“Bored Meeting”
By Terry Echoes
At least twenty years had passed since Calvin Phosphene had been a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed recent college grad excited for his life to be given an opportunity with Wellerbeans Ltd. Inc. Co. He did not want to mess up his first chance to not have to flip burgers for the rest of his life, or otherwise receive PTSD-inducing abuse at the hands of that certain special breed of customer whom has never worked a day in his or her life before. Gone were the days when his senior coworkers would place bets on how long his chipper demeanor would last, when he’d stop grooming his hair, and quit polishing his shoes. “I didn’t realize they still made shoe-shine,” Lloyd Llewelyn had quipped in the break room while the boss was getting it on with his daughter. 
Calvin took to the cubicle farm like a pig to a farm, and rose through the ranks by sheer staying power alone. These days, he worked on the eighteenth floor of the needlessly tall office building (knock off the secretarial affair penthouse and a couple of bars), where the plenum ceilings lacked weird coffee-colored stains, and the cubicle walls were proper smoke grey and didn’t smell like pee-pee. He didn’t have to work across from Corey Winslowe who dribbled urine down his pants and ended up arrested for killing all those prostitutes with a spring-propelled shovel. When that happened, Corey had gotten fired, because he’d used the shipping department’s cardboard baler to dispose of some of the bodies, which was considered a form of theft by the company. To date, Calvin was sometimes the recipient of his department head passing the buck onto him. 
But today, Calvin didn’t recognize the people in the building. He didn’t recognize Donald Johnson, the senior janitor. He didn’t recognize Tipi Cusack, who’d been locked in the building since Friday’s closing. He didn’t recognize the IT department using the seventh floor to hold a LAN party. He didn’t recognize anyone milling about the floor where he worked, nor did he understand why there were so few of them. Then he remembered, through his morning stupor, that this was Saturday, even though he had already remembered he was asked to come into work this Saturday morning. 
“Filbermotes didn’t make their employees come in on Saturday, and look what happened to them,” Calvin’s coworker, Molly Ringworm, had said in the dull, grating monotone of a smoker on the verge of a voice box purchase in the near future. The Voice Box Master 3000™ wasn’t a purchase to scoff at, either. It even had a mode that allowed you to rap, with all three progressive beats of the genre programmed in. 
“Filbermotes went into liquidation because its CEO was convicted of embezzling all the company’s funds into his off-shore erotic petting zoo,” Calvin had said. 
Molly had responded with the usual bon-mot of her golden-toothed ilk and blew smoke into Calvin’s face. 
Calvin found, at his desk, a poorly-written memo from his department head, or supervisor, or whipcracker, or whatever term you prefer, addressed to him. It was missing a verb or two here or there and also there, but he understood the gist of it. He was to attend a crucial board meeting in her stead. The thought made him feel like he was riding a big-boy bike again for the first time, and needed to secure himself in a helmet and elbow and knee pads. So he took the stairs up, two at a time, because working in an office all day had made him fat, so he’d had to find a baggier suit to hide it. By the time he reached whatever the hell floor the board meeting was on, he could taste copper. He yanked the door open so hard that he banged himself into it, spilling some of his coffee onto himself. The stain was as embarrassing as a stain could be; reddish-brown, circular, right on the chest: like a slipped nipple on a professional stage. 
“Gentlemen,” said Frosty McMcMittens, the head of the department head supervision department, as though he bore some ominous fruit like a tree of lukewarm ham. “I now pass the floor over to Chandra.” With that, Frosty waltzed out of the room without even bothering to close the door. 
Chandra “Lickety Split” Curly-Montana was a woman with a fierce jaw that could crack walnuts. She was wearing a smart black blazer with a dumb pair of tight dress overalls cut off just above one knee. She had a little podium set on one of the crappy formica tables that formed a squarish U-shape within the confines of the room. She was backdropped by the windows with the huge Venetian blinds (not to be confused with blind Venetians), and on either adjacent wall were two massive whiteboards that always squeaked every time you drew on them. Her hands were gripping the sides of the rickety podium as she drew their attention to the screen rolled down via remote control for their fancy ceiling-mounted overhead projector. 
“I’ll cut to the chase,” Chandra said. “All the major CEOs had a secret CEO meeting in their secret CEO clubhouse on Disney Island and came to one conclusion: The Internet is going to be big, and we’ve got to take it down.” 
You see, this was the mid-90s. 
