Written by: Goemagog

I used to work at the flower mill. We ground up flowers and over-protective gardners into an oil that was sold to perfume companies. The whole place smelled like flowers all the time, like walking through the bath basket section of a gift store or the perfume section of a department store.

It was a good job, decent pay, friendly co-workers, and bosses that mostly left us alone. There was a lot of management and we were never really sure what they all did, it's not like you really need supervision to run a petal mulching machine or clear bone fragments from the drain.

One of the floor supervisors, which was the lowest rank in management there, was Francisco Fitzpatrick, a welshman from the Ukraine. He wasn't the most senior floor supervisor, but he was up for a promotion because the senior floor supervisor was an ass who started every meeting by claiming that he could get anyone fired without anybody knowing that the person has been fired or that he had been involved.

The company sent Fitzpatrick to some sort of management training conference in Europe being run by a local consulting company. He was a nice guy and we were all happy for him. He was gone for a couple of weeks and when he got back he took over the company.

We weren't expecting a promotion that big and everybody who was on his old team starting trying to kiss his ass for raises and promotions. He didn't give any out, but put the whole company on the night shift, sending out a memo claiming that cooler air would enhance the product. He started to have long one-on-one meetings with the old managers, meetings that usually involved a lot of unintelligible screaming.

After about a month, there were only a half-dozen managers left, all of them spending the night locked in their office, but with their windows open all night so the whole building was icy. About once a night, someone would be called up to be let go. There would be a lot of yelling echoing down the stairs, and we never saw them again.

Kim Jose, a short Greenlander, was fine with the cold air, but joined some sort of religious cult. He kept claiming that Fitzpatrick was some sort of evil demon, and rigged up some mirrors so he could see everyone approaching the employee breakroom. He was getting really annoying so it wasn't a big suprise when he was called upstairs. He went to the breakroom instead, but there was some yelling there and he too was gone.

I'm no fool, so when the cops started poking around, I put two and two together. The company was laying people off left and right, couldn't afford heating, and with the cops asking questions there was probably some sort of fraud, even if they insisted it was just 'missing persons'. The company was going to go under, and I didn't plan on going with it.

I paid to have a resume professionally written and started looking for a new job. They pay for donations at the blood bank, which isn't really a donation I guess, and this last week there were some openings for security guards. All of the industrial jobs, where my experience lies, are night-shift only. They also seem to be dangerous, every application has a box for blood type.

Goe, trying to give you something more cheerful to read than current events.