Oh, that’s just Tom.

For a while there, Tom was the veteran of Tech Support, hired by Rambunctious Software back when it was just two developers, three telephone lines, and 435 customers starving for his attention.
     He worked there for ages, cranky and largely ignored, but surely the world’s authority on R-Mail—or Err-Mail, as he’d started to call it.

     In the end, he knew more about its many problems than the developers themselves—and constantly reminding them pretty much guaranteed he’d have stayed forever on the phones, talking down another frantic sysadmin as she watched two-year’s worth of messages vanish from her server.

But that’s the thing, those early days just naturally attracted an exciting crowd of talented misfits, cranky and mouthy, but good at pretty much anything. The problems came only when things started getting Corporate, and Management arrived to work their eccentric systems and find us some better employees–like the guy with the speech impediment they hired to work the phones, the accountant who paid bills twice, and person after person who’d show up for orientation and never return.
     The only solution, clearly, was to hire a proper HR Specialist, who promptly fired the talented misfits, and promoted the freaks.

Inspired by Romeo Oscar NOVEMBER. Image by DALL-E.