Chandra clicked a small cylindrical device in her hand using her thumb, and a slide appeared on the projector screen. It was the holy symbol of all office buildings: The sacred Pie Chart. This one divided its regions up by demographics; typically age and sex, ethnicity, and a mysterious silver sliver labeled “Miscellaneous”, which is a big word which here means “others”. Actually, it meant something more insidious than that here. There was also a chart showing a zig-zagging arrow that went down and to the right. 
Chandra continued. “As you can see, sales among our undesirable demographics have decreased by as much as ninety percent over the last quarter.” 
Calvin raised both arms and said, “Woohoo!” The others chuckled at him, so he lowered his arms and said, “Woo…hoo?” 
The matter must have been very important because Chandra explained rather than ignored him. “We keep an eye on unwanted demographics—fatties, homosexuals, Papists, the three politicians that still have ethics—to keep watch on potentially alarming new trends. This trend coincides with one thing: The metamorphosis into the mainstream of the world wide web. This could be huge, and the last thing our corporate overlords want is for Joe Schlub to use the Internet to start competing with him. Imagine every imbecile who hooks this whirring, chirping box to their phone line becoming an overnight entrepreneur.” 
Calvin, ever eager to leave a lasting impression on his absent department head’s behalf, raised an arm. “Don’t people have to pay money to an ISP? My question is, are people going to want to pay money in order to spend money?” 
“Have you never seen cable?” 
“Oh. Yeah. Once, in a zoo.” 
Chandra dropped her slide button and gestured with both hands. “We’re through the looking glass here, people. Our mission is to defeat, or, failing that, otherwise delay the incoming Internet holocaust. Our lives—no—our money depends on it! How can we make the public ‘go off’ the Internet before it’s allowed to pick up any more speed?” 
Grumbling bounced back and forth around the tables as the various department heads muttered about what they’d just learned. Calvin frowned. Brainstorming meetings were the worst kinds of meetings, because they went on long past the point anybody had any ideas. Lo and behold, as if the survival instinct centers of his brain kicked in, Calvin’s mind wracked and rambled to come up with a solution. “I’ve got it!” he said, standing up and banging his fist on the table so hard that his pants fell down. While pulling them back up over his pawprint-patterned boxer shorts that had the name “Thomas” drawn on them in permanent marker, he elaborated. 
“We make an ad campaign about the wonders of the Interwebs. We’ll teach Sally Q. Isaac-Hayes how to log onto the world wide web and navigate cyberspace to the e-tomorrow. We’ll teach them all the important lingo terms, sating any curiosity the average dipstick may have. I say we never give up, never let ourselves down, until all of them are so based, they’ll belong to us. We’ll use all the technology on offer to overwhelm their senses, and then we’ll tack on the one thing that is guaranteed to make the Internet seem nerdy and uncool: We’ll rap about it.” 
Chandra angrily pointed a finger at Calvin. “All of your ideas are terrible!” she said. “I love them!” 
Calvin held up his hands. “Oh, but that’s only phase one of my nefarious plan. Phase two goes into effect if the Internet does launch. Computers are all about automation, yes?” Taking a magic marker (which wasn’t actually magic), Calvin began to draw diagrams on the whiteboard. “We can propogate information at a phenomenal rate this way…or, as I have in mind, non-information. Think of a joke that’s been done to death since the stone age, like ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ or flatulence. Neither of those are funny at all because the human race has endured them as long as we’ve been around! The joke is dead. By permeating nonsensical phrases into the inter-hyper-global-cyberscape, we can rapidly age the Internet by a factor of up to 9000%. Maybe even higher! By rendering the Internet as both stupidly uncool and nauseatingly repetitious, it’ll be as dead a fad as pogs or Tamagotchi are today.” 
There was a flurry of applause from the room, after which Chandra asked, “I have to know, what’s phase three?” 
“There is no phase three. I haven’t thought of one yet,” Calvin admitted. “But hey, two is better than zero, right?” 
Chandra collated some papers and tapped them on her podium. “Like I said, we are desperate for ideas. Lobbying is expected to go slowly until some catalyst occurs that will drive the United States just a step closer to North Korea in terms of freedom of information. If only we could turn patriotism into fervor. The last-ditch effort the CEOs want to go in for is simply bribing ISPs. Sure, it’s simple enough to cut the problem off at the source, but we’re in business to make money, not lose money.” 
An awkward silence fell over the room. Nobody wanted to give up their cushy office job where they sat behind a computer screen all day, supposedly doing something of note by making spreadsheets and shit. So they all took a coffee break before returning back to their brain trust.