I don’t know which makes me like this story more, my corporate job or my love of the zombie novels.
Working Stiff, at Masochuticon:
“It was a matter of some pride to John Parr that he had never taken a sick day in his life; the sudden and violent cessation of life did not seem in itself a convincing reason to shirk. In many ways, he might have thought, if most of his cerebral matter was not currently sitting in the oesophagus and gullet of a former loss adjuster (himself now sitting, due to an absence of working knees, in the gutter of Threadneedle Street), becoming a zombie was precisely the kind of radical change that employees often need if they are to resist staleness. There might even be advantages. Discounting for a moment the constant, instinctual yearning for brains, the undead did not appear to need food, and as such the tendency to dawdle over lunch could be excised from a workforce. Also, since zombies were by any legal standard as dead as… well, as dead as John Parr himself, it was reasonable to suppose that much of the workplace legislation that had recently caused so many problems in some of Price and Partners’ more production-oriented holdings could be open to challenge as discriminatory against the deceased.”
I hope you like it too. By the way, you can be notified of every maschuticon story by email or subscribe to their RSS feed.
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International