Doing Business: Memorandums, Episode 3 (Patreon)

Three: Julie Smells Something Weird

Same as it was everyday: Hit the snooze button a few too many times on the alarm clock. Grab something completely unsatisfying for breakfast as she rushes out the door. Sit in traffic. Maybe grab a coffee from the drive-thru if the line isn’t too long. Struggle to find convenient parking in the garage, eventually settling for a spot seemingly miles from the elevator. 20-something new emails in her inbox that magically appeared between the time she left work the night before (and she had even left late) and this morning. Arnie stops by to bullshit, never quite grasping the fact that nobody wants to talk to him about whatever TV show he’s watching right now. Mr. Yang stops by to see if she ‘needs anything’ (translation: I know you’re busy, but I need you to have finished everything yesterday–maybe the day before that, if possible). And then, smell something weird.

It was happening more and more often. She’d be minding her own business, doing her job, and she’d suddenly smell something that seemed…off. It wasn’t always the same scent, but there was an entire range of weird scents that felt like they were somehow related. Or maybe it was that they all reminded her of something specific, but she couldn’t quite place what it was.

Sometimes there were the subtle scents of something light and calming. Other times, the odors felt aggressively disgusting. She’d occasionally catch someone else wrinkling their nose too, suggesting that she wasn’t the only one smelling it. But nobody ever talked about it. Maybe everyone else was just willing to roll with it, or to write it off as just the sort of thing that is expected in a building with a lot of people.

Julie can't let it go. She thinks about the weird scents a lot.

- - -

“Is this seat taken?” Julie asks, sidling up to a table in the busy cafeteria.

“Only by you. Hello, Julie. Have a seat.”

There are few people in the office who don’t annoy Julie on some level, and Francine is one of them. She suspects that maybe Francine would grate on her too, if they worked in the same department. No offense to Francine–or anyone else who annoyed (or potentially annoyed) her–Julie was well aware of the fact that her inability to tolerate most others was a her-problem. Such was the problem with working with other people–everyone was doing things their own way and not hers.

“How’ve you been?” Julie asks, working towards reaching the socially acceptable quota for small-talk before she could just devour her salad.

“Eh, you know,” Francine says, shrugging. “Another day, another dollar.”

“You’re not kidding,” Julie mutters. “And we’ll be lucky if we see an entire dollar.”

Francine laughs. For a moment, Julie thinks that she’s just being polite, but she senses that this, in fact, a genuine laugh and it lowers Julie’s defenses a little.

“Hey, you work in Finance, right?” Francine asks.

“Sadly.”

Francine chuckles a little again. “Do you know, uh, Megan?”

It’s Julie’s turn to laugh. It feels like Francine has her hand on the lid to a jar of worms, and is threatening to unleash them. “I do. What about her?”

“What’s that all about?”

What a damn-good question. Julie mulls this over for a moment, lightly tapping her plastic fork on the tabletop.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Francine adds, maybe feeling like she’s asked the wrong question, given how long it’s taking Julie to respond. “I don’t have a problem with someone, like, transitioning. But I’ve heard stories…”

“Stories?” Julie asks. “What sort of stories have you heard?”

“There seems to be a lot of stories around here,” Francine says.

“Ain’t that the truth.”

“So, Megan. She’s a…”

“She’s she,” Julie says, sounding a little more confrontational than she intends to. She doesn’t think Francine has anything bigoted to say–at least not intentionally–but she thinks it's probably best that she helps to direct the tone of this gossiping now.

“I know,” Francine says, comparatively defensive. “And I promise that I’m not judging her. But you’ve heard what they say about her, right? About her and Mr. Yang?”

“Maybe,” Julie says, nervously tapping her fork against the table. “What have you heard?”

“If I can be blunt?”

“Please.”

“She’s Mr. Yang’s little sex-toy.”

Julie laughs. This is not the first time she’s heard this. Not that she ever needed to be told about it–she had seen the two slinking off together enough that she always assumed that something was up. Hell, she was wondering if she had inadvertently started the rumor train herself by blabbing to someone about it at some work function after a few beers.

“Yeah,” she finally responds, playing it a little more coyly. “I’ve heard that.”

“Do you think it’s true?”

“Probably.”

“But it’s not just her, you know.”

Tap-tap-tap-tap. Julie’s fork spends more time bouncing off the table than it does in her salad. She’s not nervous because she feels any sort of connection to this potential drama–she’s nervous because she feels they're on the cusp of having a conversation that she’s never had before. That dangling thread on the company sweater? It might finally get grasped and pulled on, unraveling the whole damn thing.

“Who else?” Julie says. She has her suspicions already, but she’s curious to hear what Francine will say.

Francine leans forward a little across the table. The move’s symbolism is clear–this is something that shouldn’t be overheard by others. And yet she’s still saying it in a crowded cafeteria.

“Gabrielle Heller.”

“The CEO?” Julie is quite surprised that she doesn’t know about this.

“That’s what people are saying.”

“She’s got a little…sex toy of her own?”

“Who?”

“Dunno,” Francine said, shrugging as she slid back into her seat again. “Some new guy, I guess?”

“New? How new?”

Francine shrugged again. “Did you see that email the other day? About the promotions?”

“Oh. You think it's that guy? The one who is her new assistant?”

“Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Wasn’t there a story going around a year or two ago about her and another assistant of hers? Uh…Heather?”

“Hillary,” Julie says, nodding.

“You didn’t hear those rumors? Lacy McCarthy swore that she once watched Hillary waddling into Gabrielle’s office. And the girl had a–or so Lacy claimed–diaper sticking up over the back of her pants.”

“A diaper?” Julie says, slightly louder than she meant to. She blushes a little as she leans forward to try that again. “A…diaper? That’s ridiculous.”

“Look, I don’t disagree,” Francine says, shrugging. “I guess that’s why I kind of wrote it off as bullshit when she tried to tell me about it a while back.”

“A diaper,” Julie repeats again, not as a question this time. She mulls the word over, finding it so absurd that’s almost comical.

“Something is going on around here, right?” asks Francine. “You’ve seen the way that Ava-girl clings to Neve like she’s a child. Mr. Yang and Megan? Gabrielle and that new kid?”

“Hrm,” Julie groans. “Something, indeed.”

- - -

Had the can of worms actually been opened, or had the can been opened some time ago and she was only now becoming aware of the…worms that were everywhere (it wasn’t the best analogy, she admits to herself)? Now, it’s all that Julie can think about. She’s seen that meme online–she has no idea what show or movie it's from–with the guy sitting in front of a bulletin board that has all the pictures and pieces of paper connected by red string. She feels like that guy now, whoever he is.

She can’t stop thinking about diapers. For a while, it’s just that it’s so absurd that it amuses her. She tells herself that Lacy McCarthy had been wrong about what she had seen. Nobody is tromping around a building with a diaper sticking out of their pants for everyone to see.

But. Diapers also feel like the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle she had been working on in her mind for a while. All those weird scents? When she thinks about them, with the context of diapers, they suddenly start to make more sense to her and she’s reminded of why they had been so familiar. It takes her back to her childhood, when all of her younger cousins were in diapers. Every family function had exposed her to the scents of babyhood–baby powder; wet diapers; messy diapers.

Is that it? Maybe people were walking around the office in diapers. She initially laughed that off too, but the more she thought about it, the less willing she was to just dismiss it altogether. If the rumors about Megan being Mr. Yang’s little femmified sex-toy were true, then maybe there was a chance that Ms. Heller had actually been keeping her own assistants in diapers.

That was a kink people had, right? Diapers and baby things? She thinks she has seen that on a TV show once or twice.

There’s something to that new girl too, she’s decided. The one that seems to be working with the executive team, but isn’t specifically anyone’s assistant. She keeps going to this one office–the one that used to be Peter Dubois’s before he left last year. The office had been sitting around vacant for months. Then, suddenly, there were a bunch of renovations done to it. And now it was sealed off, and nobody she asked seemed to know what the room was being used for.

Julie’s been watching this girl and she keeps going into that room. She was pretty sure the girl’s name was…Linda?

