Joe’s anger bristled with every step he took on his trek towards Human Resources. He lit a hand-rolled cigarette and strode on, purpose in every pace. He had just passed into the defense-contracting district, paying no heed to the explosive test shelling. Nothing could compare with the hell he would unleash once he found the right ear. Oh, he would be professional about it at first (and at worst he would beg), but instinct told him that something more was afoot. Fire him? For what felt like a set up? He had the right to answers. Things weren’t like this when he had first joined the company. Or had they been all along?

One year out of Metropolitan Business College, Joe Noone sat in the VirCorp Recruitment Testing Center, finishing up his skill assessments after the arduous physical. It had been nearly an eleven-month wait just to make it to this stage. He then waited for another seven hours in the lobby patiently awaiting the Company’s decision, making friends with other bright-eyed greenhorn candidates. Like him, all had done well in school and were looking forward to landing that stepping stone job that could lead to advancement. He was elated when his caseworker beckoned from his private office and told him he had a job.

“Great! Did I get the position I wanted?” he asked, barely containing his excitement.

The caseworker took a long deep breath and peered over a printout at Joe. The look was paralyzing, like a disappointed mother catching her only son with his hand in the cookie jar. He spoke:

“You must understand, Mister Noone, that times are tough and, while your qualifications are splendid, we just weren’t able to find a place for you in management training.”

Joe shifted uncomfortably in his seat, unbuttoned his collar. Chuckling, he tried to make light of the matter. “I understand that, Mister Starling. I’m not trying to replace you, you know!” The humor was lost in his intensity of Starling’s stare. The bespectacled man with a push-broom mustache and too many chins cleared his throat politely. Joe was deflated. “What exactly are you offering me?”

“We currently have two vacancies that should suit you perfectly. Now understand you will have ample room for advancement and should any vacancies occur in human resources your name will be top on the list. We all start at the bottom, remember that. We promote from within, except when we don’t.” The caseworker nodded and slid the printout across to Joe. “Tell me what you think.”

Joe took the paper and reclined in his seat. He read it slowly, digesting all the information from the corporate header to the last punctuation mark. What disturbed him most were the two job descriptions smack dab in the middle. He read them over and over, attempting to control his disgust.

Janitorial Assistant Grade E: Day Shift Kitchen Associate. Assist in daily maintenance of the business district canteen including (but not limited to) dish washing, installation and maintenance of appliances, full servicing of the canteen washrooms including the really hairy and gross bits.

Security Assistant Grade D: Day Shift Security Associate. Assist in the checking of identifications, patrolling and monitoring of corporate assets, greeting incoming and outgoing employees with a cheerful smile and diffusion of terrorist situations. Hazard pay available.

Joe shifted in his seat, turned the paper over and over again looking for the “gotcha!” amidst the legalese. $100,000 tuition dollars and 5 years to get his diploma yielded him the opportunity to become either a mop-jockey or a corporate legionnaire. His middle-class roots withered in fear. Desperately, he held the paper up to the window to see if there was any elven writing visible only by moonlight. The gentle throat clearing of Mister Starling brought Joe’s attention back to reality. “Well?”

Joe gently placed the paper on the desk and drummed his fingers on the armrests. Employment was employment. His older brother Gerry had been on the dole for three years before the government shut the program down in favor of privatization. Something snapped inside his Gerry. Joe remembered watching him through the glass pane of his padded room after he had had to sign the formal commitment papers. Employment was too vital in today’s economy to scoff at. Joe began the long bitter process of swallowing his pride.

Mister Starling smiled at him patronizingly. “Look, I know it’s not what you had hoped for, but like I said it gets your foot in the door. Besides, we need young fit lads like you. You’re intelligent. You’ll advance quickly. Before you know it this will all be but a funny anecdote you tell your trainees. What do you say?”

“Young bright strapping lads to do the dishes?” It came out before he had even intended to say it. “I’m sorry,” Joe nodded in apology. “Mister Starling, I believe I am most interested in the Security position. I just have one question. It involves terrorists. Does that sort of thing happen…often?”

