“The worst and the best was working as a secretary,” the very bald, very fat man said as he worked a drain snake upwards through the gutter drain. “Takin’ notes, settin’ up birthday parties.”

“You did?” Sean asked. “Bullshit. No way.”

“Naw, I did. I’d type shit up, send out these little certificates of achievement to good workers.” The bald man grabbed the steel cable of the snake, shoving it a few inches deeper into whatever clog had stopped up the gutters of the chronological studies building. “I’d print up little cards and staple bags of gummy worms to them. Said shit like, ‘We dig your sales results, so you hit pay dirt!’ No bullshit.”

Sean Lawrence wasn’t old, but he wasn’t exactly a teenager either. He’d been paying his own bills one way or another for years now. The bald man in front of him was Jeff Greco, drain unclogger and general building maintainer extraordinaire. He was one of the most blue-collar, six-pack-of-beer-after-and-sometimes-during workmen Sean had ever met. There was no way that Jeff had ever worked as a secretary. His burp frequency alone was enough that it made no sense.

Having already claimed bullshit, Sean now had to be careful about how to proceed. He could call bullshit again, and if Jeff really was lying, he’d get an admission in the form of, “Can’t fool you, you smart ass.” That was the game, and he had played it with the man dozens of times.

But if he was telling the truth, chances were good Jeff would get prickly over getting called a liar, and Sean didn’t want that. He actually liked the old man, which in this kind of job was a gift from heaven. Jeff did his job, he didn’t smoke meth, and best of all, he didn’t really expect Sean to actually work most of the time. Which was good, since Sean didn’t have even the beginnings of a clue of how to do most of what the old man did.

Sean wasn’t useless. He could handle minor problems of the leaky-pipe or flipped breaker variety. But Jeff was the product of a string of jobs with titles ranging from “Handyman” to “Building Maintenance Technician III” all the way to “Bioremediation Specialist”, a job Jeff described as “pouring stuff down drains and waiting.” He could eyeball just about any broken object less complex than a circuit board, tell you how it was broken, and most of the time, how to fix it.

But that also meant he wasn’t exactly the type of guy who became a typist. Jeff, noticing Sean had been quiet for a few moments, turned around.

“What’s wrong? Don’t I seem like the secretary type?”

“You know you don’t, you old shit.”

“Well, okay. I admit it wasn’t my usual gig.” He pulled on the drain snake, grunting with satisfaction as something seemed to dislodge. “It was a bet.”

“You bet someone you could be a secretary?”

“Nope. I was working an office furnishing job, stripping cubicles. It was piecemeal work, didn’t pay for shit. And this manager type walks through with another guy, talking about how he has, I quote, ‘the right to have a secretary but not the need.’ And the other guy laughs and points at me and says, ‘you could hire him.’”

“And they bet on whether you’d do it?”

“They bet on how long I’d last. I pulled down seventeen bucks an hour on that gig. Pretty good money, back then. Better than taking apart cubicles, anyway.”

—

“What about you?”

“What do you mean, what about me?”

“Your worst job, Sean. You’re always askin’ me about mine.”

The old man had successfully dislodged the clog in the drain pipe, crowing in triumph when, as he had somehow predicted, the culprit was an entire dead bird. After that, they had moved inside and down to a basement, where they were tasked with re-gluing a peeling baseboard next to a giant machine. It was the cheap rubber kind that kept walls from getting scuffed in government buildings and shitty restaurants.

Sean thought for a few moments before deciding on one particularly bad job. “Lots of bad ones, but the worst was probably working as an Insurance Adjuster. The kind you call when you wreck your car.”

Jeff glanced up from his glue-gun for a moment. “Thought you’d like that kind of thing. Desk job and all.”

“Not this kind. The way these jobs work is that they pay enough to get you in the door, then work you as hard as they can until you quit. If you work faster, they just give you more work. It’s never enough. Then, when you leave, they hire the next guy. The turnover is impressive.”

“Nobody makes it? Long term, I mean.”

“Not without becoming an alcoholic or getting stress problems. Two guys had heart attacks while I was there. The second one came back to work the next day, just so he wouldn’t get more behind. I got the hell out of there.”

Jeff nodded. He’d often joke that he wasn’t book smart or not cut out for anything that needed math, but he could also calculate how many core boards a 15-story elevator shaft would use in his head. He wasn’t stupid, he just chose the kind of jobs where he could forget everything and zone out with his beer until the next morning when he was done with work. Desk jobs weren’t for him, and what Sean had described was part of why.

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“Whatcha reading, there?”

“The manual for this machine.” Sean thumbed through a three leaf binder detailing the various parts used to build the thing, who the vendors were, and how to operate it. “It does something like measuring time in a new way, or something close.” He held the binder out, so Jeff could take a look at the various diagrams and instructions.

“You understand that mess?”

“Some of it.” Sean lied. He understood damn near all of it. Before he had shifted his focus to be a teacher, he had been working on a physics degree. He had enjoyed it, too, enough that he kept up his studies on the side while working. He even kept reading the textbooks after learning that by dropping out, he couldn’t be a teacher anymore. Apparently, understanding something meant jack shit if you didn’t have a piece of paper from a university explaining, very carefully, that you had paid them money to “learn” the material.

