“I don’t even like animals. Why the hell do I always get the animals?” Gabe whined, walking toward the sink, tugging impatiently on the jammed fly of his black silk slacks. “Shit! Now my shirt’s caught in the zipper. Man, I just got this shirt…Goddamn it!”
“Hey, you better watch it with that GD business. The wrong person hears you, and it’s gonna be your ass, you know? Besides, better your shirt than something else getting caught in there, eh?!”
“Yeah, I know,” Gabe replied, finally extricating the fabric from the zipper mechanism. “It just pisses me off, getting stuck with animals again. Just once I’d like to prove I can do something else…something bigger, you know?”
“Hey, what can I say? I guess you must be good at it or something,” replied Peter, looking back over his shoulder as he stood at the urinal. “Dude, who does your tailoring?”
“What do you mean, ‘who does my tailoring’”?
“Your pants, man – they’re like two inches too short.”
“Oh, get the hell out of here ‘two inches too short.’ What are you? Some kind of fashion critic or something? I’m annoyed enough with work as it is. Give me a friggin break, will you.”
“Listen,” Peter continued, stepping away from the urinal and rearranging the front of his pants, “All I’m saying is the wheels turn kind of slow around here. You gotta be patient. Do the right stuff politically. Play the game a little. Kiss what needs kissing. This ‘speaking your mind all the time’ thing that you have going on–it may be great for the psyche, but maybe not so good for your wallet. You know what I’m saying? ”
“So you’re one of those ‘don’t flush the toilet’ guys, huh?” Gabe observed, appearing to ignore Peter’s counsel. “That’s a little inconsiderate, don’t you think?”
“What?” Peter exclaimed, heading for the door after a quick glance in the mirror at his hair, “I’m not touching that thing. I grab the handle, then I gotta wash my hands. Who has time for that rigmarole. I got shit to do. Besides, our meeting’s in like ten minutes. You coming, or would you rather stand there and lecture me about hygiene?”
“Whatever,” Gabe replied, regaining his original train of thought as he stepped through the dark polished wood door of the executive men’s room and into the corridor. “You know, just once I’d like a shot at the planets, or the firmament, or something a little grander. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, man. Take it up with the big guy. Lotsa luck though – once you’re in charge of a department around here, it’s damn tough making a switch; know what I mean? It’s not like someone’s gonna die or retire…Hey, you wanna soda or something from the kitchen before we get started? At the rate Jesus drones on in these meetings, we could be locked in there for a couple hours!”
“Yeah, why not. We still have a few minutes,” Gabe replied. “Besides, I need to stop by my cubicle and pick up a couple things on the way.”
The two men continued chatting as they made their way down the corridor that led to the kitchen. As they approached the double glass doors their conversation was suddenly drowned out by a loud repeated banging sound, interspersed with an occasional curse.
“Betcha a fiver it’s him again,” said Peter quietly as they approached the door.
“No way I’m taking that bet, man. Guy’s gonna stroke out if he keeps abusing the hardware that way.”
They walked into the small fifth-floor kitchen in time to see Jesus kneeling on the floor in front of the soda machine, one arm thrust up to the elbow into the dispensing slot at the bottom of the machine, the other pounding violently and repeatedly on its side. Sweat poured from his face, and a large vein on his neck was visibly pulsating.
“EVERY…FUCKING…DAY!” he screamed with near incoherence, trying in vain to rock the heavy machine from his kneeling position. “WHAT AM I? MADE OF QUARTERS? I AM SO SICK AND TIRED OF THIS SH — ”
“Whoa, whoa…” Gabe interjected urgently, grinning at Peter for a second before stepping over to where Jesus was struggling with the machine. “Jesus! Hey, calm down, man. You’re gonna bust a nut or something there. It’s only Diet Coke for God’s sa…I…I mean, it’s not worth getting all worked up over.” he said, glossing over his near faux pas.
“Yeah, let Gabe mess with that,” Peter continued. He’s good with machinery. Jesus, reluctantly conceding defeat, gingerly extracted his empty, slightly bruised hand from the dispensing slot, stood up and walked with annoyance away from the soda machine. “Piece of shit…” he mumbled under his breath.