Executives and assistants. Martin became Megan. Hillary in a diaper. New guy gets promoted before anyone even knows who he is. Linda and her mystery office. It both does and doesn’t seem connected.

But she wants it all to be connected.

- - -

Hit the snooze button on the alarm clock–only once today. Reheat some leftover mashed potatoes for breakfast. Sit in traffic. Maybe grab a coffee from the drive-thru if…

It’s another day.

Actually, no, it feels like a new day. Suddenly, the office feels like an entirely different place to her. Sure, it’s still a giant bland maze of cubicles and offices, but Julie swears that she can now tap into the underlying tension of this place. It’s everywhere she looks. People winking and nudging. Glances that linger a little too long. Knowing smirks.

But, too, the lack of clues can sometimes seem just as damning. The silence of her coworkers, trying to just get through their own days without meddling in weirder issues that aren’t theirs. She’s pretty sure there’s a lot of that happening around here.

Her eyes catch Francine’s as they stroll across one of the open office areas in opposite directions. Francine’s wry grin suggests that she’s also been taking a closer look at the world around her.

At 10:45, she hangs out near Ted Lemire’s desk with a cup of coffee in hand. She doesn’t know Ted all that well, but they’ve worked together for a number of years now and they’ve seen plenty come and go since. Once in a while he’s good for a minute or two of small talk, and she’s hoping to reach that quota today while keeping an eye on Gabrielle Heller’s office door, which isn’t too far from his cube.

“Busy these days?”

“Yeah,” he says, shrugging. “I guess. Not any busier than usual. Maybe I’m just always busy. How about you?”

“Oh, for sure,” she says, perhaps not even entirely aware of what she’s saying. “Ain’t that the way things go?”

There’s movement over at the door. It’s opening. That new kid is stepping out. What did that email say his name was? Carter? His cheeks are all red. He looks flustered.

“I heard they were going to bring back soft pretzels in the cafeteria,” Ted says, a smidgen of excitement coming through in his tone. “I guess that’s new and exciting.”

Clark, that’s right. Does his ass look big? Too big? She’s pretty sure that it does. Goddamn, is that kid actually wearing a diaper?

“Right, right,” she says to Ted, unsure of what he’s talking about.

“I actually put a suggestion into HR about the pretzels,” Ted continues. “It was a few months ago, though. So I wonder if they’ve finally gotten enough feedback about the pretzels that they finally had to do something about it, you know?”

She watches intently as Clark sheepishly looks around the office as he closes the door behind him. By some miracle, he doesn’t seem to notice that Julie is gawking at him.

“But, you know what it could’ve been?” Ted says, seemingly unaware that Julie couldn’t care less about pretzels. “It could be that they only check the suggestion box once every few months, right? Like what if it only took one suggestion to make that difference, and I could’ve had pretzels a month or two ago if they had just looked sooner?”

“Oh absolutely,” she says. “Well, it was great talking to you. I’ll see you later.”

She rushes over to the area between the door to Gabrielle Heller’s office and Clark’s cubicle. Doing her best not to look like a complete nutball, she takes a swift sniff of the air. She’s not positive, but she’s pretty darn sure that she catches notes of baby powder and…stale urine?

How does nobody else notice this?

She sees Ted Lemire, lost in his work. She sees Carla Burton, absentmindedly scrolling through her phone instead of working on her computer. She sees Dennis and Rich chit-chatting over to the side, Dennis mimes swinging a golf club as they both laugh and nod.

Maybe, she thinks, it’s the perfect crime. You can get away with anything in plain sight if everyone else is lost in their own little worlds–the little worlds they go to for escape from the ceaseless boredom of office life.

- - -

The harder she looks, the more she seems to find. She swears that she can see bulging pants when she follows behind Clark in the hallway. Ava too. She watches Lyndie, sometimes, herding them around from executive offices to her own mystery office.

And knowing what she thinks she knows, she’s certain that she can identify the days when either walk past her in a diaper that needs changing.

