Light Counter Conspiracy

Image from indypendent.org, "a free paper for free people".

Now I know that bringing up another work conspiracy (for the original, see my post about what’s in the tissue boxes), but I can’t help but think that I’m involved in some sort of underground dirty scheme.

Last week, a group of three men wandered into my office and began milling around in front of me, staring at the ceiling and looking particularly cautious.  It’s sort of a knee-jerk reaction for me to greet someone with a smile and ask if I can help them when they wander into my office because thanks to the awful positioning of it, it’s the first unintimidating-looking office people get to after they leave the elevator.  So if they skipped instructions in the lobby that were listed on a sign telling them to dial the extension for the party they need (with a list of numbers and names right beside it), they just mosey about the floor until they stumble upon me.

On an average day I have between 1-3 clueless visitors.  And you all know how much I love people who don’t read signs or plan out their lives or have any idea what they’re supposed to be doing.

But this group of three fellas didn’t need any help.  They said they were just fine and that they  needed to “count the lights”.

Count the lights? Seriously? There are three of you.  “Oh.  Okay…”, I said, staring on in confusion as they silently muttered themselves through counting and made marks on mysterious papers lodged in clipboards. 

If you ever want to look official at something, invest in a good clipboard.  Gets ’em every time.

So I thought the visit was strange, but hey – I work for an enormous company and I imagine something like how many lights are running at any given time might be useful for their files.  Maybe it was a sort of electricity census.  Or maybe they needed to switch all of them out at the same time and needed to know how many to replace because they lost the record from the last time they did it.

But then they came back yesterday.

Well it wasn’t actually them.  It was three completely different guys who looked slightly more dressed up than the group that visited me last week.  And when I asked if I could help them, they said they didn’t need any and were just there to count the lights.  “Huh.  Do you guys do that a lot? There was just someone here who said that to me last week”, I said.   “Yeah, I know”, the bossiest looking one replied “and they didn’t do it right, so that’s why I’m here.”

What?

I’m sorry – what? The last crew of three people that you sent failed to accurately count the number of lights in this room and so you had to leave your office and come take care of the business yourself?  There’s a bad joke about how many guys it takes to change a light bulb in there somewhere.  I’m starting to think that this isn’t about light bulbs at all.  What is actually going on underneath all this?  Am I part of some underground goings-on that I’m oblivious to? 

I’m going to get to the bottom of this.   Maybe it will be some sort of huge scheme by a bunch of folks to scam as light counters to get out of a day of work and they accidentally used the same site twice.  Or maybe it’s just a stupid job that the company I work for genuinely finds useful to employ.  But there’s a very small chance that I’ll discover something super secret and exciting.  Maybe all of this somehow leads to a Malkovich Room.  Maybe there are leprechauns somewhere along the way.  Or a secret plot of the CIA.

Or maybe I need to give the Netflix queue a break. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, Humor, life, musings, office humor, postaday2011