“You need a hand with anything before the meeting starts?” Peter offered, guiding Jesus back out into the corridor while glancing furtively over his shoulder as his friend deftly coaxed three sodas from the machine, along with more than his share of spare change. Gabe caught up with them, reached out and tapped Jesus on the shoulder, offering him the chilled Diet Coke can.
“Thanks,” Jesus responded, visibly calmer than a moment earlier. “Sorry about that, guys. I don’t know what it is. I just kinda get agitated around machines, you know. The whole day’s been this way. I spent maybe half an hour this morning kicking the crap out of our copier. It wasn’t enough that it wouldn’t make a decent copy…damned thing had to shred my original too…” He seemed still on edge and easily capable of getting heated up again, perhaps even at just the memory of an earlier experience.
“You just gotta count to ten before you let these things get the better of you,” Peter advised as the three men walked out of the kitchen and back down the corridor that led to the main conference room. “Just take a deep breath and count to ten – that’s all.”
“Jesus, have I got five minutes to run back to my office before you get started?” Gabe asked.
“No sweat,” Jesus replied. “I still have to get the overhead set up. That should be good for another half-hour,” he added sardonically.
“Thanks – I’ll be right back. Remember…deep breaths – count to ten. Don’t go killing yourself, man. We need you around here!”
“Thanks,” Jesus replied dispiritedly. “See you in the conference room. Figure we’ll get going in maybe ten minutes.”
“Cool! See you in there,” Gabe said, rushing off down a side corridor. Peter and Jesus continued down the main hallway, chatting quietly as they neared the main conference room.
With less than three days to go before the new project kicked off, the system design team was holding its last planning review meeting before finalizing the schedule. Gabe walked into the nearly filled conference room, his arms awkwardly clutching a loose disorganized collection of paperwork. As he took his seat next to Peter, several of the papers slipped from their tenuous position under his arm, scattering on the thickly carpeted conference room floor.
“Man, when are you gonna break down and get a briefcase?” Peter intoned quietly, bending to help Gabe collect the sheets, several of which had floated under the long polished mahogany table.
Jesus was still getting situated at the front of the room, and, true to his earlier pessimistic prediction, he appeared to be having difficulty with the overhead projector. He was respected throughout Heaven for his excellent team leadership and people skills, but his reputation for being technologically inept was the stuff of legend, with displays like the earlier one in the kitchen occurring on an almost daily basis. He had blown one of the projector bulbs and was just getting the spare to come on when the sleeve of his shirt caught the pile of overheads on the corner of the table, knocking them into a chaotic pile on the floor. He looked up sheepishly at the patiently waiting group around the table, and then knelt to pick up the slides, quietly cursing to himself.
“I’m telling you man,” Peter whispered to Gabe. “He’s gonna snap one of these days, and I don’t wanna be around when it happens.”
After another minute or so of reordering his slides, Jesus set the first one onto the projector and began the meeting. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am happy to report that the board of directors has given us the final go-ahead to get started on Planet H8-237b, which the naming committee has chosen to designate “Earth”. Before getting started though, why don’t we take a minute and introduce ourselves. There are a couple of last minute additions to the team, and we’ll all be working together pretty closely on this one if we’re going to bring it in on schedule and budget. Peter, why don’t you get us started.”
“Sure thing. I’m Peter, and a lot of you folks know me from Plants and Shrubbery. I’m changing hats on this one though, and I’ll be leading the Space and Planets team for the first time. I’ll ask you to bear with me a bit, since I’ll be on a pretty steep learning curve for a while.” He paused after his introduction, and turned his head in Gabe’s direction.
“Yeah…hey…good morning. I’m Gabe with the Animals department,” he said unenthusiastically, proffering no elaboration, but only nodding in the direction of the woman to his left.
“Hi! Good morning all,” said an overly enthusiastic woman with remarkably straight blonde hair. I’m Rachel and my background’s in nuclear chemistry. I’ve been doing solar optimization work for quite a while now, and I’ll be joining the lighting group for this project.”