Mister Starling smiled amiably and reached across his girth and the desk to pat Joe on the shoulder. “Oh, not as often as you’d think. Here at least. At some of our international operations we take a lot of flak from extremist groups, often backed by foreign governments who are, ah, unsympathetic to globalization. Because of the sensitive nature of these operations we tend to attract strong negative sentiments.” Starling sighed and looked at his manicure. “I won’t lie to you. Since the Golden Gate Incident a few years back, we need to be extra cautious. Although, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about this right now. Things are calm.”

Joe remembered signing some papers, requisitioning his uniform and gear from the compound’s quartermaster, the long drive home, and the look of utter disappointment on his girlfriend Marie’s face. In a cataclysmic flash of emotions he learned that she was going places and he wasn’t. That night she walked out on him. That night he discovered the joys of drinking alone.

He started work two days later, sad but sober and ready to get down to business. He was working in the pharmaceutical sectors, manning the metal detectors and checking IDs. It was here that he first met his mentor, the gregarious middle-aged Commander Al Jablonski. After his first shift, he asked Joe to take a walk with him.

“Smoke?” he offered Joe a cigarette.

“There’s no better time to start,” he replied. “ Thanks, sir.”

“Roll ‘em myself, saves me about fifty dollars a carton. And call me Al, none of this ‘sir’ bullshit down in the ranks.” He lit up his cigarette, handing the lighter to Joe. Joe lit up and passed it back. They ambled down the landscaped parkway. “You’ve done well your first day, son.”

“Thanks, Al.”

“But…”

“But?”

“It looks like you’ve got more on your mind than unwinding after your shift.”

Joe smiled wanly. “Ain’t that the truth.”

Al nodded. “It’s OK to speak your mind among your fellow man, provided your conversation partner is a fellow man,” he jerked his head towards the business district. “We’re gonna’ be working together for a while, son, so why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?”

Somehow Al exuded trustworthiness, the father figure Joe had been missing for years. He could open up to him without feeling weird about it. Al was genuinely concerned about him.

“Well Al, this isn’t exactly what I thought I’d be doing right out of college.” He went on and told him about college, his job interview with Starling and how he felt reading the job assignments. Marie walking out. A binge to forget.

“When you’re young and in love—or what you think is love—you expect the best right away. You feel that because of what you’ve had to do to get where you are, to be who you are, that the world owes you something. We’ve all felt that way, since we crawled out of the slime. But let me tell you something. We don’t’ know shit.” He took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette before looking at Joe. “A man named Oscar Wilde once wrote something very profound that I try to keep in mind. He said, ‘Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.’ And you know what? Drinking yourself to death isn’t gonna improve your knowledge, your job, or your life. You’re one of my boys now. I need you sober to be your best. Hell, I requested you for our group because I know you can do the job and think with a clear head. Your school records prove that.” Joe stared down at the ground, ashamed for complaining.

He tapped Joe on the arm and pointed to the business district. “Now, some of the people working up there really do know what they’re doing. They aren’t avaricious, vain or stupid. But the majority of them got there based on who they know, not what they know. Up there they invest in product development, prospects, assets, corporate bonds and foreign currency. Wherever they go, they’re always focused on the money. It haunts them. They’re responsible to stockholders and bosses in even higher towers that nip at their heels every other second. No time for much else. Sure, they have trophy wives and other expensive things they pretend to enjoy, but ‘business’ dominates their life.

“And yes, we help protect them in the bigger picture. Yet down here, we invest in people, not dollars and cents. That’s intangible to them. In our work, do we have to occasionally chase down and kick the living shit out of someone? You bet. We have to exercise discipline. I won’t lie to you—we have corporate brown-nosers in our ranks too, hungry for promotion. There’s at least one in every ten, so watch your back. But look at it this way: who’s the first person to greet you at the door when you come into work in the morning. It’s you. Who will people trust in an emergency? One of those glib despot VPs? No, it’s you again. Here you still make a difference in a person’s daily life. That’s got to count for something.

“I know it isn’t what you wanted, but down here you can still manage people—in your own way. And you don’t report to any sweating executive who’s gonna lash out at you because he can’t get it up in bed. You report to me. Down here we’re family. Got it?” He offered his hand to seal the speech.

