I was just reading an article about a Florida woman who was fired from her job for saying "Merry Christmas." It occurred to me that this is a sign of how truly screwed up our values have become. You can read the article here.
Since it's Christmas Eve, I figured I would take a moment to comment here on my blog about this article. I think that it's just stupid for a company to mandate that their employees say "Happy Holidays," instead of "Merry Christmas." In attempting not to seem biased to their customers, they are in fact discriminating against their own employee. The company spokesperson claims that the employee was not fired for this, however; my experience as a Human Resources manager tells me that she probably was. The company will never admit this for the reason I stated above. They probably wrapped it in some sort of insubordination claim and sent her on her way.
I post this not to bring you down on Christmas Eve, but to give you all a chance to post a comment here and weigh in on the discussion. Do you think employees should be discouraged from saying, "Merry Christmas," "Happy Hanukkah," "Happy Kwanzaa," or any other statement that expresses their personal beliefs around the holidays? Let me know here and don't be afraid to say, "Merry Christmas" while you're at it...
Until next time...
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Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Merry Christmas. There, I said it...
Not Even a Mouse: A Rona Shively Short (Chapter Five)
I left Santac, still a little confused about the whole operation but slightly more enlightened than I had been before I went. My first inclination was to think that the thief had to be someone other than Violet Tooney. She seemed way too mild-mannered to steal from anyone. That and she didn’t have two nickels to rub together. If she were making any money off of these consoles, she would be able to take more trips or at least take the one trip she usually planned on each year. I’d been wrong before, many times as a matter of fact, but I had a hunch that Violet wasn’t the bad guy in this case.
I didn’t have a good reason to stop in at the office today and I was in the mood for a burger so I drove through the In-N-Out Burger and picked up a couple of sandwiches on my way back to the apartment. I planned to do background checks on all five workers when I got home. This would at least give me some insight into the type of people I’d be running into later.
With sandwiches in hand, I trotted up the steps to my apartment and let myself in. I set the bag down on the counter and went over to my desk to turn on the laptop. As I waited for it to boot up, I went back over to the counter and pulled one of the sandwiches out of the bag. It was a double cheeseburger and it smelled damned good. I grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator and took the can and the sandwich back to the desk. I pulled the list of Santac employees names out of my pocket. As I unwrapped my sandwich with my left hand, I clicked on the icon for background checks with my right hand. I’m a multi-tasker. While the page loaded, I took a couple of bites of my sandwich and then opened my Coke and took a sip.
The page loaded and I quickly entered the names into the search engine. Violet Tooney brought no hits. She had no phone number listed and there was nothing substantial coming up under her name. I tried Jordan Sinclair next. I wasn’t sure if Jordan was a man or a woman, so I looked at both names to see if anything connected. There was a male, age 39 who lived in Crystal Ridge just a couple of apartment buildings away from mine. He had no criminal record, but he had recently filed bankruptcy. There was no employer listed, so I couldn’t be sure if this was the right person.
I tried the female Jordan Sinclair. She was 36 years old and lived just outside of Crystal Ridge in a town called Berger. Again, she had no criminal record and no employer was listed. She hadn’t filed for bankruptcy and there was no other information about her that seemed to matter. She was married to a man named Roger, but he also had no criminal record. Feeling deflated, I finished my burger and sat there thinking for a moment.
After crumpling up the burger wrapper, I tossed it into the wastebasket. I typed in Monte Bergman’s name and waited for the information to come up on the screen. When it did, I had to smile to myself. My third shift worker was a convicted felon. He had no known address and he, too had recently filed bankruptcy. His employer wasn’t listed, but I figured there weren’t many people around here named Monte Bergman so he had to be the right one.
I tried Dirk Morris and Tony Albertson but came up with little to nothing on both. Bergman seemed like the best candidate for my culprit, so I decided that I had seen enough for the day. It was coming up on six o’clock and I was tired. I closed the laptop and headed to the couch with my Coke. I’d save the other sandwich for later. Right now, all I wanted was a nap. I stretched out on the couch and stared at my ceiling. Boredom usually makes me so tired that I can fall asleep standing up if I so choose. Today, with the exception of the déjà vu stuff had been outstandingly boring so it didn’t take long for me to fall asleep. As I drifted off, I began to dream again. I pretty much picked up where last night’s dream had left off. This time, I was at the house in the snowy field again. I was standing outside watching the man in the SUV. I could make out now that the SUV was in fact, a red suburban. I chalked this up to my subconscious filling in the blanks with what I’d seen earlier.