And so it went around the table, with each of the score or so attendees providing perfunctory explanations of their backgrounds, team affiliations, and other appropriate cursory information. Jesus was just getting ready to get into the meat of the scheduling discussion when Rachel’s hand tentatively went up.
“Sorry if others already know about this, but I was wondering about the “b” designation at the end of the planet code. I’ve never seen that as part of our nomenclature system before.”
A brief uncomfortable pause suddenly pervaded the room, punctuated after a second by a single too-loud cough from the back corner.
“It’s actually our second attempt at this planet,” Jesus explained. “You probably didn’t hear much about the first effort. The original planet was called “Kark”, and there was a pretty bad mishap rather early in its history. The short version is that we tried to do a ‘wrath of God – cataclysmic flood’ thing, and unfortunately the manager of the Weather department at the time got a bit carried away and killed off every living thing on the planet. We figured the ‘lesson’ was kinda moot at that point, so we salvaged what parts we could and scrapped the rest. At some point we’ll have another go at that with Earth, but hopefully we can tone things down just a bit next time…Any other background questions before we get going?” Jesus did a quick scan of the room, and seeing no more hands, he replaced his opening overhead with one that presented a summary of the entire schedule.
“As usual, we’re on a tight schedule, so let’s get through this stuff and see if there are any questions or open issues.” He adjusted the schedule slide on the projector, then noticed that it was backwards and had to flip it over a couple of times before finally getting it right. He then spent another second or two adjusting the focus knob before continuing. The slide was a project management flowchart showing the entire seven-day schedule the team would need to complete if the new system was to be ready on time.
“As you can see, we’re really pushing things on this one. It will be tight, not only because of all the advance work we’ve got to finish up before we can start on Monday morning, but also because we’re trying a few new ideas this time.” He removed the project summary chart from the overhead and replaced it with a page showing the first day’s activities. “We have to be finished up with creating all the planets, as well as day and night, by the close of business on Monday. On top of which, the whole thing’s got to be lit. Now Peter is new at this space business, but he’s got an experienced team behind him. As most of you know, God has personally led the past dozen or so lightings for us, so he’s offered to help out on Monday morning again. In addition, besides Peter’s normal team, we’ve recruited a couple of archangels who just recently rolled off a project in another system
“Oh, that’s fucking great,” Peter whispered. “Just what I need – the old man breathing down my back.”
“Hey, don’t knock it. At least it’s visibility,” Gabe replied in a terse whisper. “At least you’re not dealing with animals and bodily functions. Try cleaning up after a buffalo sometime, man.”
“Is there a question?” Jesus asked, acknowledging Gabe’s upraised hand.
“Yeah, if I look at your seven-day schedule, it looks like you’ve got the lighting on Day One, but the sun doesn’t get installed until Day Four. What exactly are we planning to use for light for the first three days?”
“We’re still sorting out that little scheduling faux pas,” Jesus replied, “but the board’s pretty optimistic that between Peter and God they can develop a temporary fix. Thinking so far is that if we go with some kind of big initial explosion, that should give us plenty of latent lighting for a while – at least enough to last until we can get the sun in place. Anyway, God’s been pretty good with these tricky situations in the past, so we’re hoping for the best. Unfortunately though, as CEO he’s got a lot of other stuff on his plate on Monday, so he’s only going to be available to the team for a couple of hours early in the morning. Depending on how it goes, Peter’s guys may just need to suck it up and pull a little harder the rest of the day. Jesus looked quickly around the room and, seeing no follow-up questions, reached down and replaced his Day One chart with the schedule for the second day.
“Aaron here, as everyone knows, has recently been promoted from Plants and Shrubbery to head up the Sky and Firmament department.” Mild applause and approving nodding came from the others around the table as Aaron blushed quietly.
“Oh, for the love of G…” Gabe whispered, conveying as much exasperation as he could manage without being heard by anyone but Peter. “How in the hell does that guy go from working for you to heading up his own department?!”
“Don’t ask me, man,” Peter replied. “I think the guy’s the biggest brown noser I’ve ever seen. That probably had something to do with it, now that I think about it.” Gabe only crossed his arms and slumped down angrily in his chair.
