corporate/office sff

[Dragonlady]

Thought i'd start a fun and slightly silly thread. I'm sure there is a serious idea in here somehow i may one day pursue but I am not short of projects at the moment.

I work for an insurance company, in a big open plan office. I talk to customers every day on the phone. This environment is both utterly predictable and enclosed, but at the same time you never know who's going to be on the end of the phone. I've been thinking this could be a really fun setting for an SFF story.

You can have a tom holt style story where Jane Smith the accountant suddenly gets caught up in fantastic events, or you could have the monotonous open plan office of the Dragon Regulation Authority, or you could have the first few days in the office start normal, but then extraordinary events slowly unfold so it becomes totally removed from normal. You could have a normal day at the office around you and receive a totally unexpected phone call...

Any other ideas/thoughts, silly or serious?

 

[Elckerlyc]

After every phone call your conversation is going to be evaluated within your group, were every participant will do his/her utmost to highlight every flaw, inconsistency or failure in helping the customer in a satisfactory way. After which you are expected to sign a letter that will be send to the customer in which you profoundly apologize for the listed shortcomings in your conversation.
Of course, records will be kept and shared throughout the company, so everyone can learn from it.

 

[Biskit]

What a tame office. In my last day-job, in a medium-sized open plan space, they mixed people like me trying to build/fix the client's system and craving peace and quiet to be able to concentrate, with the customer relations people talking loudly on the phone to the client, or loudly amongst themselves regarding the client.

Perhaps this is why I wrote three urban fantasies with irritating demons.

 

[Dragonlady]

@Biskit to be fair we are the loud ones on the phone to the customer probably winding everyone else up

 

[tinkerdan]

I am IT and tech support:
I've had a number of interesting conversations.

One that stands out is the customer who had one of our pricey pieces of equipment, who called to ask if it was possible for the sensor inside the unit to be damaged. I responded with the usual; that our equipment could withstand as much as a 1000 g impact with no damage; however, (after determining that he had the equipment with him)I instructed him to flip it over and note the two screws that were near the center of the bottom plate. I said, ' You would have to hit near the center of those two screws with a hammer(or some other object that could focus the impact) in that spot to damage the sensor.
Over the phone I hear a soft, 'Oh.' and a long silence afterwards.
The unit has batteries that have a strap to assist pulling the batteries out for replacement--if you forget to put the strap back on, it becomes difficult to remove the batteries. So....

Internally the one that comes to mind--
An engineer arrives to work and turns his computer on and then goes of to get coffee or whatever. When he returns he hears an obnoxious sound rising out of his computer. Instead of investigating he runs to my office(which is close)and enlists my help.
Upon approach I recognize the sound and say loudly, 'Sounds like a keyboard problem.'
When I reach his desk, the spot where the keyboard should be is littered with heavy notebooks.
I remove each, placing them in his chair, until the noise stops.
Problem solved.

I know you probably are looking for more paranormal things--however sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.
The first above was an engineer who worked with an aerospace company and the one below was an engineer who used to work for an aerospace company. Both have more degrees than I do.

 

[Jesse Harris]

You could write a story about mythical creature police non-emergency line operator.
A dwarf calling in to report the neighbor's garden gnomes as offensive.
An elf calling in to report age discrimination.
A dragon reporting his security camera caught someone sneaking around his cave and wants the police to investigate.

the main character is the operator but falls in love with one of the police officers. They eventually have to work together to solve a mystery about a young orc who called in a 911-style emergency but they can't get anyone else involved due to corruption. They have to 24 hours to save the kid and they are going to need data from the callcenter, so now its a heist too. A romance, heist, mystery, drama, fantasy... with dragons ;-)

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Sounds like it could make a good urban fantasy. Take the personnel in any given office one has worked in and assign each person a different fantasy race, slightly exaggerate a situation that has actually come up in real life, but exacerbated by inter-species tensions and misunderstandings between fantasy counterparts, and there could be a highly entertaining story there. Fantastical, but one in which readers could think, "That sort of reminds me of something that happened when I was working for XYZ Corp."

Alternatively, for science fiction, instead of fantasy races, each character belongs to a different alien species: a felinoid, an insectoid, etc. Drop them down into that situation that developed last week where you worked, and you have your cast and basic plot. You might not even need speculative fiction type inciting events to set the plot in motion, because it could be interesting to see how a character from a naturally predatory cat-like species might react to that situation you and your office mates got through in real life without anyone eating anybody else.

 

[The Big Peat]

I've had a few thoughts and even story ideas based on my work environment (vendor management in a media monitoring company, which is a wonderful window into both culture clash and how creepy the world is).

I think the thing about making this sort of thing a SFF story is where's the juice? Most office based stories tend to be comedies of fairly episodic nature insofar as I've found them. Do you roll with that? Make it a subplot in an adventure story (I could very easily rewrite my job to being desk liaison for intelligence agents, trying to protect them from the stupid things our sales have said to the clients they'll do)? Go for some dark horrible intrigue where the company's up to hideous stuff?

Or something else?

 

[Dragonlady]

@The Big Peat I'd almost be tempted to do something Asimov style where the office events mirror the big things happening in the outside world. @Teresa Edgerton I sort of agree, I think people (and fantasy/sf species) are interesting enough often

 

[tinkerdan]

Well there is this one story...

I think the thing about making this sort of thing a SFF story is where's the juice?

An engineer I worked with for several years was sent to a customer site to help set up a test using our sensors.(I will only say that it was a military contract.) The test was to take place in a vacuum chamber. Jack, our engineer, was asked to install the equipment in the vacuum chamber and he went inside to do just that. While working at that, everyone else went on to get their part started.

As Jack is working he notices that there are a number of sounds staring up around him and quickly ascertains that the vacuum chamber has been activated; locking him in.
Stay tuned for our next installment...
Will Jack ever get over his vacu-phobia...oh; wait that is another thread entirely.

 

[Boneman]

Well there is this one story...

An engineer I worked with for several years was sent to a customer site to help set up a test using our sensors.(I will only say that it was a military contract.) The test was to take place in a vacuum chamber. Jack, our engineer, was asked to install the equipment in the vacuum chamber and he went inside to do just that. While working at that, everyone else went on to get their part started.

As Jack is working he notices that there are a number of sounds staring up around him and quickly ascertains that the vacuum chamber has been activated; locking him in.
Stay tuned for our next installment...
Will Jack ever get over his vacu-phobia...oh; wait that is another thread entirely.

That story sucks...

 

[tinkerdan]

ah ha