Can you see the resemblance?

January 8th, 2019

While I prepared to leave work today, I noticed a conspicuous void where my laptop normally rests. You know, sitting right behind me, with my lunch box and the bag I use to transport both between work and home. This instantly cranked up the intensity of my headache, which had appeared out of nowhere at 1 PM, and was already attempting to evolve from its current, lowly state into a truly epic migraine.

As it so happens, I had just read my e mail on the janky work computer that has been bequeathed to me, which is sort of strange. Not that I was checking my work e mail before I left for the day, so much as because I checked it at all. It's as if I'd managed to tune out all of the smarmy feel-good propaganda messages from the new CEO, whose lifespan in the company can be measured in months.

Anyway, one of the electronic mail messages, from the Human Resources department, indicated that someone had 'turned in' an 'electronic device'. That was conspicuously vague, and after canvasing everywhere I had traveled over the course of my work day, I figured it couldn't hurt to ask them if that 'electronic device' was 'my laptop'. And ask why someone 'turned in' the device sitting behind me.

Trundling downstairs, I entered the dilapidated offices of the People Processing portion of the building, and waited ten minutes for one of the salaried douchebags to stop hogging the entire office's time with his exploits about recent jet ski hijinks. "Nobody cares," my inner monologue shouted into the universe. "Don't you have a job or something? You know, anywhere else?"

Glad that I hadn't clocked off before entering the Underling Slaugherhouse department, I rolled my eyes in a spot that everyone present could clearly see, sighed loudly in a fashion that everyone couldn't help but hear, and started fooling around with my Pixel. This was enough to grab the attention of the lady who sent the electronic mail about the electronic device, who shrugged.

The jet skiing dirtbag finally drifted off, my having disrupted his posturing and preening before the women of the Minion Disassembly department, and my wait was over. Stepping into her sub-office, I told her that I had lost an 'electronic device'. She looked at her desk, where I could plainly see my laptop, and foolishly asked me whether or not I could prove that my laptop was, in fact, mine.

"I think so, yeah."

I pulled the laptop out of its protective sleeve, and opened it up.

Though it won't be easy.

I looked at the laptop, with those decals of me facing her, then at her, then at the laptop, and then at her. "Looks like me, doesn't it?"

I mean, kinda sorta?

The Human Resources creature then chuckled, and handed over my laptop. Stuffing it in my bag, I then left for the day and began my journey home, still wondering why someone would have removed my laptop from the shelf right behind me, the one with all my other things on it, and turned it in to the Hall Monitors as if it were 'lost'. I suppose that's going to be one of those mysteries for the ages.

firebomb@obnoxiousjerk.com