Come Saturday morning, our consultant wakes up in the new apartment and sees a message that his belongings have been delivered. He opens the door to the entrance space between the apartment and elevator and has two boxes waiting for him with a note apologizing for the delay. The top on contains his laptop and all his notes and reports, success! He pops open the second and it’s full of clothing, pink clothing. He looks at the outside of the box again and it too is addressed to this “Mandy” character. He kicks the box inside, plops down on his pink couch and stares at the contents. These are the only clothes he has now, outside of the dirty outfit from yesterday, everything else is locked up in his old dorm for the weekend. And he ran around the recreation zone in that outfit so he doesn’t want to wear sweaty clothes all weekend... He rummages through the box and finds a long pink shirt, the only one without puffy sleeves or sparkly glitter. His pants options are more grim. Skirt after skirt, but then a lone pair of tiny white shorts. Finally, the box contains nothing but bras, panties, and striped knee-high socks. After a shower, he gets dressed and looks himself over in the mirror. The shorts are short enough and the shirt long enough that it looks like he’s just wearing a small dress and nothing underneath, great. He ties off the shirt at the waist so people can at least see he has the shorts on, but it’s showing off a long of his smooth legs. He pauses and rubs a hand down them and wonders when that happened. Did his hair fall out in the shower or had that happened earlier and he didn’t notice? Either way, he pulls his socks up high to cover himself. He’s hungry enough to put it out of his mind and head out for food.
Avoiding eye contact, he marches quickly to the weekend food stalls and scans his badge to activate the ordering tablet. Instead of the pages of options from earlier, he’s shown just three. The company must skimp with keeping the chefs working on the weekend. He orders a meal and shake, eats it quickly at a bench off to the side, and hurries away from the small weekend crowd. Passing by the old dorm on his trip back, he tries to scan his badge again, but has the same flashing red result. By the time he returns to his apartment, he’s already hungry again. He figured he’d do a little work to keep his mind off... everything, and then grab an extra meal in a bit.
Sunday has a similar routine. He digs through the clothing box, grabs one of the special weekend meals, and comes back to work. As he sits at his computer, he shifts uncomfortably. Today’s shirt really chafes and is preventing him from working. He glances back at the clothing box and one of the silk bras strewn on the floor. It did look more comfortable than his shirt, and nobody would know or see him in it... He slips it on under the shirt and the material is cool and smooth so he quickly feels better. All the stress wears on him and he is already feeling tired by noon. He soon gives up on trying to do work, watches a little TV, grabs an early dinner, and is asleep before the sun sets.
He startles awake on Monday, unaware of how long he’s been asleep. He glances over at his phone and realizes he never set an alarm the night before. Well passed 9 and with his shift starting soon, he wouldn’t be able to stop by HR to fix all the problems before work. He barely has time to shower, toss on an outfit, and rush to log into the laptop for his morning meeting. He joins the meeting and grabs his report from the weekend, but hears the engineer congratulate him on fixing his laptop’s camera and microphone. He’s confused but glad the new apartment did actually fix the connection issues. He looks down at his notes and brushes his hair back out of his eyes. Now that he’s seeing the consultant for the first time, the engineer said he’s shocked and that they’re not what he was picturing a productivity consultant to look like. She’s a lot cuter. Our lead pulls back, What?! The engineer apologizes and says that probably wasn’t appropriate, so he apologizes to Mandy. The consultant shakes his head, what was going on here. Why did the engineer call him “Mandy”? The confused worker says he knows she never introduced herself, but when you join a call, it has your name on screen. So the entire time they’ve been working together, you thought my name was Mandy? No, no! My name is- but then the microphone blips and stops broadcasting. It comes back on in a few seconds so he tries again, but the mic blips off. Angry, he scrawls his name on one of his notes and holds it up to the camera, which has already blipped off on its own. The engineer questions if everything was all right, she’s having a lot of connection problems. The consultant furiously types in the meeting chat log. Engineers must have good access around the campus, he could get help correcting all these problems. As he reaches for the Send key, his connection is suddenly severed and the meeting is ended.
Stewing in the apartment and now unable to scan out the door, he’s locked inside. Several hours pass and then there’s a knock at his door. He cautiously opens it, only to find the entrance space occupied by a cartoonishly curvy woman in a stereotypical French maid costume straight out of a Halloween bargain store. She loudly apologizes for forgetting to refill his soaps yesterday. He starts to question her, but she glances side to side into his apartment and then grabs him by the collar, yanks him into the entrance space and slams his door shut. The space was small to begin with, but between her springy skirt and the overinflated basketballs on her chest, she has him pinned tight against the wall.
She speaks in hushed tones and lets him know that this was the only unrecorded space she can talk to him openly in. They don’t have much time, so he has to listen. For his own good, he needs to stop fighting the system. Try to escape but if he keeps complaining about his conditions or trying to tell his engineer the truth, bad things will happen. The company is trying to get rid of bad employees. The staff shortages are fake, the company actually has tons of employees but they don’t release their employment figures to keep things secret and avoid paying fees and taxes. All these consultants are being brought in to find the bad engineers. She knows because that’s what happened to her. She was an early hire but after a bad performance review from when he refused to work overnight on a project, they took him away. After they changed her, they confined her to serving as one the housekeeping staff to prevent her from leaving and going public. The more she fought back, the worse the changes got. She pushes her massive chest tighter into him to drive her point home. Don't blame your engineer, he doesn’t know the truth. Blame the company. She pops his apartment door back open, shoves a bar of soap into his hand, and pushes him inside before backing into the elevator.
Stunned, the consultant tosses the soap onto the table and heavily sits onto his couch. He could NOT end up like the maid, but the changes he’d already experienced meant the process was starting. He has to find a way to do something without anybody knowing about it and without risking his job. If they have cause to fire him or end his contract, who knows what they’d be willing to do once there was no paper trail.