Microstory 434: Floor 8 (Part 1)

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I’m a blue collar worker in a white collar building. Most people here get to wear nice clothes and turn their noses up at us. I used to manufacture standard products for Analion at our main factory, but they’ve promoted me to custom work at the new headquarters. We’ve barely done anything here yet. The windows that people fell out of were made before the new HQ was ready, which means it was necessarily before my promotion. Still I’ve received a lot of blame for the deaths. I know, a lot of people are saying the same thing but it is no truer for anyone else than it is for me. I keep telling people that I’m new here, but that doesn’t matter to them. Everybody wants to blame somebody else. Is one department at fault for it, I’m sure I don’t know how it could be anything else, but it can’t be me. I don’t care who gets in trouble for it, but it just cannot be me. I’m in such a tough spot here. I sort of feel like my superiors knew about the problems before anyone else did, and they brought me in as their scapegoat. The most obvious source of blame is always the one closest to the issue. I and the other machinists are the last to see a window before it goes out to the world. Since each incident was under the control of a different installer, the natural conclusion is that product development did something wrong. And I want to stress that this may actually be the right call, but again, I wasn’t always here. Please, leave me out of it. I’m perfectly innocent, I tell you...innocent. Man, I really need to get back to the factory. I had no idea how much I would hate it here.

Microstory 46: Lost Dog

“I was on one of my regular walks a few weeks ago when I came across a lost dog flyer. I decided to take a picture of it in case I ran into the dog along the way. Several miles away, I thought I saw another lost dog flyer, but it wasn’t. It was a found dog flyer. I pulled up the picture I took on my phone earlier and compared. Neither picture was of great quality, so I wasn’t 100% sure, but they sounded similar enough. Then I noticed that the lost dog was reportedly last seen wearing a red collar, and the found dog was said to have been wearing a blue collar. Wanting to be certain no one was colorblind or something, I began to dial my phone. Before I could press send, a dog trotted up to me. It looked just as close to the dog or dogs from the flyers, but it was wearing a green collar, and it didn’t have a tag. Were there three missing dogs? I called both numbers, and they were both out of service. I realized that these fliers could be years old, and were just never taken down. I took the dog I had to the vet to see if it had one of those microchips, but it didn’t. I had no choice but to keep it. It wasn’t until later that I found out she was pregnant.”

“Cool story, bro. All I asked was how much for a puppy.”