Etheliliczak: They certainly keep it dark in here.
Numorant: Helps them practice keeping everyone else in the dark.
Witzphorio: Should I turn the light on?
Zakrinkle: Actually leave it off. It's better for seeing the screensaver.
Fremf: Like watching a movie in the theater except the film gets stuck.
Etheliliczak: You ever been in a theater when the film gets stuck and a giant hole melts in the middle and the soundtrack sounds like a huge freight train crashing to a halt?
Zakrinkle: It always sounded to me more like a drunken orchestra sliding down the side of a mountain and crashing into a canyon full of bagpipes.
Witzphorio: I watched my cat just sit by the window and observe the scene outside as if the ice had penetrated the window and chilled his her muscles.
Numorant: How long have you had your cat now and you still can't get the sex right?
Witzphorio: There's a lot about sex I can't seem to get right.
Zakrinkle: Ice probably did penetrate and freeze the whole damn window it's been so friggin' cold.
Witzphorio: You're right.
Etheliliczak: Can the image get burned into the screen if it stays frozen up there too long? I've heard about that.
Fremf: That's why it shuts off after a while and goes into hibernate mode.
Zakrinkle: I'm due for a hibernate mode.
Witzphorio: I think they jipped me on my PTO.
Fremf: Remember, in September you were out a day with a 24 hour bug and then in October you were out two days with food poisoning from that new pizza place you tried out, then you were out three days in November when your urticaria allergy got aggravated, and you were out 4 days in December with a laceration that got infected after you tried to clear a paper jam in the copier in quality assurance.
Witzphorio: You're right.
Zakrinkle: I'd like to have a big generous mug of warm milk and hibernate for a week.
Numorant: I could hibernate for a month.
Zakrinkle: And a donut and then hibernate for a week.
Witzphorio: Wish I had a month of PTO for a nice hibernation.
Etheliliczak: Digestive, allergic, and photocopier trauma will put a dent in one's PTO.
Witzphorio: You're right.
Zakrinkle: A jelly donut and a profusely abundant stein of hot chocolate and then go into deep cryogenic hibernation for 5 days cradled between two dead weekends of comatose sleep.
Fremf: Now we've moved from warm milk to hot chocolate?
Numorant: Doesn't hot chocolate have caffeine?
Zakrinkle: When I'm extremely tired caffeine doesn't affect me anymore.
Etheliliczak: Then how do you explain your caffeine intake when you get here in the morning? You always look so exhausted with those triple saggy burlap bags under your eyes.
Zakrinkle: I don't know. Leave me alone and stop grilling me with such invasive questions. You've been watching too many of those investigative shows. Keeps a person from hibernating unless they're already dead before the show starts. That's a good way to avoid all these questions and investigations and background checks and applications and reviews is to already start the show dead or even better get written out of the story by the scriptwriters or never even make it into their ideas in the first place.
Numorant: I hate those stories where they show the main character has things set up so it can be as if they've never been born and there they are standing around seeing what things would be like without them never having been born and the lives they never get to touch. When they make the protagonist unborn they should just disappear and pop out of existence.
Zakrinkle: I don't know, that sounds like my life as if I've never really been born into what's happening around me and it's all just going on without me and I put my arms out in front of me and I'm looking for the invisible portal to finally enter and get here at last into it and others will actually know I'm here.
Numorant: Will you put your arms down? You're blocking the screensaver and you almost hit me in the nose.
Zakrinkle: It's like I'm trying to find the unseen entryway slit of some transparent birth canal of a see-through vagina.
Numorant: Do you have to go on like that?
Zakrinkle: What if I want my arms up and about and around moving through space? You want me to stop to stay frozen and return to my non-existent spot out of your view your point of view.
Witzphorio: You're right. It's good aerobic exercise.
Etheliliczak: So what do you make of Bremson's new screensaver?
Fremf: I don't see the big deal you've been making about it.
Witzphorio: Yeah, did you have to drag us all over here to see this?
Etheliliczak: Hey, you chose to come along. No one held a gun to your head.
Witzphorio: You're right.