Joe shook it firmly and smiled. “You’ve got my vote.”

Al laughed and waved it off. In the ranks, he had become everyone’s favorite uncle for a reason. He took the time to chat with every one of his people. He was more than a boss; he was a friend and brought a real sense of fellowship to the profession.

Over the next two years, Joe followed in his mentor’s footsteps. Treating everyone as compassionately and fairly as possible—while remaining firm, respectable and trustworthy. With these attributes Joe became Security Chief of Sector C. But then a tremendous blow to morale came when the executives decided to let Al go, in what became known as the first round of The Purges. Men with outstanding records, men with families—good men—all thrown to the wolves when the company found it could save more money by outsourcing half of its security detail to RoboGuard Security Systems International. Efficiency consultants were called in, clipboards were passed around, meetings held, careers ended with a sycophantic nod of the head.

Joe’s fellow officers commiserated together as one by one they said goodbye. Their fraternity was disbanded as computerized systems and cheap labor began to replace everything. And Joe grew bitter. Smoked too much. Drank too much. Grew to despise the company when he took the requisite pay cut to keep his job. Crawling into the bottle became the only area of his life where he felt right. It became his only escape from a world turned upside down. But that world had suddenly been turned round once again.

Back in the present, Joe exhaled, smoke climbing away in the evening air, tossed his cigarette into the darkness. He stopped and looked around, gathering his thoughts in a silence only broken by the occasional test explosions in the distance.

He recalled blacking out, world spinning, too drunk. He remembered feeling the cold of the floor on his face as he lost consciousness. Yet he had woken up in his chair. Someone must have moved him, sat him upright. That someone knew more about what was going on than he did.

He cursed under his breath and stepped forward. The skyscrapers of the business sectors glowed in the distance. An enormous porcelain fountain shaped like a toilet bowl was just ahead. He now knew exactly where he was. Behind the fountain was a building shaped like a gigantic plunger, home to VirCorp Janitorial Services Headquarters. He stared at it, lost in reverie, thinking about how his life might have turned out had he elected to take the other position offered him.

During the course of his employment, Joe had come to know quite a few janitors. After all, he had to approve their access to his sector when they performed their often-unmentionable tasks. They were a strange lot. Mostly good folks, but rumor had it that the fumes they breathed did something to their brains. Something that that made them gravitate towards reclining in boiler rooms reading avant-garde pornographic magazines. Genuine connoisseurs. Joe shuddered to think how his tastes in the female form might have otherwise been shaped.

The best janitor Joe ever met was an ambitious, but disorganized, man. It was his lifelong ambition to be promoted from Clog Specialist (Janitorial Services Assistant Grade K) to Mopmaster (Grade A). When The Purges were over, his wish was granted. He wore the Twin Mops of Honor badge around his neck with pride each and every day. He indulged himself in this fashion until one fateful poorly lit shift when he grabbed Liquid Plumber by mistake instead of Coca-Cola. The best janitor Joe ever met.

Joe chuckled as he approached the fountain. He saw the bits of copper and silver catch the light in the bowl. So many wishes just flushed down the drain. Why not me? he thought. Digging in his pockets, he withdrew a quarter. In good superstitious fashion, he turned his back to the fountain and flicked the coin over his shoulder. Joe closed his eyes and made a complicated wish. The sound of metal hitting tissue broke his concentration.

“Oww!” Something big crashed down into the water behind him.

Joe turned his head to listen better. “Wait a minute. Coins aren’t supposed to go ‘oww’!” He spun and saw a dripping shadow emerge from the center of the fountain. He grabbed hold of his nightstick and dropped into a defensive stance. “This is Sector Chief Joe Noone! Who’s there?”

The shadow began to laugh in panicked ecstasy as it trudged through slimy fountain water towards him, calling his name. “Joe Noone? It is you, Joe Noone! That’s your name! I knew it had a time of day ring to it. Joe Noone! Ha ha!” The figure splashed around, half stumbling as it strode closer and closer to Joe. Joe gulped. Who the hell was this person? He took several steps back, shielding his eyes to see, nightstick at the ready.