Terry Bisson - An Office Romance

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 23.59KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Originallypublished in Playboy, February 1997.

AN OFFICE ROMANCE

by Terry Bisson

The first time Ken678 saw Mary97, he was in Municipal Real Estate, queuedfor a

pickup for Closings. She stood two spaces in front of him: blue skirt,orange

tie, slightly convex white blouse, like every other female icon. Hedidn't know

she was a Mary; he couldn't see which face she had. But she heldher Folder in

both hands, as "old-timers" often did, and when the queuescrolled forward he

saw her fingernails.

They were red.

Then the queue flickered and scrolled again, and she was gone. Ken

wasintrigued but he promptly forgot about it. It was a busy time of year, and

hewas running like crazy from Call to Task. Later that week he saw her

again,paused at an open Window in the Corridor between Copy and Send. He

slowed ashe passed her, by turning his Folder sideways--a trick he had

learned. Therewere those red fingernails again. It was curious.

Fingernails were not on the Option Menu.

Red was not on the Color Menu, either.

Ken used the weekend to visit his Mother at the Home. It was her birthdayor

anniversary or something like that. Ken hated weekends. He had grown usedto

his Ken face and he felt uncomfortable without it. He hated his old name,which

his Mother insisted on calling him. He hated how grim and terrifyingthings

were outside. To avoid panic he closed his eyes and hummed--out here,he could

do both--trying to simulate the peaceful hum of the Office.

But there is no substitute for the real thing, and Ken didn't relax untilthe

week restarted, and he was back inside. He loved the soft electron buzz ofthe

search engines, the busy streaming icons, the dull butter shine of

theCorridors, the shimmering Windows with their relaxing scenes of

theexvironment. He loved his life and he loved his work.

That was the week he met Mary; or rather, she met him.

Ken678 had just retrieved a Folder of documents from Search and was takingthem

to Print. He could see by the blur of icons ahead that there was going tobe a

long queue at the Bus leaving Commercial, so he paused in the

Corridor;waitstates were encouraged in high traffic zones.

He opened a Window by resting his Folder on the sill. There was no air

ofcourse, but there was a nice view. The scene was the same in every Window

inMicroserf Office 6.9: cobblestones and quiet cafes and chestnut trees

inblossom. April in Paris.

Ken heard a voice. <Beautiful isn't it?>

<What?> he said, confused. Two icons couldn't open the same Window,and yet

there she was beside him. Red fingernails and all.

<April in Paris> she said.

<A little trick I learned> She pointed to her Folder, stacked ontop of his,

flush right.

<-did you do that?> he finished because it was in his buffer. Shehad the Mary

face, which it so happened was his favorite. And the redfingernails of

course.

<When they are flush right the Window reads us as one icon> shesaid.

<Name's Mary> she said. <Mary97>

<You slowed when you passed me last week, Ken. Neat trick too. Ifigure that

made you almost worth an intro. Most of the workaholics here inCity Hall are

pretty unsociable>

Ken showed her his Folder trick even though she seemed to know it already.<How

long you been at City?> he asked.

<Maybe you saw me but didn't notice me> she said. She held up ahand with red

fingernails. <I didn't always have these>

<Where'd you get them?>

<It's a secret>

<They're pretty neat> Ken said.

<Both>

<Are you flirting with me?> she asked, smiling that Marysmile.

Ken tried to think of an answer, but he was too slow. Her Folder wasblinking,

a waitstate interrupt, and she was gone.

A few cycles later in the week he saw her again, paused at an open Windowin

the Corridor between Copy and Verify. He slid his folder over hers,

flushright, and he was standing beside her, looking out into April in Paris.

<You learn fast> she said.

<I have a good teacher> he said. Then he said what he had beenrehearsing over

and over: <And what if I was?>

<Waswhat?>

<That would be OK> she said, smiling the Mary smile. Ken678 wishedfor the

first time that the Ken face had a smile. His Folder was flickeringbut he

didn't want to leave yet. <How long have you been at City?> heasked again.

<Forever> she said. She was exaggerating, of course, but in a senseit was

true. She told Ken she had been at City Hall when Microserf Office 6.9was

installed. <Before Office, records were stored in a basement, in metaldrawers,

accessed by hand. I helped put it all disk. Data entry, it wascalled>

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Terry Bisson - An Office Romance.pdf

共11页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Terry Bisson - An Office Romance

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: