SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

[goneawaymod]

SHEET CAKE MEETUP

“Who the fuck is Linda?”

The question pops up every few minutes, a little tack of punctuation above the offensively-inoffensive music being piped in*. The room the hires have been ushered into is clearly just a conference room, with a layout that requires either sitting at awkwardly-spaced intervals around a giant table or milling and scooting around the smaller folding table, where the “big surprise” the corporate officers promised them is on display: a sheet cake.

A sheet cake that that still bears HAPPY BIRTH DAY LINDA in blue icing across the top, although someone has, at least, gone to the effort of writing welcome, to the team new hires in Sharpie on a purple flashcard and used a Popsicle stick and tape to plant it like a dismal flag right in the middle of Linda’s “DAY”. Dedication aside, the cake itself looks pretty suspect too, not as if it were poisoned but more like if it were salvaged. The cake part looks dry, and the frosting seems strangely...sweaty. No one’s eating yet, and yet there’s already a piece missing.

However, there’s no lack of enthusiasm around the room. A projector hooked up to a laptop casts an off-center, warped rectangle of WELCOME TO, THE BEST TEAM. NEW HIRES!! onto a wall. The many paper plates have a festive print, although they all seem to be Christmas themed. The table cloth looks as if it came from both 4th of July and potentially a war, given the scuffs and tears. The shot-glass sized paper cups are inadequate to hold a satisfying amount of sparkling cider, but at least they don’t leak. There are many more plastic knives than forks, which could prompt some hires to give in to their animal instincts and just use their hands, or perhaps start a barter economy for the better utensils.

“I’m so jealous,” a corporate employee keeps saying as she ushers hires into the room. “We haven’t had a good party in this office since Kelly’s baby shower, and that little girl practically has teeth now!”

(An eagle-eyed hire may suspect that the box of donuts next to the sheet cake might have come from said baby shower, on account of the fact that the few stale hunks of donut remaining have Pepto-Bismol pink strawberry icing and that there’s still the paper envelope for a gift card with ITS A GIRL written on it.)

Most of corporate slips out after the hires get set up - this is clearly an event for the hires to do some “team building” and work on “rapport” in addition to filling their bellies with cake that tastes remarkably like sand. There’s a karaoke machine in the corner, but hires are instructed not to touch it because, as an employee points out, last year’s Christmas party demonstrated that karaoke is the worst thing in the entire world for morale (“in any world! even before this one got eaten away by the bombs!”).

There’s an additional big glass jar filled with scraps of paper, which the hires are informed are filled with prompts for ice breakers and activities in case the party needs a pick-me-up. Any hire who investigates will find that most of the ice breaker activities start with three benign questions (“what’s your name?” “where are you from?” “what’s your favorite animal?”) and somehow, always a fourth question that feels a little invasive (“what are your feelings on unions?” “under what circumstances would you kill an innocent person?” “do you use the same passwords for all your accounts?”).

“Please enjoy yourselves and all the desserts Jorgmund has generously supplied you with,” one of the employees says on her way out, “and don’t worry about making a mess, janitorial gets paid too much to sit around as is.”

*All music that can be summarized as ’grocerycore’.

Comments

[morebetter]

"But someone might drink it before then."

Mac gives Dojima a suspicious look, as if he thinks Dojima's planning to be one of those shady people who would urge someone to leave a bottle of champagne for later only to fiendishly kipe it. And he continues to shove it through the arm hole of his outfit until it sits there, obvious and painfully bottle-shaped, under the cheap corporate-issued clothing.

"Besides, it's not a matter of not getting caught, you just have to book it before anyone does anything about it."

Spoken like someone who shoplifts most of his groceries and uses someone else's credit card for the rest.

[becauseimacoward]

"If those guys from Jorgmund allow you to take it out"

By all means, take it with you...if that bunch lets you. Dojima is pretty convinced if there's anything they can do to make them feel dependent to them, they will do it. Not letting them have a moment of respite seems like the kind of thing they'd do.

[morebetter]

"That's the point of booking it. You go fast enough, no one catches you. And most places have laws about apprehending thieves before they make it out the door - once they're beyond the first gate, they're like, free as birds." Mac makes a hand gesture like a bird flying away, buoyed by the confidence of someone who's kiped a lot of shit before and has seamlessly justified it to himself.

He gives Dojima an incredibly skeptical look. "Why, you security?"

[becauseimacoward]

"Do I look like security to you?"

He raises an eyebrow. Does he really look like someone who is associated with Jorgmund...willingly?

That's got to be an insult of some sort. He actually feels insulted.

[morebetter]

"No, dude, if you were security, I'd expect either a more titanic physique, especially around this area-" Mac gestures to his own pecs- "like I would demand of my security details, or I'd expect a beer gut and a badge, and since you don't have either of those I assumed we're cool. So, you know, no need to blow up my spot."

He lets the champagne bottle sit there under his clothes and is almost offensively blasé as he turns his attention to seeing if there are other vessels of real alcohol mixed amongst the sparkling passionfruit mixer crap.