This year I am working on a story called Bob vs. The Alien Slug Monsters. Instead of an outline I have a basic list of plot points I want to cover between meeting Bob and sending him off to fight the king of the slugs. There is more of a cast of characters than an actual outline, so we will see how the story develops. And with that intro we continue with Bob Versus the Alien Slug Monsters…
Day 2: He set them for different time zones but forgot to mark which was which.
He set them for different time zones but forgot to mark which was which. Bob suspected that the one in his office was set for Zurich. He checked it once and that was the closest, timewise. It was still off by about fifteen minutes. He wasn’t sure why Zurich would be a time they needed to know. They were a regional company. They worked throughout the tri-state area. All of which was in the same time zone. Technically they were a subsidiary of a larger company but that company too was in the same time zone they were as well.
He once asked Anderson why the times were set to different zones, more as a precursor to changing at least his wall clock back to something closer to his own time zone than because he expected a response. He was told it was aspirational. He was also told not to change it.
Bob calculated the time difference in his head and then glanced at his computer’s clock to double check himself. While the clock was set for fifteen minutes off Zurich time when left on Bob’s wall, every time Anderson was out of the office, Bob took the opportunity to change it by a few minutes. It was now an hour and thirty two minutes off of Zurich standard time.
“Anderson isn’t go any where for another two weeks,” Bob thought after a glance to the office schedule. He wondered if he dare shift it by half an hour this time instead of just a handful of minutes. ‘Maybe twenty eight minutes or thirty two,’ he decided. ‘Something off of the actual thirty minute mark. That should be less noticeable.’
While Andreson glanced at the clock repeatedly when they were installed to make certain no one changed them to a less aspirational and more accurate time, he was starting to forget them as he looked into more aspirational items. Motivational posters were the item on Anderson’s radar. Apparently he believed they would increase productivity. At least that is what he told Bob when he was foolish enough to leave his office.
Whatever time it was, soon the day would end and Bob would leave the office. ‘And it is Friday,’ he thought. Tonight’s big plans involved swinging by the comic book store to pick up the latest issues he ordered and then settling in for his own personal movie marathon. He would pick up take out on the way home and ignore the work day bed time, watching until he could no longer pry his eyes open.
Hearing snippets of his co workers far more exciting plans, Bob realized that he was less interested in going out to parties than he was in finding a quiet place where for a few days he could forget the rest of the worked existed. Not that he was invited to any wild parties.
Ten til Midnight 