Fast Track Facsimile

by Ben O'Mara

"Necessity is the mother of invention," said the boss as he dumped another box of paperwork onto my already crowded desk. It was my fifth day in a row working twelve hour shifts and somehow the jobs kept on coming. So I did what anyone would do in this situation: I opened the side panel of the giant, archaic photocopier in the office down the hall, squeezed my skinny-arse inside that buzzing, shuddering box of circuit boards and ink cartridges, pressed myself up against the machine’s large glass plate, and let its rhythmic green light flash over my contorted body. Ten or so life-sized photocopies of yours truly popped out and stood up. I set them to work, a fleet of flimsy, black and white office staff (no-one in the department seemed to notice the difference), but the quality of their performance was kind of lacking, and the work kept mounting, so I retrained them in a strategic use of management-speak and soon the office became a robust team filled with pro-active initiatives creating productive synergies in cross-departmentally friendly ways across the company. They did well, a little too well, so well in fact that I found myself in a productivity enhancement meeting with one of my own copies who had been fast-tracked to senior management, and with a nice-guy smile and a ninja’s deft guile, he flicked through my performance review for the year, spoke warmly of the legacy I had left after ten years of employment, and gave me my marching orders.

6S

Ben O'Mara loves chicken parmigiana, cinnamon donuts and zombie contingency plans. (Click here to make a donation to Dr. Ben, half of which will support 6S.)