I saw the man in the Santa costume again and this time, he had a bag full of something that he was putting in the back of the SUV. The last time, it had been boxes. In the distance, I could see the animals running around again. I still couldn’t figure out what kind of animals they were. I looked in the window of the house again and saw several people standing around an oven. After a few moments, a bunch of cookies started rolling out on a conveyor belt. That was odd. The conveyor belt hadn’t been there last time, either. I watched for a few moments and then someone came up behind me. When I turned around, I was standing next to Trey. He put his finger to his lips telling me to stay quiet and then he kissed me. It was one of those long, slow dream kisses that you don’t want to wake up from.
Unfortunately, this was about the time that I was awakened by a knock at the door.
“Shit!” I said as I sat up. I looked at the clock. It was almost ten. I needed to get up and get moving if I was going to get to Santac on time to meet with the workers before they left for the day. I jumped up and ran over to the door to see who was knocking. I looked through the peephole and saw no one. Again, weird shit.
I hurried into the bathroom to straighten myself up and then grabbed my bag on my way out the door. I got into my Jeep and headed out toward Santac again. In spite of catching about ten red lights, I made it there in less than fifteen minutes. I got out and walked up to the front door this time. I opened the door and went inside. No one was there to greet me, so I made my way through the house until I reached the workshop. There were two people working; one was at the Move ‘N Shaker station and the other was hovering around it with a cart waiting to pick up any finished consoles. I headed over to the table where a woman was putting together consoles. She was working hard to get the pieces to fit together, but she was obviously struggling. As I approached, she put one finished console up on the corner of her table for the young man with the cart. He snatched it up and quietly rolled it over to the conveyor belt. She picked up some more parts and started trying to put together her next console.
“Hello, are you Jordan Sinclair?” I asked her.
“Yes, I’m Jordan,” she said, shakily. “What’s wrong? Who are you?”
I put my hands up in front of me, “Oh, no, nothing is wrong. Didn’t Mrs. Clos tell you? I’m here to talk with you about the Move ‘N Shaker,” I said.
“Mrs. Clos?” she asked, “No, she didn’t say anything about anyone talking to me.”
“Well, she must have forgotten,” I said, “I’m Jenny Herman, I’m working on some market research for Santac and I just need to talk with you for a few minutes about the Move ‘N Shaker.”
“What about it?” she asked, sneering.
“I just need to know a little bit about what your experience has been working on the Move ‘N Shaker?” I said, “That’s all.”
“My experience has been that it sucks,” she said, “I can never get the damned things to go together right.”
“Really?” I asked, “It looks like you’re doing fine with it.”
“Well, after a bunch of messing around with it, I eventually get it together,” she said. She looked tired and unhappy.
“So, it’s not been a good experience for you, I take it,” I said.
“No, it hasn’t Sherlock,” she said, “it’s a job, but it drives me up the wall.”
Sherlock, I thought. If she only knew.
“Okay, well, I really don’t need much more than that from you,” I said and I started to walk away. She reached out and grabbed my arm to keep me from leaving.
“You’re not going to tell Mrs. Clos what I said are you?” she asked. She had this desperate look on her face and for a moment, I almost felt sorry for her.
Come back a little later today for Chapter Six!
Until next time...
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Not Even a Mouse: A Rona Shively Short (Chapter Four)
I studied the paper for a moment and then folded it and slipped it in my pocket. “So, there’s no problem if I come in and talk to each of them during their shifts?”
She brought her hand to her chin as she thought for a moment. “I don’t see any problem, but what reason can we give them?”
We both sat for a few minutes trying to come up with a ruse. “I’ve got it!” she said, nearly jumping out of her seat. “You can say you’re coming in to talk to them about their experience making the product, like it’s part of our new marketing campaign or something. How would that be?”
It made sense, so we decided that I would talk with the lady who worked first shift before I left this morning. Though I hadn’t seen any workers other than those gathered in the kitchen area, she assured me that they were all present. I would come back at around ten this evening to catch the second shift worker and then just wait around for third shift to come in. We got up from the table and she walked me back to the “workshop” as she called it. This time, instead of ten empty stations, there were at least twenty people bustling about. At each station there was someone who was putting something together. There were four people roaming around with carts, picking up completed items and then there were several people huddled in the middle of the room throwing papers about and speaking loudly amongst themselves. I wondered where all of them had been when we were in here earlier. This place was just bizarre.
