Work Text:
You did engineering, you worked for TransPlanet. Heck, you did anything and you inevitably worked for TransPlanet, or one of it's bastard corporate kids. Bob'd studied at the University of Stantan as brought to you by our TransPlanet based sponsers on a TransPlanet scholarship, and as he was brute force cramming his way through the closing subway doors made by the fine Machinists at TransPlanet, he was eating Uppy Chunks, the only 'floating' breakfast snack being developed by a certain corporation that started with a T and rhymed with FlansCramit.
What he was getting at, he figured, was that as much as this job was the pits as far as ambition and integrity in engineering went, unless he wanted to see what other vast array of jobs were waiting for a guy voted 'most likely to get socked by a boss' in high school it was all he had. Though he was hearing good things about the space program lately, maybe that was an avenue to look into, whatever other planets were looking like they needed a guy specialised in a law of physics currently only existing in 0.000000000001% of the known universe.
It wasn't all so bad, he was a griper, he griped, but it was fine. He was starting to build his day around little things, like the liberal smoke breaks in the almost constantly abandoned smoke room, the way the snack machines were always stocked with TransPlanet prototypes instead of actual food (and most of were tolerable, almost adequate). The office was pretty okay, as far as he could tell, beyond the harsh strip lighting and the fact that they were placed by superiority rather then department. The people in it were all massive weiners, of course, but what was the point in having an office with split gravity if you couldn't see how each side tried to out-weiner themselves.
The novelty of having an office up top'd worn off pretty quick considering. For all that him and his little hub got on pretty well, it was getting hard to think of them as people rather then just somewhat elaborate, talking chandeliers. Obviously there was the ribbing, and he'd been cold cocked by the odd pen thrown as a gag, once you'd been a 120lb kid you sort of found it hard to tolerate punching down when it came to laughs. For all that the ceiling guys were weiners- and they were, no doubt- he couldn't help but be aware of the fact that he'd seen someone wearing the same carefully spit shined, tatty shoes for six years now.
The chain of thought got him all the way off the tube to his desk where he found himself minus the a pack of Uppy Chunks and plus some mysterious fat stack of hardware that someone had shoved into his hands with such authority that he'd just taken them unquestioning. Possibly, she was his supervisor. Bob'd never actually met his supervisor, to his knowledge, because him and the other engineers and the counter-part team he assumed worked on the other side all just talked through a mix of e-mail and the occasional passive aggressive post it note left on work passed along. He had a lot of sympathy for them, if they had to deal with things like mysterious stacks of hardware he was 90% sure were nothing to do with him, and did not hold the passive aggressive notes against them at all. Even though some of them could be cutting.
"What the hell is all this?" He asked the general room. Those that weren't knee deep in their own Monday 9a.m breakdowns looked up; that'd mean Stevie, who never worked, who was essentially the only sea cucumber to ever be given paid employment. Stevie, whose idea of a good time was having a stupid hair cut and not getting his squeaking chair fixed. Stevie, who had to be the result of some massive screw up in HR, because there's no way anyone would own up to being related to a man like Stevie enough to let him benefit from nepotism.
He got along with Stevie, he was all right. "What does it look like? It's fucking computer parts."
Ignoring him, Bob threw up his hands. "And what the hell are you doing?"
"Party poppers." He said, blowing streamers out of his eyes from where they hung off of his hair. "They keep setting on fire, though."
"I swear on all that's good, Steve, if you even think of playing with glitter bombs again I'm coming over there and throwing you into the ceiling like a caber." Bob replied.