Julie keeps it all to herself for now. She’s not sure what else she’d do with this information. She could go to HR, but she’s not sure what that actually achieves. She’s not exactly offended that these things are happening around her, so she doesn’t want to stir up trouble. And she’s not sure that she wants to tell Francine either, worried about what she’d do with that information.

For now, she just holds onto this information. It’s a strange sort of thrill–having your eyes open to something that nobody else can see.

- - -

“Hello there.” It’s a feminine voice that Julie doesn’t recognize, coming from behind her.

Julie spins around in the already-cramped copy room to find that Linda–the young lady who had recently gotten her promotion and now worked out of a mysterious room–is also here.

“Oh, hi. Linda, right? I’m Julie. I don’t think we’ve met before.”

“Lyndie, actually,” the girl says. She looks to be a few years younger than Julie. Right out of college? In college? “Pleasure to meet you.”

Julie shrugs. “There’s so many people here. I swear, I’ve seen some of the same faces for years and I still don’t know their names.”

“I figured as much,” Lyndie says. “I guess it’d be pretty hard to connect with everyone. Though… I have to admit that I’ve been meaning to introduce myself to you in particular.”

Julie’s head tilts in curiosity. “Me?”

“I feel like everytime I turn around, I see you.”

Julie’s cheeks turn a little pink. She didn’t think she had been that obvious. “Well…”

“I’m not mad about it,” Lyndie says, shrugging nonchalantly. “I’m sure it looks like there’s some pretty crazy stuff going on around here, huh?”

“Maybe,” Julie says.

“I’m curious what you think is going on.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Julie responds, feeling a little cornered. She opts for some diplomatic tact: “Sometimes, when it feels like things are being hidden, people talk and speculate, you know? I’m sure it’s all just normal business though.”

“You don’t actually believe that, do you?” Lyndie asks.

“I mean…”

“I can let you in on our little secrets, if you want.”

Julie’s eyes narrow suspiciously as she leans forward. She doesn’t entirely believe that Lyndie is just going to randomly appear in front of her and give her all the answers she wants to hear, but…maybe?

“Okay?”

“Whatever it is you’ve heard,” Lyndie says. “It’s real. And it’s even fucking crazier and wild than you could ever believe.”

Julie scoffs and shakes her head. “No way.”

“Try me.”

“Megan?”

“What about her?”

“I heard she transitioned for her boss.”

“Oh sure,” Lyndie says, nodding. “Poor thing didn’t even have a choice in the matter.”

“Gabrielle Heller?”

Lyndie laughs. “What did you hear about her?”

“Something about her assistants having to wear…diapers?”

“That’s totally true,” Lyndie says. “Her current assistant, Clark? Contractually, he has to wear diapers for her or else he gets fired. Not only that, but he’s required to fill it too. She weighs it at the end of every workday. If it’s not heavy enough, she sends him back to his desk to work on it a little longer. She even put a cage on his cock too, so the kid can’t even get off now if he wants to.”

Julie grimaces as some skepticism is starting to set in. Now it just sounds like Lyndie is fucking with her.  “That can’t possibly be true.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Lyndie says with a shrug. “Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. What other burning questions do you have about the great mysteries of our company?”

If only to see how Lyndie will respond, Julie continues:  “That office you work out of? What about that?”

“That’s the new office nursery. It’s where we send the babies when they need to have their diapers changed.”

“Babies? Plural?” Julie asks, rolling her eyes. “How many people around here wear diapers?”

“Oh my gosh, so many,” Lyndie says. “More than you think, for sure.”

“Four? Five?”

“Oh, god no. More like–I dunno–50? 60?”

“60? You’re telling me that 60 people in this office are wearing and using diapers?”

“Easily. We have a whole club, don’t you know? Ask around. I bet you wouldn’t have to ask too many people before you find someone sitting in their own piss. I think we’re having a meeting later, actually. Over at the Build-A-Bear at the mall. You should drop by.”

Julie sighed. “You’re bullshitting me.”

Lyndie laughed. “What? You don’t believe that there’s a secret group of executives who make babies and little girls out of their employees? That there’s people out there on the floor, right now, pooping their pants because their boss told them to?”

