THE DESIGNATED LOCATION
a brand compliance follow-up to a facilities notice
May Season Studio Archives
by Gintare O.
The notice arrived on a Monday morning from Facilities and Workplace Services. The subject line was Reminder: Smoke-Free Campus Policy.
Maribel Ortiz read it at 9:06.
It said the campus was a smoke-free environment. It said smoking was not permitted anywhere on campus. Then it said there were two designated locations where smoking was permitted.
She read it again.
The second reading did not help.
She checked for an amendment. Some notices at MSS were revised within the hour, quietly, with no acknowledgment that a first version had existed. This one had not been revised.
She checked the intranet. The policy page matched the email exactly. Both statements were present. Both were formatted the same way. Neither was footnoted.
Maribel considered replying to ask.
She did not reply.
She had learned, over eight months, that asking a question in writing was how a person became a topic.
Maribel did not smoke. Nor has she ever tried it or been around anyone that did.
Her interest was structural. And this email did not make sense. A rule that contradicted itself in two consecutive sentences implied something. Either the campus was smoke-free and the designated locations were an error, or the designated locations were real and the campus was not smoke-free. Both statements could not be operational.
Unless they could.
That was the part she wanted to understand.
MSS encouraged short walks as a form of ‘well-being and balanced lifestyle’. There was a page about it. Fifteen minutes, twice daily, as schedule permits. Maribel took hers at 2:15, when the floor emptied for a recurring meeting she was not on.
On Wednesday she walked toward the West garage.
She took the long side of the building, past the loading area, then along the walkway where smoking was also not permitted, and approached from the north, the way a person would if they happened to be passing.
She was not passing. But the route supported the interpretation.
The designated location was less than she expected.
A rectangle of pavement beside the garage entrance. Nine feet by twelve, roughly. No canopy. No bench. One receptacle, waist high, steel, with a perforated lid that struck her as decorative for what it was.
No signage. Nothing indicating that this rectangle was the location in question, or that the pavement around it was not.
The boundary was implied.
She noted that.
A man was standing in it.
He was in his fifties. Windbreaker over a company polo. His lanyard was tucked into his chest pocket the way people did when they wanted to be slightly less identifiable.
He was smoking.
Maribel stopped at the edge of the rectangle. Not inside it.
“Is this the designated location?” she asked.
He looked at her. “Yeah.”
“Both of them or one of them?”
He paused. “One of them.”
“The West one.”
“Yeah.”
She nodded and wrote nothing down, which she recognized too late was worse than writing something down.
“How long have you been smoking?” she asked.
He glanced at the cigarette. “Like four minutes.”
“I meant in total.”
He was quiet for a second. “Are you from HR?”
“Brand Compliance.”
That was worse. She watched it land.
He held the cigarette away from his body at an angle that suggested it was no longer his.
“I’m not here about you,” Maribel said.
“Okay.”
“I would like to understand your decision-making.”
He straightened. He said he had been coming out here eleven years. He said he clocked it against his break and never went over. He said he never used the walkway. He said he always used the receptacle, every time, and that he had never once thrown one in the mulch.
“That was Terry,” he said.
Maribel nodded.
“The notice says the campus is smoke-free,” she said.
“Right.”
“And that smoking is not permitted anywhere on campus.”
“Right.”
“You are on campus.”
He looked at the pavement. Then at the receptacle. Then, briefly, at the garage, as though checking whether it had moved.
“There’s a spot, though,” he said.
“Yes.”
“So.”
“So what?” Maribel said.
They stood with that.
He put the cigarette out. There were two thirds of it left. He did it carefully, against the inside of the lid of the receptacle, and dropped it in, and did not look at her while he did it.
“You can finish,” Maribel said.
“I’m good.”
“I am not reporting this.”
“Ok?”
She had one more question and she knew, in the way she was learning to understand things, that she should not ask it.
“Does it taste good?”
He looked at her fully for the first time.
“No,” he said.
“Then why do you smoke?”
He thought about it longer than she expected.
“I get eleven minutes out here where nobody talks to me,” he said.
Maribel processed that.
It was, structurally, the clearest thing anyone at MSS had said to her in eight months.
“I’ll go,” she said.
“I appreciate it.”
She walked back the long way, past the loading area, along the walkway where smoking was not permitted.
By Thursday, word had moved through Receiving that Brand Compliance was monitoring the West location. By Friday it had reached Engineering. The account varied. In one version she had a clipboard. In another she had asked him to spell his name.
Use of the West receptacle dropped for eleven days.
Facilities logged the reduction. In the quarterly summary it appeared as evidence that the reminder had been effective.
Maribel filed nothing. There was nothing to file. But then again, she wasn’t HR or Facilities but Brand Compliance (which was part of Marketing).
The campus was smoke-free.
There were two designated locations where smoking was permitted.
Both statements remained accurate.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
at may season studio, policy effectiveness is measured quarterly. use of the west receptacle declined for eleven days. the reminder was effective.
written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.
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