THE RETIREMENT OF DENNIS CALL

internal social correspondence

May Season Studio Archives

by Gintare O.

The email had come from HR three weeks earlier with the subject line: Celebrating Dennis! and a clipart image of balloons that had not rendered correctly on Paul’s monitor, showing up instead as two gray rectangles and a question mark.

He had marked it as attended and moved on.

The party was in the third floor conference room, the big one they used for all-hands that nobody liked because the air conditioning ran too cold and the chairs were stackable. Someone had pushed the tables to one side and covered them with a paper tablecloth in MSS oxblood that was slightly too short, showing an inch of folding table on each end. There was a sheet cake. There was a row of water bottles and cans of soda. There was a banner that said HAPPY RETIREMENT DENNIS in individual letters spaced unevenly, so the N at the end was closer to the wall than to the S.

Paul got there at 1:07, seven minutes after it started. He took a piece of cake he did not want and stood near the window.

Dennis was near the door shaking hands. Paul had worked under him for about fourteen months when Dennis was running the risk adjacency side of product development, before the reorg that moved him to Creative Operations and then again to something in Brand Alignment that Paul had never fully tracked. They had gotten along fine. Paul had no strong feelings about him in either direction.

He was working on the cake, which was dry, when the woman appeared next to him.

She was looking at the banner.

“The spacing,” she said.

Paul looked at the banner. “Yes.”

“Someone did that by hand. You can tell because the D and the E are too close together and there’s too much space before the N. If you’re going to do it by hand you should measure first.”

“Sure,” Paul said.

She looked at his cake. “Is it dry.”

“A little.”

“It’s always dry when they order from that place. There’s a better option at the same price point. I’ve mentioned it twice.” She looked back at the banner. “Karen,” she said, not quite extending her hand.

“Paul.”

“Which department.”

“Risk and Analysis. Product side.”

She nodded. “I was in Dennis’s group for about two years when he was on the fourth floor. Before Creative.”

“I had him in product development.”

“He was different in product development,” she said. “More decisive.”

“He was fine when I had him,” Paul said.

“Fine is different from decisive.”

Paul ate some cake and did not respond to that.

Across the room Dennis was laughing at something. Someone had given him a card he was holding but hadn’t opened. The punch bowl ladle had slid in again and nobody was fixing it.

“Do you know what he’s doing after,” Karen asked.

“Consulting, I think. Someone mentioned it.”

“Everyone says consulting,” she said. “It usually means nothing for six months and then either something works out or it doesn’t.” She turned slightly toward him. “What department did you say.”

“Risk and Analysis.”

“The Nostalgia Capsule.”

“Among other things.”

She looked at him. “I had a complaint come through classification last quarter. Someone in Orland Park. The unit kept producing a scent profile that didn’t match the purchase environment.”

“We handle those,” Paul said.

“I know you handle them. I’m saying one came through classification first, which it shouldn’t have, because whoever set up the intake routing sent it to the wrong queue.” She paused. “That was fixed.”

“Good,” Paul said.

“I fixed it,” she said.

“Good,” Paul said again.

Across the room someone was trying to get people together for a photo. Dennis was being positioned in front of the banner, which meant the uneven spacing was going to end up in whatever got sent to the all-staff email later.

“Are you staying for the photo,” Karen asked.

Paul checked his phone. Nineteen open tickets and a Legal follow-up he hadn’t read. “Probably not much longer,” he said.

Karen set her plate on the windowsill. The cake was mostly uneaten. She looked at the banner one more time. “Someone should fix it before they take the photo,” she said.

Nobody fixed it.

The photo was taken.

Paul said a brief goodbye to Dennis on his way out, who remembered his name. He took the stairs back to the fourth floor, sat down, and opened his email.

Nineteen tickets. The Legal follow-up was about revised language for Category 3 disclosures. Full template review, probably another round with compliance before anything changed.

He opened the first ticket and started reading.

He could hear the party faintly through the walls.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, we document the quiet mechanics that hold our world together, the routines, the tensions, and the moments that should not have happened but did anyway. this entry reflects another observation from within our walls.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio, a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

Filed Under: product catalog division / from the may season studio employee files

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Then follow the trail.