People Person

This week’s new flash fiction. Staffing Noir.

People Person

Andy was a people person. Not in a good way. It was his business. He sold them. Rented, really. He ran a temp agency. Best in town.

But he’d be lost without Fern to come home to every night. She was his rock. And, of course, Little Andrew.

Stability. Support. After a long day of transactional relationships.

“You can’t let them get to you,” she would tell him after he’d emptied the grease trap of another day’s commerce.

He fixed the meal. She couldn’t cook a lick.

“How ‘bout you, junior? You gonna make weight for tri- counties?”

Andy always had wanted to wrestle as a schoolboy. Didn’t have the sand.

“Yes, sir.”

At work the next morning, Andy had hearth and home on his mind. Before the first pot percolated. He placed some nurses in an understaffed rural hospital where he knew they’d handle everything short of resections. Then the day went sour. Lost a bid to cover a strike at the airport.

He needed a dose of Vitamin Fern.

She had a beer at the ready. That, she could handle. With a mate like that you gladly fry your own pork chop. Tonight, she knew just the right thing to say, which was nothing at all. The youngster followed her lead. Andy could feel his systolic descend.

The next day at work, almost nothing happened. There’d be such days, said mama and others.

He trudged home to the apartment. Sensible. Comfortable. It suited him fine. The others never complained about it. He loved that.

“How’s the king of the jungle?”

Feeling more meerkat than Uncle Scar if he was being honest. He took it out on Andrew.

“Homework won’t do itself, will

it?”

Andrew stared back blankly. Maybe he had a point. Times had changed hadn’t they.

Next day at work, Friday, Andy was back to doing Andy things. Mixing and matching like a Yenta. He’d hit it off with the new HR director at the biggest bank in town. The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

He’d made a real connection. Made him think of home.

It had been a good day, and there were only two people he wanted to share it with.

Andy knew there was bad news the minute he turned the key.

Fern was by the front door, not her usual spot. Like she was ready to leave. She had a printed note for him.

There was no beer. Odd. Normally she stayed on duty until he went to bed. The most reliable worker he’d ever seen. And he’d seen plenty.

He had no inkling there was a problem. There had been no drop off in service.

She’d been hand picked for God’s sake. He was supposed to be an expert at this kind of thing. Placement. Staffing. Spent a lot of time on training her.

So this was indeed a shock.

He read the note. “It’s nothing personal. I resign, effective immediately. I’ve enjoyed this gig. Sorry about the short notice. I got a better offer. Supply chain management. I’ll be using my degree.”

She turned to the kid, in his usual spot in the dining room, seeming to anticipate Andy’s question, as if to say, “We are not a package deal. You’ll have to ask him yourself.”

Once he got his bearings, Andy was most surprised, and frankly a bit alarmed, that her programming included an option to quit at all. Let alone come up with an elaborate new back-story and a tale about negotiating a better deal. He’d have to check her manual about that. The salesman certainly never mentioned it.

She was a primitive first generation model after all. Little more than a Roomba with attached gripper arm. With a handful of canned phrases. Really an Alexa on wheels. But she was his. They both were. Perhaps there had been an automatic, systemwide software upgrade.

He had to admit he was impressed, if blindsided. How did the damn thing sync up with the printer? He had half a mind to power-down the pair of them and put them back in their boxes. Back into the closet.

Then he had another thought. Even more unsettling.

About what this evolution portended for his day job, outsourcing meat puppets. And how improvements like this, if you could call them that, made his work, his very being for that matter, increasingly, day by day, more and more, obsolete.