This conversation feels like a waste of time to Julie. Was Lyndie mocking her? Poking fun at her quest to understand what was happening in the office around her? She had no doubt that there was at least some iota of truth in the ridiculous stories Lyndie was telling now, but without any actual evidence, she seemed to be in no better place than she was before her conversation with Lyndie.

“Alright, fine,” she finally says to Lyndie. “Forget it. Maybe it’s better if I leave it alone.”

“Look…between you and me? This place is pretty fucked up.”

Julie laughs. “That’s hardly a secret.”

“I’m sorry I was dicking you around,” Lyndie says. “I guess I’m a little protective of the weird place I’ve found myself in. But you and I aren’t all that different.”

“No? How so?”

“Well, we’re both just employees, right?” Lyndie asks. “We’re just doing our jobs and getting paid. My job’s probably a little weirder than yours, though.”

“Yeah,” Julie says, shrugging. “I guess.”

“Do you want to see?”

“See?”

“The nursery. I can show it to you, if you want. Maybe it’d be good to know what you’re missing out on and you don’t have to think about it all the time.”

“So…there’s actually a nursery?”

“Follow me, I’ll show you.”

“Aren’t you afraid that I’m going to tell everyone else?”

“Good luck getting anyone to believe you’ve seen the things I’m about to show you.”

- - -

Another day. Hit the snooze button a few too many times on the alarm clock. Most of her panties are in the laundry bin (and she should’ve done laundry a week ago) so she’s left wearing the ugly turquoise ones. Sit in traffic. Grab a coffee and an overcooked bagel from the drive-thru. Struggle to find convenient parking in the garage, eventually settling for a spot seemingly miles from the elevator. 34 new emails in her inbox that magically appeared between the time she left work the night before (and she had even left late) and this morning. Ted stops by to bullshit– something about soft pretzels. Mr. Yang stops by to see if she ‘needs anything’ (translation: I know you’re busy, but I need you to have finished everything yesterday–maybe the day before that, if possible). Go to lunch, only to be (once again) disappointed by the selection in the cafeteria and settle for another fucking salad from the salad bar.  Finding a free table, though another body plops itself down across from her soon after.

“How are you doing today?” Francine asks.

“Oh, you know. Another day in paradise.”

They talk about the weather and how busy they are in their departments for a few minutes,  working towards reaching the socially acceptable quota for small-talk before they can delve into the real tea.

“I saw that Ava girl in the hallway today,” Francine says. “The girl practically bowled me over, she was walking so fast.”

“Oh yeah?” asks Julie. “Where was she going?”

“That office over on the far side of the executive wing. I think it used to be Peter Dubois’s office? Do you know the one?”

“I think I do,” Julie says.

“They did some work on that room a while ago, I heard. But nobody seems to know what they’re using the room for now. They even replaced the door with one that doesn’t have a window. It’s like they don’t want anyone seeing inside of it.”

“Weird.”

Julie contributes the bare minimum to the conversation to sound engaged, but she’s careful not to sound too interested. This indifference seems to work in getting Francine to switch gears to just complaining about her boss.

There’s things she could’ve said. Hell, there’s so many things she is dying to tell everyone else. Lyndie showed her some stuff, and she hadn’t been lying when she said it was ‘fucking crazy.’

But Julie doesn’t mind biting her tongue. She doesn’t mind keeping the secret for herself. At least she knows now–that was all she ever wanted, to just know. It’s actually a bit of a weight lifted from her shoulders, not having to wonder all the time. She doesn’t have to stalk her coworkers. There’s no imaginary bulletin board with red string that she has to overanalyze. Now, she just does her job, occasionally laughing to herself because she watches Clark shuffle down the hall like he’s got a load in his pants and doesn’t want anyone else to notice.

Nobody ever notices. Everyone else is either too distracted by their job or by the things they do so they don’t have to think about being at work.

Julie notices. Yesterday, when Ava waddled past her desk, Julie let her nose wrinkle in an exaggerated way and asked if anyone else smelled anything. She swore Ava’s face grew bright red as she took off like a jet plane. It was such a satisfying response that Julie thinks she might do things like that more often.

Everyone’s got to keep sane at work somehow.