i’m just sayin’

outing my evil undead co-workers

I work with vampires.

I really am convinced that I work in a building covered in vampires.  I always had my suspicions, but lately it’s gotten out of hand and I can no longer ignore the fact that my building is inhabited with the undead.

Note the following clues:

Clue Number One:

Everyone keeps their lights off.  Every office is terribly dark, save for a small halogen lamp in a corner, just lighting up some corner no one uses.  Everyone has a blue glow to their faces when you talk to them.  They just turn from the monitor slightly, and their eyes still have reflections of cnn.com in them.

Clue Number Two:

They have a permanent hunch from the keyboard lean.

Clue Number Three:

Keyboard fingers look so much like Nosferatu that it’s terrifying.

Clue Number Four:

It’s friggin’ cold in here.  I’m not kidding.  It’s like sixty-six degrees.  This is refreshing when you come in from outside (where our heat index today is 107 degrees) but when your desk sits underneath the air vent it’s like living in some Siberian Corporation.  Earlier I hugged my monitor for warmth while holding my desk lamp in my hands to unthaw them.  You have to wear pants or jeans to survive and then when you go home you melt on the way to your car.  They don’t want you to go inside and outside.  “Just stay in here.  Everything you need is right here.”  Yeah, like a big death grip on my throat.

Clue Number Five:

Staff meetings are held in rooms without chairs.  There are no chairs.  Just bean bags.  Someone sits on the ping pong table and everyone else sits on the floor in a bean bag.  Although this seems like it’s a way to make everyone feel comfortable and Romper Room like, but really it’s just a way to enforce the superiority of the head vampires by making everyone else sit with their knees near their faces.  It’s an automatic cower.  Also, you could just cover yourself up in the pile of bean bags and no one would find you for three weeks– until a ping pong ball falls into the crack in the bag.

Clue Number Six:

At any minute of the day the coffee pot is brewing.  I’m talking from when I get to work at eight in the morning until I leave here at six at night.  Constantly brewing.  This is because vampires aren’t used to staying up during the day and they need caffeine and sugar.

Clue Number Seven:

We had a microwave that was broken for a full month.  A full month you couldn’t microwave any food, but no one seemed to mind.  Vampires don’t really eat food, you see, they only pretend.  A missing microwave meant nothing to them.

Clue Number Eight:

We used to have animals that would run around in the creek out back in the smoker’s area.  We had deer, fox, road runners, cats.  No more.  All gone.  Now we have a bunch of enormous ants.

Clue Number Nine:

No one seems to mind the sound of the phone constantly ringing, just droning on and on.  Reminds them of the clock tower bells, I guess, and makes them feel right at home in Transylvania.

Clue Number Ten:

When we order pizza, I’m the only one eating the garlic sticks.  I’m just saying.

Clue Number Eleven:

People have called my Office Voodoo Doll “cute” and then put it down and giggle as they walk away.  I heard one whisper to the other, “As if that’s going to work.”

Clue Number Twelve:

The hallway that I work on is referred to as “The Cave.”  This is because of it’s remote location, freezing temperatures and the only large collection of women in the building.  Maybe the women part has nothing to do with it.  I’m just saying.  It’s a fact.

Clue Number Thirteen:

Although I hear people talk about “customers” and solve “problems” the only time that I ever really see these people is when they are in meetings or smoking.  Other times they just go into their dark offices and no one hears from them.

Clue Number Fourteen:

Sometimes in the afternoon, I’m the only one on a smoke break.  That’s right when all shade is gone from our smoking area.

Clue Number Fifteen:

Someone changed the test lab network server’s name from “South Park” to “Bela Lugosi.”

Clue Number Sixteen:

Someone purchased “Classic Romance Songs” and “Moonlight Serenades.”  If those aren’t instruments of torture, I don’t know what is.

Clue Number Seventeen:

There is not one mirror in this building.  Really.  And the windows (when you find one) do not open and have all of the shades pulled.  The only mirror is in the bathroom, which technically isn’t in our building, but rather a part of the complex.

Clue Number Eighteen:

The Graveyard Shift people absolutely love their jobs and never ever complain about anything.  They think it’s a breeze.  They don’t mind staying up all night and some of them work until dawn.  Just until dawn, though.

Clue Number Nineteen:

They encourage us to participate in the Friday office parties and drink an alcoholic beverage or two because it’s “good for the blood.”

Clue Number Twenty:

Not one stick of wood in this entire building.  Everything is metal or plastic.  Everything.  The doors are a heavy metal.  The walls are made of plaster.  There is carpet on the floors.  Our desks are metal and formica or something.  When we order Chinese food they give us the plastic chopsticks.

I’m marking these facts down here and now so that if I suddenly disappear one day you guys come busting in here like the two Coreys and try and save me from eternal life.

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