Mrs. Clos approached the Move ‘N Shaker station and introduced me to a skinny woman in a green velvet smock. “Violet, this is Ms. Herman,” she said, “She needs to talk to you about your experience making the Move ‘N Shakers. She’s going to be helping us with our marketing.” She winked at Violet and patted her on the back before pushing me forward and walking away. I extended my hand to the lady.
“Hi, my name is Jenny Herman,” I said, thankful to have remembered who I was today, “I’m doing some market research for the company and I wanted to take a few minutes of your time to ask you about the Move ‘N Shakers. Is now a good time?”
The lady pursed her lips, but did not stop assembling her pieces to shake my hand. Instead, she nodded and finally broke into a smile before saying, “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”
“Your name is Violet Tooney?” I asked.
She nodded again, still putting together one piece with another. I watched her, mesmerized by her efficiency. She didn’t fumble around with the pieces; she simply picked them up from the bins and put them exactly where they went. I admired people who could do things like this. I wasn’t the least bit handy.
“Can you tell me a little bit about the product and your experience making the Move ‘N Shakers?” I asked, thinking this sounded like the right thing to say.
To my surprise, Violet started talking up a storm. She told me all about the different pieces she was working with and how each one worked with another. Today, she was working on the consoles, but that could change from day to day. Some days, she worked on controllers. Some days, she worked on both. She had worked here for several years and had just been moved to the Move ‘N Shaker line about two years ago. This hadn’t been a popular item until earlier this year, so she hadn’t had so much to do until this Christmas season. Before, she had been able to work on both controllers and consoles at the same time. She told me that she enjoyed putting the machines together because there weren’t very many pieces and they usually all fit together without any problem.
“It’s a good job and I’m lucky to be here,” she said, “so many people out there right now don’t have anything.”
I nodded to show that I was listening. “I know, it’s rough.”
“My sister just lost her job and she’s got three babies to take care of,” she said, shaking her head. “I give her any extra money I make with my overtime.”
That was interesting. A sister that needed money might be willing to sell off some stolen consoles if things got bad enough.
“Does your sister live here in Nevada?” I asked, hoping she would think I was making conversation and not fishing for information.
“No, she lives in Baltimore,” she said. “We hardly see each other because we can’t afford airfare. We just talk on the phone a lot and I used to try to get out there at least once a year. The problem is that I don’t have a lot of vacation time and if I take off, I lose money, too. I haven’t been able to make the trip for two years now.”
“You don’t get vacation time?” I asked.
“Oh, I do, but I used a lot of it when I fell last January,” she said, “I was laid up for about three months with a busted knee.” She stopped working long enough to point to her left knee by way of explanation.
I nodded again. We talked for a few more minutes and then I told her that I thought I had enough information. She smiled politely and told me to come back if I thought of anything else. “You can pretty much find me here all of the time.” She stopped assembling again long enough to reach out and shake my hand. Then she smoothed the sides of her graying hair back away from her face and set back to work. I walked away feeling not one way or the other about her. She didn’t seem like the type of person who would be running a scam. I took the paper out of my pocket and unfolded it. Jordan Sinclair and Monte Bergman were the other two assembly workers I needed to see. Dirk Morris and Tony Albertson were the two stockers. I hadn’t seen Dirk when I was talking to Violet, but he’d probably be there later when I go back to talk to second shift. I couldn’t wait.
Come back tomorrow for more of the story...
Until next time...
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Not Even a Mouse: A Rona Shively Short (Chapter Three)
This is what woke me from my slumber: The smell of cookies baking. I heard a knock at my door and sat up with a jolt. I shook my head and then looked across the room at my clock. It was midnight. Who the hell would be at my door at midnight and why did I smell cookies?
I got up and walked over to my door to look out the peephole. Rolling my eyes, I unlocked the door and opened it.
“Can I help you?” I said crossly.
“Hey, babe,” it was my friend, Trey. Well, to be exact, he was my ex-boyfriend from a while back.
“Trey, what are you doing here at this hour?” I asked, “Don’t you know that normal people sleep at night?” I had a lot of nerve putting myself in the same category as normal people.
He must have thought the same thing. “Who’s normal?” he said, “I hadn’t talked to you and I wanted to see what you were up to.”
“You’ve heard of the phone?” I asked.