“This will be Aaron’s first solo stint at leading the sky effort. Has the team settled on a color yet?” Jesus asked. Aaron flipped quickly through his stack of notes. “Looks like we’re going with the Number 16 light blue this time. The design guys thought it would go well with the green plant life,” he replied with a smile.
“By the way, I should add,” continued Jesus as Aaron closed his notebook, “the sky department has been expanded to include weather, so all of the folks in the old Weather and Clouds group will now be reporting to Aaron as well.
“Great…” Gabe mumbled under his breath. “Fucking great.”
As long as we’re on the subject of sky, let’s segue into Day Three,” he said, changing slides again. “The Sky and Firmament team is going to need to work closely with Land and Ocean on Day Three to make sure the whole separation phase goes smoothly. We don’t want any repeats of two months ago.” Jesus said.
“Why? What happened two months ago?” Peter quietly asked, leaning in Gabe’s direction.
“Dude, don’t you ever read the newsletter?” Gabe exclaimed. “Some idiot screwed up separating the oceans, the land, and the air. Talk about a hosed-up animal population. I had sheep falling out of the sky, rhino’s in the ocean. Holy crap! Don’t even get me started on that one.”
Everyone also knew what had become of the manager responsible for the calamity. The phrase “sleeping with the pitchforks” had gained new immediacy for everyone who had heard the story.
“Peter,” Jesus added, trying futilely to gesture with his laser pointer at the schedule on the screen, “Your guys need to have the separation process wrapped up before two on Wednesday, so that the plant teams can finish up before nightfall. Jonas, what’s the final tally on plant species for this one,” he asked the balding, round-faced manager a couple of seats to his right.
“He’s wearing a bow tie,” Peter observed with quiet derision. “Who in the hell wears a bow tie nowadays?” Gabe ignored the quip, choosing instead to dwell on the apparent injustice of Aaron’s promotion.
Jonas, however, appeared to have overheard Peter’s critique, and glowered briefly in his direction before answering Jesus’s question.
“We’re still deciding on a few last-minute additions – fruits and spices mostly – but we’ll have at least fifty thousand different species to get in the ground. Plus, I’ve got one guy out on disability for the next two weeks, and another two on vacation, so we’re gonna be real tight on manpower. Let me add, while we’re on the subject, that the sun team had better bloody well have their act together the following morning. If they’re not up and running by seven, all our plant work’s gonna be for shit – pardon my language – cause it’ll all be dead by noon. As far as the moon and stars go, I couldn’t care less, but the sun’s gonna be the make or break part to this whole thing.”
“Is there any problem with that?” Jesus asked Andrew, the head of the Sun and Moon team.
“We should be fine for seven a.m. on Thursday,” Andrew responded, “except that I’m having a bitch of a time getting my hydrogen consignment. We were supposed to receive a shipment two days ago, but I still haven’t seen anything. Right now all I’ve got is this big black rock sitting in the warehouse.”
“Well,” Jesus replied, looking in the blonde woman’s direction, “maybe Rachel can pull some strings with her buddies in Chemistry. If you haven’t seen something by tomorrow morning though, don’t be afraid to escalate. Go right to the head of Purchasing if you have to. Jonas is right – if the sun’s not blazing by seven or so on Thursday morning, he’s gonna be up to his ass in dead plants. How are you set on stars?”
“No sweat,” replied Andrew, “I’ve got tons left over from the last couple of jobs. Besides, it ain’t like we’re using real stars. We only need the dummies – you know, those little light points. Hell, it’ll be eons before anyone on this planet’s smart enough to start worrying about whether the stars are real or not. Why spend the money now, when we can always do a changeout later on?”
“Good thinking,” said Jesus, flipping to the next overhead. “That should help with the budget. Let’s talk about Day Five for a second. Gabe, where are we with the animals?”
“We’re ready to go,” replied Gabe, leaning forward in his chair. “We’ve got ones with hair, without hair, scales, huge ones, microscopic ones, you name it. We’re dragging out everything we can find for this job. Our sentients are gonna be forever figuring out all the different beasties we’re putting down there with them. Oh and, uh, should I tell them,” he asked with a smirk on his face, “about our little experiment?”
