The Office Tour

There is a minor god in the supply closet.

Sort of a household god, if an office can have something like that. It's lived there as long as anyone can remember— maybe it came with the building, maybe it was born from the energy of the people who live their slow lives in dusty cubicles.

Either way, it eats paperclips.

That's how we found it, actually. We ordered so many paperclips. HR came to ask us about shrink, once, thinking someone was stealing paperclips for their own business ventures, or maybe just to get back at the company for driving their soul into the ground. Noone needs that many paperclips, HR said.

They installed a video camera near the supply closet. No one was stealing the paperclips. They went in, every Tuesday, and they never came back out. The camera caught no one. Eventually, it was turned off.

The paperclip theft continued. Janice, from Marketing, suggested a rip in the space time continuum. That's so very Janice of her, really, to suggest something like that. She's in Marketing, what does she know about tears in the fabric of space and time? She doesn't even know that people don't click links in emails anymore. Email marketing, hah. What a joke.

Anyway, HR didn't have any better ideas at that point, and the paperclips were still going missing. So they hired some guy out of Newark who was supposed to be able to fix that sort of thing. Flew him in on a company jet and everything! The bigshot got to the office, pulled out a bunch of fancy equipment— no idea how he got through TSA— and told us the closet remained solidly in this dimension.

The higher-ups were getting real antsy at this point. Yeah, they'd tried storing the paperclips somewhere else. I suggested that back when this started, you know, but it took them a while to jump on that suggestion. It didn't work, anyway. The paperclips disappeared just as they always did, and all the staplers in the whole building went missing until we started keeping the paperclips in the right place again. Our stocks tanked, too. Probably a coincidence, we thought.

We put the paperclips back and the staplers showed up overnight, just where we'd left them, all shiny and full of fresh staples. After a week, our stocks went back up, and once we even found a company secret from those rats over at UCorp written on a Post-It note stuck to the coffeemaker. That was the time we messed up and someone bought those pretty paperclips, the ones in the bright colors.

Next, we hired a ghost hunter. She preferred the term "paranormal investigator" and she had blue hair. She came in with a whole team of people and had a seance, ran some tests, the whole nine yards. It went up on some online show, actually— you might've seen it? Don't worry, there's a link in the new hire stuff online. She didn't find anything, but she said she got some weird vibes from the storeroom closet. Nothing ghostly, she said. Just off.

We hired extra security overnight at one point. They didn't see anything. Didn't hear anything, either. One of them even spent the night in the supply closet. He didn't remember falling asleep, but he woke up with some strange language no one recognized written on him in pink highlighter. We called in a linguist from the nearby college and they said it was written in the same language as the Voynich Manuscript, which didn't really help us any, but made the security guard an instant celebrity. He quit working for us the next day and started doing the talk show rounds.

It was Erin, the intern, who finally figured it out. I don't know how she did it. Some think the god finally revealed itself, chose her as a worthy vessel. Janice, from Marketing , thinks it's because Erin was a theology major before she wound up here. I would like to disagree with Janice, who ate all of the canapes at the last holiday party and left none for me and therefore is unworthy of a god revealing itself to her. Janice is just jealous.

Erin says the god is formless, and mostly benevolent, and that it also believes we should pay our interns. Since the god only speaks to Erin, we have no way of disproving that. I saw Erin slip a pack of those nice, colorful paperclips into the supply closet the other day before emerging with her latest revelation, saying interns should also be given benefits and we should have half-day Fridays. I think she's bribing the god to say these things.

We try to keep the god happy, these days. We leave it the nice paperclips sometimes, and it still gets the normal office supply delivery every Tuesday. We just use staplers for everything now. It's a minor inconvenience. You'll get used to it.

It looks good on Erin's resume, too, the whole being-a-mouthpiece-for-a-god. She's hoping to get hired on at Google after this. We think she's got a pretty good chance.

We're not sure what the god will do once she's gone. Maybe it'll go with her. We've considered that and made contingency plans for when we no longer have its blessing. More likely, I think, it'll choose another mouthpiece. Maybe the next intern, maybe Tom from art development— Tom always seemed to know a little too much about the paperclip situation. I don't think it'll choose Janice, not after the canapes. Plus, she's never really recovered from suggesting the whole space-time thing. Ridiculous.

Well, that wraps up the new hire tour! I know we kind of focused on the deity here on the seventh floor, but I did point out the gym, cafeteria, copiers, and time clock, so keep those in mind. Let me know if you have any questions! You can always pop by my office if you need any help with anything. Gotta help each other out, you know. We were all new once— except for the god in the supply closet. Erin says it's ageless.