“Aw, now, let me in,” he said, moving past me and walking into my kitchen.
“Come on in,” I said.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” he said, looking around my apartment.
“You’re just weird, you know that?” I said.
“You never know,” he said. Then he grabbed me and planted a kiss on my cheek.
Instead of letting go of me, he attempted to pull me in closer for a real kiss but I put a hand up to stop him.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“What?” he said, “I can’t get a kiss from my favorite girl?”
“Oh, now I’m your favorite,” I said, “What happened to your girlfriend from the other day, what was her name, Tina?”
“Oh, that,” he said, “That’s over.”
I marveled at how quickly Trey jumped in and out of relationships. I had to admit, it almost made me jealous. I fancied myself somewhat of a contender in the area of romantic conquests, but he made me look like an amateur. The sad thing was that if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the thought of cookies, I might have kissed him back.
“What happened there?” I asked.
He shrugged, “Nothing, really, she just wasn’t you.” He grinned and I had to smile at him, the big dummy. He was so damned good-looking.
“Hey, do you smell cookies?” I asked him.
“Well, yeah, I thought, and I don’t know why, but I thought you might have been making them,” he said.
“What would ever make you think that?” I asked. “I was just having a really weird dream about cookies and then you knocked at the door.”
“Was it a kinky cookie dream?” he said, still grinning.
For this, I slapped the top of his head. “No, ass,” I said. “I was actually dreaming that I was watching someone make a bunch of cookies. It was really stupid.”
“You probably just dreamed that because someone on this floor is making cookies somewhere,” he said, “too bad you’re not friends with your neighbors or you could get in on the cookie action.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, “Whatever.”
We both sat down on the couch and Trey flipped through my channels. He stopped at an episode of the Rockford Files and we watched for a while without saying much. I only had to slap his hand away from my knee three times while we sat there together. After that, I got up to go to bed.
“Need some company?” he asked.
“Nope, need a blanket?” I replied.
“Yep,” he said.
It was difficult to leave him on the couch, but I knew that we couldn’t keep having these little interludes if I was ever going to move on. We could be friends, but that was going to have to be it. Besides, I wasn’t going to make things that easy for him.
When I woke up the next morning, Trey had folded his blanket and left a note on my kitchen table. “Missed you out here last night, see you tonight.” Evidently, I’d see him later. I took a shower, got dressed and then grabbed the stuff from my desk that I’d put together for my fake presentation to Santac. I found a manila folder in my desk drawer and stuffed all of it inside to keep it from getting wrinkled. When I had finished my morning routine, I grabbed my purse and the folder and headed to the car. I was off to Santac for my meeting with Mrs. Clos.
When I got to the address that she had given me, I felt a sense of déjà vu. Instead of a manufacturing plant, as I had expected it to be, I drove up to a large house that was situated in the middle of a large lot. The building was surrounded on all sides by parking lots, but there wasn’t a car in sight. I checked my watch to make sure I hadn’t arrived too early. It was about 10:15 a.m., yet no one appeared to be here. I drove around to the back of the house and there, I saw a large, red Suburban parked at the rear of the house. There was also a row of what appeared to be large dog kennels lining one side of a fenced area along the back. This was just creepy. It was almost exactly the same as what I had seen in my dream last night. Except for the fact that there was no snow and that I hadn’t actually seen any animals.
I parked the Jeep and got out to look around. I quietly walked across the parking lot and took a peek inside one of the windows of the house. Another feeling of weirdness crept over me as I looked inside. There were about fifteen people inside, standing around a table and they appeared to be decorating cookies. “Wow!” I heard myself say. “What is up with all of the cookies?”
I heard a door open and I quickly jumped away from the window so that I looked less like I was spying and more like I was trying to find a way inside.
“Can I help you, Miss?” a woman asked. She was about four feet tall and she was wearing a bright, red velvet dress that was trimmed with fake white fur. This was suspicious.
“I’m here to meet with Mrs. Clos,” I said, digging in the manila folder to retrieve a card.
As I handed her the card, she looked at it carefully. “Do you have an appointment, Miss Herman?”
“Yes, she’s expecting me,” I said, crossing my fingers behind me.
“Right this way,” she said, leading me into the house.
Christmas music was playing softly from somewhere. The same music I’d heard in my dream last night. I wanted to turn around and run back to the Jeep to get the hell out of this place, but I remained calm. Maybe I was just extremely intuitive, though that wasn’t something I’d been plagued by in the past. The woman disappeared into another room and when she came back, Mrs. Clos appeared behind her. She smiled at me and then walked over and extended her hand.
