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12/19/22

I skipped lunch today, and I’m really fucking hungry, but more than that, I’m scared. I’ve been shaking in my seat for the better part of four hours because I am very scared for a very obvious reason.

The name of the obvious reason is Business Tom Cruise, aka my acting manager, who walked right past me when I was getting coffee to microwave some food. The food in question was red and bloody. So not only is he a cannibal, he’s eating raw meat. The fact that he’s being so obvious about it now in front of me means he definitely knows. The only upside is that he’s gonna be dead by the end of the week from food poisoning, so that’s how long I need to keep my head down.

We’ll see what happens.

I made a pit stop by Alan’s cubicle, since my seat was relocated for some reason. There’s nothing there anymore–it’s been cleaned out, which means either the police have everything on his desk or it’s all in the basement. If it’s in the basement, I’ll check tomorrow. Give me an adjustment period, guys.

Anyways, I recalled some other pretty weird and downright scary moments today that I’ve seen before in the office. I don’t recall how I could manage to forget them. Maybe my mind just blocked them out so I wouldn’t be fucking traumatized.

I’m writing them down just for the sake of trying to process. I started looking up online therapy, and journaling was one of the more common recommendations across websites. Without further ado, here is the list of the top three scariest moments during my time in this office in no particular order (I couldn’t remember five. Shut up.)

Number one is Alan’s murder. Realizing my boss was a cannibal. Everything associated with all of that.

Number two has to be the weird matching card game.

A common element of any workplace is people skiving off of work, whether that’s calling in sick or messing around in their cubicle. Alan had his phone calls, but most of us just preferred to mess around on our computers, playing games and whatnot.

The IT guy we had two years ago was smart; he caught on and installed a software that would always block all non-work-related sites. Well, all except one app on our browsers, called Cards of Fate or something equally ridiculous. We all made fun of it, and talked about how we wouldn’t ever play it. But people get bored, and it caught on as a fun, weird little bit for office gossip every other lunch.

The game format was talked about for how weird it was–the idea was it was like a matching game where you had a set amount of time to flip and match cards, but the cards either had a picture of a random man, or a description of a bad injury, and we learned through Google searches after work that the theme of the game seemed to be brutal accidents real people had suffered.

Imagine our surprises when our faces became the ones on those cards one horrible afternoon.

One of my fucking coworkers was playing the game, and matched nearly all of the cards before realizing what was going on. He’d paused the game that day and gone home early. Ralph really had tripped on something and broken his leg, and the worst accident was Gary going home that night and ending up in a coma because he got in a car accident.

When he came back tomorrow and we all realized what was going on, we all rallied together to delete the fucking app. It got deleted, and so nothing worse happened, but Gary’s still in the coma, I heard, and I’ll have to check if Ralph still has his cast on.

I still have a scar in the middle of the palm that came from something I don’t recall, but I’m willing to bet I had an accident because of that fucking app.

Number three is Monica becoming the receptionist.

This happened maybe three months before, sometime when everyone was complaining about their kids’ school starting. I don’t remember much about our previous receptionist, just that she was tall and dark-haired, the opposite of Monica’s blonde. At that time, Monica was a temp like the three others that frequented the office from the hours of eight to noon for two days of the week, and I remember that she had gotten sternly scolded by the other lady once. After that, she scowled for the rest of the day before seemingly forgetting all about it the next week, which was when the temps started bringing the cookies in.

I only ate the cookies once and had the weirdest next twelve hours–definitely drugged. So you would figure that after one go of those things, Monica would get fired and the cookies would be thrown away, right? Wrong. Everyone seemed to want more of them, if anything. They’d beg for sugar cookies and the ones with the white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts, and the receptionist loved them the most, since all the remaining boxes would get stacked up at her desk. The more she seemed to eat, the thinner she seemed to get until she was practically a skeleton.

The worst thing was she didn’t seem to notice. I remember mentioning it to her once, and she said that she felt just fine. It got to the point that the skin on her hands was barely stretching over her knuckles, and we could hear her bones grate every time she stood up or sat down. Boss made her take a leave of absence the next day, and Monica became the receptionist, which was innocent in of itself, but I remember her face when the previous woman was led out. I remember her smirk with excruciating clarity, and I think that she deliberately poisoned the woman just for retaliation, and that getting the job was an unforeseen benefit.

I’m debating just going to Business Boss Tom Cruise and just flat-out asking for more of a raise now, because I think one of my coworkers did something that was basically murder, and another one who loves playing games on his computer is a fucking idiot.