The Story - part 3

George rolled over and closed his eyes. Tomorrow would be a very different day.

Over the next few weeks, George continued to work as diligently as ever. He prepared his report each day as always, and his boss always gave him the same approving review of his work. For a while, he was bothered by the thought of the report ending up in the trash when he was done, but he tried to focus on the fact that it was only important that the report was prepared and given to the customer. Whatever happens after that, is not important. Sometimes it was hard to keep that in his mind.

At the end of the day, George often looked out the window, wondering the man whom he had seen throwing his report away would come back. He wondered what the man thought about when he read the report. He wondered if he was ever curious about who exactly wrote that report.

Once, when it was raining, George was certain he saw the man standing in the parking lot. The rain on the windows may it hard to see outside as it twisted and distorted the images of the cars in the parking lot under the dark rain clouds. George squinted looking through the dirty glass, but eventually decided it was one of the lamp posts.

George sat back down at his desk and finished up the changes to his report. He printed it and stapled the pages together and slid it into a folder for his boss. The entire routine of preparing the report was very mechanical for him now. After years of practice, it was almost like he was running on auto-pilot. Type, print, prepare, and finish. Just like clockwork.

George walked to his boss’s office and handed him the report. His boss thanked and praised him as usual upon reading through it. Just like clockwork.

George returned to his office and cleaned up from the day’s work. His papers tended to get strewn about the room as he progressed through preparing the report. It wasn’t that he was messy, just that the work required a lot of printing and revising and as he worked he needed to spread it out to see it all. When the work was done, he could clean it all up.

As he was finishing, he noticed he had left the report open on the computer. He leaned over the keyboard to close the document, but as he did he happened to glance at the very first line of the report, which read:

“The accumulated data, for the mouth of October, conclusively demonstrates that…”

The mouth of October? How could he have written that? He read it over again to make sure he saw that right. It was definitely there. George had never handed in a report with a mistake on it like that before. Maybe years ago, and certainly not one recently that would reach his customer.

George ran from his office and down the hall to his boss’s office. He wanted to stop him from giving that report to the customer with a typographical error in it. Especially in the first line!

George skidded to a halt in front of his boss’s empty office. He stood for a moment and then ran down the hall to the meeting room where he was certain his boss was meeting with the customer. He stopped outside the door and listened. But there wasn’t a sound coming from inside. He opened the door slowly and looked in, but there was nobody inside.

Then he heard his boss’s voice down the hall. He ran down the hall and slowed as he came to the corner at the far end. He peered around it to see his boss talking with the tall man in the dark coat! The same one who had thrown that report in the garbage. His boss had his back to George and it was hard to hear what they were saying.

Then George saw his boss hand the report to the man with the dark coat.

to be continued…

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 10:05 pm and is filed under The Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.