Almost 5
2015
Welcome New Employees!
Every moment of the Almost 5 experience was themed to fit the strangely familiar alternate reality in which the story took place.
The program was presented as an employee handbook…
Guidelines to help make you a better and more well-adjusted employee of the company that was picked as … “A company to work for in 2015” by the editors of Doldrums Monthly.
…
This book is designed to give you a complete understanding of your rights and responsibilities as a member of our staff. Please read it carefully and be sure to as any question since ignorance is no excuse. For the safety of the office workers please refrain from flash photography and silence cell phones and other mobile devices that make noise and could distract.
This story unfolds in a monochrome, dreamlike industrial office environment. The company’s employees stagger in one by one, and after the “absolutely mandatory morning meeting,” they are left to survive the doldrums of a boring work day filled with maddening trivialities. Lunacy seeps in with each passing hour, and some staff member develop “unique” ways to endure the tedium.
The world may be gray, but color sneaks in as bursts of imagination overtake each worker. They escape into fantasy, madness, depression, distraction, and play in order to challenge the banality of “normal” reality. Coping mechanisms are as varied as the human experience, and this office’s employees explore them through the askew lens of the circus arts. As they each survive the madness in their own way, they are all thinking the same thing as they check the clock:
“Is it Almost 5?”