Missing Things

you won't even notice it's gone!

On his way to get an adaptor, Carl saw Alison staring at the floor of the kitchen.

"What's going on?" he said, coming to stand next to her.

"That!" Alison pointed to tape on the floor around the seating area.

"What the hell is that?" Carl said.

"I have no idea. I'm going to go ask Sam. He's part of the Infrastructure Services Team now. He'll know."

***

"They're going to be reconfiguring the kitchen," Sam said. "It was in the email."

"Yeah but it didn't say how it would be reconfigured!" Alison pressed.

Sam sighed. "We got a lot of complaints about there not being enough meeting rooms with windows, so the kitchen seating is going to be reconfigured into a meeting room. We did a survey of the space and found that no one was using the tables anymore and it made sense to utilize the space better." He shrugged.

"So you're going to take away the last space left in the office where we can sit and talk to each other?" Carl exclaimed. "Why don't you use part of 50-East? No one ever sits there!"

"It's reserved for visitors," Sam said.

"What visitors?!" Carl exclaimed. "Who's visiting? No one's visiting! And who's so important that they can't sit in any of the other cubes?"

"Visitors can't use the booking system," Sam said.

"You couldn't book for them?" Alison said. "You literally have access to everythingin the booking system!"

"We want to keep them in a dedicated section," Sam said. "And we can't afford to lose any desks to create a meeting room because of all the hiring that was done during the pandemic."

"How can you look at us with a straight face and say that?" Alison said. "You're reserving desks for visitors! Obviously there are plenty of desks to go around!"

"And Darren and his whole team were just let go," Carl said. "That's twenty desks that just opened up."

Sam looked at Carl. "Who told you that Darren and his team were let go?"

"Were they not?" Carl asked.

"Yeah but who told you?"

Carl sighed. "Does it matter?"

"It does!"

"It was posted in the secret Discord server," Carl lied. "Give me an adaptor. I need to get to work."

"What anonymous Discord server?" Sam asked, agitated, handing Carl the adaptor box.

"If you don't know about it, it's because no one wants you to know about it," Carl said. He took an adaptor with a heart sticker for himself and handed an adaptor with a purple star to Alison. "Let's go. There's nothing else for us here."