Fremf: What are you seeing that I'm not seeing?
Etheliliczak: It just gives me the feeling that something significant has shifted inside her that's all.
Numorant: I couldn't imagine anything significant shifting inside that Queen of the Icebergs.
Zakrinkle: Is this one of your mysteries you want to solve? Because Bremson's not an open book like the rest of us you want to conduct one of your investigations.
Etheliliczak: I like investigating it's one of the few pleasures I have left in life.
Witzphorio: How much time do we have? Their meeting must almost be over.
Numorant: Their department meetings always go long.
Witzphorio: You're right.
Etheliliczak: Probably because Bremson's probably waxing philosophical and obscure, probably. I think she's hiding the fact that she can't really do her job. I wonder what her real education and experience are.
Numorant: I think she's unprofessional and unsuited for her position.
Zakrinkle: I think you're both confusing unprofessionalism with intelligence and critical thinking which she appears to do really well.
Etheliliczak: Actually, I'm confused about whether you want to penetrate Bremson or that see-through vagina.
Zakrinkle: Coming to work every day and encountering you guys does bring one to choose abstinence from life.
Witzphorio: You're right.
Numorant: You are such a yes-woman.
Zakrinkle: You mean a "you're right-woman."
Numorant: Whatever, always agreeing with everyone.
Zakrinkle: Like someone in the dark following other someones in the dark?
Witzphorio: Agreeing with others gives other people the idea that I really give a shit when I don't. You show off your sharp teeth and all you get is a reflection in my safety goggles.
Numorant: Are you kidding me?
Etheliliczak: More like the "roll over and play dead" routine if you ask me.
Witzphorio: I didn't ask you.
Fremf: Where did that come from?
Zakrinkle: A good come-back was written in for her this time.
Witzphorio: Never get written in often enough.
Zakrinkle: I'll probably get my next one while I'm incoherent from sedatives during my final hospital visit before the screen goes blank for good.
Witzphorio: Me, too. You're right.
Numorant: I'd like to be sedated.
Etheliliczak continued to insist that there was something more there in the screensaver. The others in the dark office began to insist that Etheliliczak's screensaver had something more behind it and that their whole jaunt to stand in the darkroom with Bremson's screensaver projecting its frozen light out into the dark was nothing but a projection. His despising the nicknames of "Ethy" or "Shack" or even "Ack" abbreviations were followed by derivations, synonyms, antonyms, and the ubiquitous litany of acronyms. Another took a stab in the dark the frozen dark to penetrate the ice of frozen projection at conveying something that could be pushed up as a proposition or insight rising short of anything more lasting between the tectonic shifting of glaciers through their insistence for all they had was insistence an insistence that generated an ephemeral thaw only to be chilled by the retort of another accusation come-back projection insistence. The sequence would sometimes change from insistence persistence accusation come-back retort projection to projection insistence resistance (is futile, you know) retort resort to change of subject absurd non sequitur to reference back to the canyon full of bagpipes to insult insistence retort distort lack of confidence overconfidence to diffidence as they shuffled minimally in the dark the frozen dark then standing still in resigned silence as they together watched the frozen image and rocked slowly trying to find something more behind it and insist there was something more behind something else or insist there was nothing behind anything at all nothing more behind each other open books trying to keep their covers shut and anymore of their older pages from being whisked away by the frozen winds of forgetfulness and disagreement and vainly pressing together their remaining blank pages from having the same old routines and investigations and inquiries and questions and confrontations and projections and rejections printed and re-printed copied and re-copied on them as they waddled slowly together like a rookery of penguins trying to protect their fragile shells.
The image was frozen and those who were observing it were also frozen. Some were frozen because of other reasons and some were frozen because of the office temperature and some were frozen because of the image frozen on the computer screen. One of them who stood frozen might possibly have been frozen because of reasons that were slightly different if not completely different than the reasons that made up most of the other reasons that kept some of them frozen in contrast to those who were frozen for reasons of office temperature or the image that continued to be frozen on the computer screen as everyone else for all their reasons stood frozen staring at the frozen image.
- Max Stoltenberg
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