Towards Zero Hour

Towards Zero Hour: Chapter 4

Hour 6

"Excuse me Frank, you got a minute?" Steve said as he stood behind Frank.

 "Hey Steve, how you doing?" Frank replied knowing well enough that Steve was probably bringing some work with him. The work just does not stop coming, even on your last day, thought Frank as he said, "What can I do for you?"

"Just a small question regarding one of the images from your storyboard"

"Shoot", Frank said.

Steve continued, "The image bank throws up a different image for the ID you have used. Can you tell me what's the correct image identifier?"

Frank opened his storyboard and scrolled down to that image. He selected that image's identifier and searched the image database to see what kind of hits it returned. It returned a single match and it was a different image than what was intended to be used.

"Steve, can you give me a minute and I'll get back to you with the correct image ID once I find it."

"Sure Frank, you can drop me a mail with the correct ID", Steve said and moved away from Frank's desk.

Now every image that Frank used in his storyboards had a copy of it stored in his computer. You could simply open the image and note its ID in the bottom-right corner of the image. Frank browsed to the folder on his computer that stored all the images sorted by the storyboard's name. He located the image with the incorrect ID and opened it using an image viewer. Its image ID was there at the bottom right corner as it should be and Frank made a note of it.

He sent an email to Steve informing him of the correct ID after which he stretched his arms out in victory. Frank blamed this minor error to a short lapse in his attention span.  "I am really going to miss this" he thought as he remembered all the times someone had asked him to fix an error in one of his storyboards. These errors may look difficult at first to untrained eyes but for someone like Frank it seemed like taking a short break between doing other important things.  

He returned again to his speeding train of thoughts that weren't really going anywhere. As odd it may sound this can get extremely exhausting. Wading through that jungle of thoughts growing thickly among the cluster of nerve cells can get tiring even for the most brooding fellow who finds himself engaged in such meaningless activities. But Frank had become accustomed to it, it was one of the few things he enjoyed doing in spite of getting mentally drained every single time.

The blinking mail notification snapped him out of there again. It was another mail assigning him on yet another task of fixing a storyboard bug. "If only I had been more careful the first time around, this bug would not have raised its repugnant head" Frank thought as he took a heavy breath of fresh and started work on it.

Somehow work—whatever kind of work that maybe—gave him a sense of direction, a definite purpose to his existence. No wonder his lips always give away the faintest hint of a smile whenever he would get assigned something to work on even if it was a reminder of his inefficiency at completing something the first time around.

For the nth time in 366 days—Frank did not bother calculating the number of days out of those 366 days that he spent in office—had someone asked him out to lunch. A lot of people did, but since he never carried anything he would flatly say that he didn't have lunch. Frank never managed to trust an unknown place to insert food into his body. Maybe he was a little too aware of the indiscretions of the hospitality industry. Yesterday maybe he would have even accepted the offer because of the unexplained sense of epiphany that had dawned on him for some mysteriously unknown reasons. But today he was back, back to that place where he felt like being cornered off; as useless as the g in lasagna. Afternoon time tended to have this effect on him. "Maybe a walk in the park will clear my head…like it has done so well for the past one year", he thought to himself and waited eagerly for the clock to reach lunch time.