A Journal of the Corporate Plague Year
By: Valerie Kittell
Tags: Mystery, Fiction, Writing, Short Story

A Journal of the Corporate Plague Year

A Survivor Reminisces

(Author’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a business diary that was discovered in a discarded file cabinet during the cold case investigation into the disappearance of Malinda Flagstaff. )

Having already overcome predicted Armageddon twice in my life so far, I consider myself a seasoned survivor, albeit without the toned upper arms of cinematic dystopian heroines. I resemble Sigourney Weaver only in the stoicism I present when confronting the life force sucking shape-shifting humanoids stalking the corridors of the headquarters of the global conglomerate where I have managed to maintain a decades old sinecure.

I unflinchingly faced down Y2K in my corner office with the window view, comforted by the fact that my file drawers were filled with beef jerky and dried fruit and the knowledge that I had stashed away an old Royal manual typewriter and a boxful of ink ribbons. When others faced having their computers turned into paperweights, I would still be able to crank out the mind-numbing training bulletins and updates that were my professional bailiwick without interruption. I also managed to secure a vintage mimeograph machine the city was auctioning off from the contents of an asbestos ridden elementary school it was forced to finally knock down when it became known as PS Mesothelioma.

As we all know now with the benefit of hindsight, my preparations were superfluous. My fellow management caste even got off a few ripostes at my expense at the executive retreat that year, when I rolled out my Power Point presentation on “THRIVING, Not Just Surviving, in a Darwinian Corporate Environment”. The point of my treatise was basically how to take the delivered daily rotten lemons of bureaucratic peonage and turn them into personal challenges and inspirational goal setting lemonade.

It turns out the word “Darwinian” was impolitic of me and was taken by most to be a negative aspersion on our corporate character and culture. So ironic, in that I had taken some care in selecting that adjective, having rejected “Sadistic” and “Cannibalistic” as being accurate but distancing. It seemed to me that our company, based as it is on the dispassionate setting of ever insurmountable sales goals, was clearly Darwinian, a world where only the strongest and the wiliest survived.

Oh well, they all disappeared in the corporate merger, leaving me to have the last laugh. I was scheduled to disappear as well as a “redundancy” as they helpfully label it in order to cushion the blow, when the Training Director of our “sister company”, who had greater seniority than I, was discovered to have pilfered her budget in order to cover some cosmetic surgeries she felt were required to order to maintain her youthful mien. “Youthful” interpreted to mean her skin being stretched so tightly that her eyes were migrating flounder-like to her temples and her lips being permanently bloated as if she were suffering from an ever-present shellfish allergy and needed to be stuck immediately with an Epi-pen by some helpful bystander.

She actually did have a shellfish allergy, I recall it being discussed when we were selecting the entree choices for the merger luncheon, inspiring a brief reverie on my part imagining her being mistakenly served the Shrimp Newburg instead of the Chicken Divan. I pictured her gasping and clutching her throat after swallowing a first gluttonous forkful and slumping from her chair to the carpet. If I am being brutally frank, I will confess that she could lie gasping at my feet,and if I held the antidote in one hand and a prawn in the other, I would press the pink crustacean to her lips given the choice. Fortunately, her little embezzlement peccadillo saved us all a lot of time and misguided energy.

Then I survived, as did we all, The Mayan End of the World predicted for 2012. Having learned my lesson in 2000, I held off on the jerky and dried fruit this time around. I really couldn’t see why there was all the fuss about their calendar ending on December 31, 2011. For heaven’s sake, didn’t the court calendar guy do more than anyone could have possibly expected by carving dates out through 2011 in the first place? He must have been totally sick of whittling those weird jaguar gargoyles in stone and felt like, “There! That should hold them for awhile”.

Isn’t it so typical that an unprecedented outlay of frenzied calendar carving should prompt only a belief that he should have done even more but must have been prevented by an apocalyptic vision of the pointlessness of continuing? Most of us realize that the daily gerbil activities that we engage in, in order to purchase gerbil food, are pointless but at least we aren’t accused of reducing the universe to flood and ashes if we cease.

But I digress. I feel quite sure that I am facing Armageddon yet again, and as they say in the movie trailers “This time it’s personal”. My own personal Armageddon, unshared by the multitudes, but which threatens to bring down my own little comfy and secure universe. It’s not much, but it’s all I have and I have discovered that I have untapped reservoirs of strength within myself that I am fully capable of tapping should they be required. I realize that I have hit that invisible age of mature womanhood, when no one but no one pays any attention to me and what I do or what I think or where I go. Good. So much the better.

The threat to which I refer has appeared in the form of a many headed hydra, a chameleon, a multiple-personality disordered schizophrenic Sybil of a woman known to others in my milieu as The Human Resources Director. Her name sadly, is not Sybil. Since her parents did not possess the ability to peer into the misty future and foresee the chaos resulting from her tragically underdeveloped frontal cortex (likely the result of tobacco, alcohol and artificial sweeteners ingested in utero), they christened her Malinda.

From the first day she was introduced at our monthly management meeting, I sensed the potential danger from the interloper. She was charming in a Ted Bundyesque fashion, displaying superficial bonne homme but with strangely black and opaque eyes which did not mirror the smiling upturns of her mouth. We shook hands cordially and surveyed one another.

I may as well confess that I fancy that I have certain gifts of empathic intuition and a tie to the rhythmic cycle of history and heritage and all that has gone before. I sensed somehow that I had met Malinda previously in another time and place and that we had been adversaries and that one of us had emerged victorious and the other had been vanquished. I could not tell at this initial meeting who had been Mary Stuart and who had been Elizabeth Tudor. Not that I am that vainglorious to imply such a momentous re-incarnation; for all I know our ancestors had squabbled over a fish bone in the Middle Paleolithic. I will only say that as we ceremoniously clasped fingers that a look of recognition passed between us and one of us may have well as spoken aloud the words, “So, it is you.”