“Nice to meet you, Ms. Herman,” she said, “We can talk in here.” She pointed to a room off of the kitchen in the opposite direction of where she had just been. She didn’t say anything else until we were both sitting at the table together. She looked over at me and asked, “Would you like some hot chocolate, dear?”
“You do remember talking to me yesterday, right?” I asked.
“Oh, of course,” she said, “Will you need to look at our inventory today?” She winked.
I tried to think of why I would need to do that. I guessed that it might be helpful to get an idea of what kinds of products we would be pretending to promote. “Sure,” I said, “I guess that’s a good place to start.”
We didn’t get any hot chocolate. Instead, she led me out to another room in the house where I could see about a hundred different stations had been set up in a large open space. There were about ten tables set up and behind each of them were stackable crates full of parts and pieces that I guessed were used to make whatever it was that Santac manufactured. Mrs. Clos showed me the first station and indicated that this one was where dolls were made. She pointed to the other side of the room where a large conveyor belt had been set up. “One of our stockers comes around and collects the things that have been made at each station and puts them on the belt so that they can be sent down to be packaged,” she explained.
I nodded. “Okay,” I said, “What is your most popular product?” I was hoping she knew that I was asking about the product that had been coming up missing.
She walked a couple of stations down to a larger station that had a variety of parts stacked along the wall behind it. The parts included all kinds of cogs and wheels and other things that I didn’t quite recognize. “What is this?” I asked.
“This is our most popular product, the Move ‘N Shaker,” she said proudly.
“What’s a Move ‘N Shaker?” I asked. I admit, I have little to no knowledge of what kids are into these days.
“It’s a video game that kids can play by using special virtual controllers,” she said, “it’s like they’re in the game.”
“Oh, really,” I said, still trying to figure out why this would be so great.
“Come with me,” she said. We walked out of the room and she took me into a smaller room where a large screen television had been set up. In front of it, there was a console that had all kinds of wires hooked to it. She flipped the television set on and then reached for a headset that was lying on top of the console. She put the headset on and then hit the switch on the console. The screen lit up and the television showed what appeared to be a large field covered with snow. This just kept getting more and more strange. She pulled another item from below the console and I could see that she now had a set of handlebars in front of her. They were tethered to the console and there were all kinds of different buttons on them.
“Watch,” she said. I watched as the front end of a vehicle appeared on the screen.
It was a snowmobile, but I was looking at it as though I was sitting on the thing. Mrs. Clos pushed some buttons on the handlebars and the snowmobile started moving across the screen. It was pretty cool actually. She “rode” the snowmobile around for a while and pointed out the changes in scenery. This was the Move ‘N Shaker. It was a virtual reality game console and evidently, it was the hot ticket this year.
She started putting things away and we headed out of the room and back towards where we had started out. When she had closed the door, I waited until we had gotten settled back in at the table to ask her any questions about the game. “So, about how many of these things can you make in a day?” I asked.
“We are supposed to produce at least three hundred each day here at this location,” she said, “but our inventory has been coming in at about two hundred and sixty every day.”
“Are you sure that three hundred are being made each day? I noticed that you don’t have any cameras up or at least none that I can see,” I said.
“Oh, we’re sure,” she said, “There are enough parts for three hundred consoles given to that workstation every day. Each shift is to make one hundred consoles during their eight hours here.”
“Is anybody lagging behind or are all three shifts pretty much doing the same number?” I asked.
“First and third are doing fine, it’s the second shift that seems to be having trouble,” she said. “But I hate to think that she’s doing anything wrong, she’s been with us for years.” She went on to explain that the assemblers work in tandem with the stockers to move the merchandise from the assembly line to the warehouse.
“I’m going to need the names of all of the workers associated with that station, can you get me that?” I asked.
She nodded and took a pad and pencil from her apron. That was odd; I hadn’t noticed she was wearing an apron before. In any case, she wrote down five names and beside those, she wrote down which shift they worked. She handed me the slip of paper and said, “There are only two stockers who work twelve hours a day. Like I said, I don’t think it’s either of the two ladies who are working assembly. It’s the other three I’m suspicious of.”
Come back later today for another chapter of this story...
Until next time...
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A Little Bit of Mystery: Short Mysteries to Confuse and Amuse