“Sure – what the hell. May as well,” replied Jesus, also grinning a bit. “They’re gonna know sooner or later anyway.”
“Just to give credit where it’s due,” Gabe said, turning to address the room, “Jesus here dreamed this one up. Besides all the live animal species we’re introducing, we’ve got a bunch of these old bones from some ancient gigantic animals – some old Kark stuff, plus some lizard leftovers from a couple other recent planet jobs. The thought is let’s bury them all over the planet, just to throw these guys off-course a little bit. We all thought it’d be pretty entertaining watching them try to make sense of how things all fit together.”
“Yes, Andrew,” Jesus said in response to the manager’s anxiously waving hand.
“Hey, Gabe, I’ve got a bunch of old monkey skulls and tools and stuff in my warehouse from like a thousand years ago. Bury some of those two. We’ll have these guys thinking they came from freakin apes or something!” An enthusiastic hoot went up from the room, as others tried to chime in with ideas for misdirecting the sentients that were slated for Earth.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Jesus intoned with a chuckle, trying to regain control of the room, “Andrew, I like the skull idea – get them to Gabe as soon as you can. Let’s leave it at that though. We don’t want these poor bastards turning completely neurotic – some of us have to live down there for a while you know. Yes, something else, Gabe?” he asked in response to the manager’s waving hand.
“I’m on here for two days, and you’ve got it broken down into land animals one day and ocean animals the next. Does that really matter, or can we get them in, you know, whenever?”
“Well, whenever, just so long as your team’s out of there by Saturday night. Beyond that, I don’t care how you use the two days. Oh, but make sure the humans are last – that’s key. And by the way, keep in mind you may still have some of Jonas’s guys in there doing last-minute plant installs. OK, let’s talk about the humans for a minute,” Jesus said, putting up a new slide containing a complex-looking array of boxes and lines. There was a brief silence as several in the room looked at him quizzically. “The sentients…sorry.” Jesus clarified. “Hey, we had to call them something. If we decide later that we don’t like “human”, Gabe can just pick another name. He’s our animal guy.”
“I said at the outset,” Jesus said, now shifting gears, “that we’d be trying a couple of new things with this job. The main one is the sentient creature – this human business. As you know, every other system we’ve done’s been pretty much just rocks, stars, maybe some algae or bacteria, but we’re going whole-hog on this one. God’s concept is that we’ll put something on Earth that can think a little bit, the idea being that this might lighten the maintenance workload for our crews down the road, and also provide a little entertainment for us from time to time. Trouble is, we could only get our hands on a couple of these things on short notice, seeing as how we don’t use them much and they’ve been on back-order forever. So just a word of caution – Gabe, keep the carnivores in a different area please, at least until the humans develop some smarts. I don’t want to be up in the CEO’s office explaining why his first human got its arm ripped off by a bear or something.”
The group was getting a bit restless, and several were beginning to collect up their papers and other belongings. “Hold on, hold on, one more thing,” Jesus said, “I know we’re running a little late, so let me just wrap this up with an unexpected piece of good news,” He flipped a final chart onto the overhead. “I know all your folks have been working their butts off lately, and to show our appreciation we’ve set aside the last day of this project for a beer and pizza party. Keep in mind though,” he continued, raising his voice above the chorus of cheering and applause, “if your schedules slip, Sunday will be the day for any make-up work. If we aren’t out of there by nightfall on Day Seven, there’s gonna be hell to pay, and I think we all know that ain’t just a figure of speech, if you catch my drift. If there are no more questions, let’s get to work and make this thing happen.” Jesus said, collecting up his stack of slides and flipping off the overhead projector’s power switch.
The managers murmured among themselves as they slowly made their way out of the conference room, with Jesus bringing up the rear of the group. As he inched his way toward the door he stared down with intent annoyance at his laser pointer, which he had never once managed to turn on throughout the presentation. Rapping it lightly against his wrist, he made an exasperated face and thrust the slender object into his pants pocket. Once he had made it through the door he turned left toward the kitchen. All that talking had left his throat dry, he thought, and a soda would really hit the spot about now.