18/05/2024

The Thrill of the Case – Part Two

Read part one of The Thrill of the Case.

At work the following day, Everarck sat in the horseshoe of the reception desk, doing such a marvellous impression of someone who was not the receptionist, perhaps a technician surveying the receptionist's equipment in their absence: phone, switchboard, computer, guestbook, pen, cash drawer, corporate agenda, complaint forms; that not one of the visitors found themselves able to approach him for help for eight and a half unbroken minutes.

However, even the white golf club baseball cap, incompetently Windsor-knotted tie and oblique, uncomfortable posture could not indefinitely suppress the idea that this small-framed man with squashed facial features might be able to perform the most basic tasks of a receptionist - with effort. And perhaps a little support.


To his credit, Everarck maintained the impression of not really being the receptionist but graciously prepared to stand in for them, fumbling with systems he knew intimately and lathering his instructions with mights and maybes, until the last of the visitors had disappeared into the labyrinth of the back offices or gone home.


At this point, Everarck wrote, 'Back in 5 mins. Pls wait or leave a msg' with a marker on a sheet of scrap paper, which he placed next to the guestbook, and left with a pile of emails which he had printed out according to corporate policy.


In truth, his pretence of not being the receptionist had some basis in fact. The company did not have a receptionist, and Everarck's job description specified little more than that he competently assist the director and put to rest a minimum of 40 hours per week on the premises. However, that the flexibility of Everarck's role and the official vacuum of services in the reception area provided him a permanent mooring point in the organisation had been so powerfully implied by the director, the stone-faced and permanently sleep-deprived Surd Fleeting, that Everarck had not had the will to resist. Few would have.


He took the meticulously compiled sheaf of papers towards the IT room and attempted to open the door with his two unoccupied fingers but succeeded only in opening the stiff door and spilling the papers directly from his guts in one great floe across the IT room's becabled floor.


'Well done, young man,' rumbled the only person there, a man whose thick hair in several shades of shining grey was the only part of him visible behind a variety of box-shaped machines the colour of rancid cream, 'That is by far the funniest thing to happen today.'


'Apart from looking at yourself in the mirror, Nik,' replied Everarck to Nichomachus, stooping to pick up the papers and slather them into a single jumbled pile.


'Don't be rude. You'll upset MARIA.'


Everarck knew that MARIA was how Nik identified the seemingly alert core of the interlocking databases that defined his professional sandbox.


'How is she today?'


'Temperamental,' replied Nik with a hollow laugh, 'She still hasn't forgiven me for my little holiday to Lake Solemn without her.'


Everarck was briefly caught up in the dream of a woman who would miss him when he was gone. But he was holding Zagonella to an impossible standard. He never went anywhere.

Read part 3 of The Thrill of the Case.

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