That didn’t mean he really understood the machine, though. It didn’t tell time in the way a clock did. He knew that. This was about measuring time in the sense that they were actually studying time itself, the way it worked, and what drove it. It was a fairly new field, which explained part of why the behemoth in front of him was a bespoke, custom machine slapped together from various expensive parts with an extremely thick instruction manual.

Jeff snorted. “Smart. Too smart for this mess.” He laid down another few dots of glue, then toed in the strip of baseboard to the wall again. “That should stick, but we need to keep it pressed down. Get something heavy.”

About five times a day, Jeff would actually make Sean do something. Considering how much of an asshole he’d be to complain about the five or ten minutes a day Jeff wasn’t doing his job for him, Sean didn’t grumble. Instead, he glanced around the room until he saw a heavy-looking metal table, mounted on wheels, with a bottom shelf at just the right height to push on the rubber strip.

He walked over, carefully checked to make sure there wasn’t anything breakable nearby, then grabbed the lip of the table with both hands to shift it away from the wall. It was surprisingly heavy, and didn’t budge. He put more force into it, successfully creating a gap of a few inches. But as he did, he felt a horrible tearing as something on the table seemed to give way, followed by a loud, grating beeping noise filling the room.

“Sean, what the hell is that?”

Sean knelt low by the table, immediately identifying the problem. One of the cords powering the big machine in the center of the room was carefully covered with plastic stripping, keeping it safe from accidentally getting hooked by toes or equipment as people walked through the room. The last few feet of it weren’t, and some idiot of a scientist had decided it was too much trouble to get down low enough to thread it under the table itself to plug it in. Instead, the cord had been bent and threaded through an opening near the back of the bottom shelf.

That meant Sean had ripped the cord not out of the wall, but out of the plug itself when he moved the table. According to the manual he had read earlier, the machine had a minute or so of backup power, but only that, and the beeping was presumably to alert anyone nearby to plug the machine back in. The room was deafeningly loud while it was going off.

“Shit. Jeff, I ripped this cord out of its plug. Not the wall. The plug.”

Jeff popped up and ran over to the wall. “Dammit. Is whatever they are doing already fucked?”

If it was, so were they. This job paid pretty well for the kind of gig it was, which HR presumably did with the assumption that they could hire the kind of people who wouldn’t cause the kind of problem that Sean just made. Jeff was innocent, but it wouldn’t matter to any of the higher-ups. And though this was a shitty job, it was also flat-out the best shitty job that Sean could get. He needed it.

Sean glanced over at the machine. “I don’t think so. It has some battery backup, or something. If we get it fixed fast enough, it should be fine.”

“Got it. See if you can’t get that machine quiet. I’ll fix the plug.” Jeff immediately pried the plug out of the wall with his gloved hands and started cutting away at the rubber hood that sat over where the bare wires were supposed to connect. As he was pulling his knife to strip the cord a bit more, Sean made it to the machine’s control console, which sat on a pedestal bolted to the ground just a foot or so from the machine.

It wasn’t hard to figure out where the noise was coming from. The console itself wasn’t as ad-hoc as the rest of the machine, and the speaker wasn’t exactly cleverly hidden. The beeping was coming out of a small, easily seen wire-mesh hole about two inches across. Sean looked desperately around the room for something cushy and sound-deafening to cover it with, before realizing the palm of his hand would do just fine. Pressing down over the hole didn’t eliminate the sound entirely, but it did knock it down from an unmissable blaring to something you’d have to be inside the room to hear.

“Good, keep doing that. I’m almost done here. Thank goodness someone built this cord modular, or I’d have to solder it. I don’t have my kit here.” As Sean watched, the fat old man’s hands flashed from his knife to his screwdriver, loosened the wire-clamping screws on the plug, cleaned out fragments of broken wire, inserted the newly stripped wire ends, and tightened everything down.

“Now just some tape, make sure this thing doesn’t burn down the whole place, and none of these college types will ever know the difference,” Jeff continued, whipping some tape around the plug. He was right, too.

Sean knew more physics than most of the lab assistants did, and the string of dead-end, miserable jobs had also given him a general knowledge and situational usefulness none of them had. Most days, he could pretend that he wasn’t dying inside when the assistants had cool, interesting work while he spent his time tightening power outlet covers and adding bait to rat traps.

But his present stress coupled with the knowledge that those same guys would sneer and fire him over something that their idiot cord-routing had caused meant that he was okay with covering up the mistake. He had been failing his life. Once upon a time, he had tried to do something good with teaching. It hadn’t worked out, which would have been bad enough by itself. Learning that the whole world was subtly geared to keep him from ever recovering from it was worse. Was he bitter? At that moment, yeah. He was salty as hell. But with the prospect of failing even harder, he just wanted to go back to his shitty life.

“All right. Got it. Hold on to your ass,” Jeff’s voice came to break Sean out of his thoughts. He spun the plug in his hand to orient the prongs and plunged the plug back into the wall. Out of the corner of his eye, Sean watched as the metal sparked, the prongs sunk into the outlet, and the circuit closed.

Then, with a sudden flash, time itself stopped.