually slept.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
at may season studio, wellness check-ins are offered to all employees and are entirely voluntary. rooms are booked based on availability. the floor plans on the shared drive are current.
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 building has five floors. This has been documented elsewhere.
Begin with:
HR Advisory: Sustained Visual Engagement - guidance on what employees should not look at, and for how long
The Annual Review - another meeting, another twenty minutes, another room
The Company That Regulates Reality - the premise, stated by the company, which helps here
Part ten arrives next Friday.
Ooooo, something is up. That is just creepy.