The Traffic Controller

Ted controls the flow of the universe, but you shouldn't call him god. He's really more like middle management. He was told the company needed a strong self starter who was not afraid to make mistake in a critical impact area. Being unemployed for eight months has a way of making a man ready for any kind of job and willing to apply anywhere.



He put on his best brown corduroy pants and the brown sports coat his father passed down to him when it became "unusually snug for a normal man." The light blue striped shirt he wore on his first and last date with Lisa with the little curry spots under his right arm pit that won't be visible as long as he keeps the coat on throughout the interview.



After only five minutes in the waiting room of IUT, Ted knew he was going to have to make a decision. After watching the AC repairman walk out shaking his head in defeat, Ted was sure this was going to be another disappointment in a long line of failed job searches. He was called into a well lit room that increased the temperature to a level he could bear no more. The rest of the interview was spent trying to ignore the fact that the large pools of sweat under his arms even after removing the jacket was re-hydrating the curry and the stains began to smell of Desi Palace.



When asked for an example of an experience in which he showed keen decision making in the face of disaster, Ted's first instinct was to lie, but he could only think of the date that caused the stains. He explained how he had been on a date in the very shirt he was wearing and had reached across the table to feed his date trying to be romantic with a piece of naan and ended up sliding his armpit through his chicken tikka. Instead of panicking, he had instantly torn of a piece of naan and dipped his armpit to taste the sauce and went on to complain about the state of the interior design world in which a restaurant would stoop to using customer's clothing as dishes.

Lisa had laughed and the night had ended as well as he could have hoped. He explained that he had considered it his lucky shirt from then on despite the irreversible damage the turmeric had laid on the shirt. He didn't feel the need to explain how Lisa never called him again and he not been able to find her again after that night.

He waited in the stifling heat of the lights while one interviewer left and was replaced by a strangely familiar looking man. A grey haired man with a small mole in the center of his lip smiled and asked Ted how long he had been unemployed. Ted felt oddly drawn to be honest with the man and explained his move to the new city and his inability to find a new job with his mix of experiences.

The man looked at him seemingly through him and asked why he had not gone on to describe how his relationship with the girl from his date story was going. Ted admitted to the first date being the only date and how he felt saddened by the loss of a chance at what he thought could have been something really good. He stated unasked that he had not been on another date since that moment three months back, but he had not missed an opportunity when if presented itself again.

Another smile and Ted was asked if that was why he decided to go without the jacket when he realized the repairman would not be able to allow him to cover the stains. A light flashed in his mind and Ted now saw the new interviewer shaking his head in defeat and pictured the generic HVAC hat he had been wearing earlier as the fake repairman.

Ted willingness to go on regardless of the certain embarrassment the shirt should have caused him and his ability to turn that negative into a positive in his interview got him hired on the spot. The training was rough and quite vague. He was given test scenarios on a computer to simulate where he would lead a situation as if he were writing the script of a life.

He spent his first day causing embarrassing erections in Poughkeepsie, NY, to a young man in public situation followed by leading him to medical text books to understand what was happening to him and onto a possible future in medicine through his new found curiosity. He spent the third day letting a young girl in Stamford, CT grab a frayed vacuum cleaner cord and nearly electrocuting her before seeing her turn to her science teacher for long discussion on the science behind electricity. After two weeks of various events in the near NY metropolitan are, Ted began to tire of the vagueness of his tasks and snuck into his boss's office while his boss was in a board meeting.

He found the file cabinets bear and the computer to be a hollow shell. Only a mild hum from behind the closet door could be found in the office. Ted opened it as his boss walked in screaming for him to keep the door shut, but the blue flash of light cut through Ted like an arrow and out through the open office door before disappearing into the stairwell. Ted found himself in front of the firing squad made of the board of directors and his boss before being assigned to find the escaped thing or find a new job.

Accustomed to two weeks of employment and the paycheck he hoped to receive in the mail when he returned home that evening, Ted searched the stairwell before finding the charred blue husk like a snake skin in the shape of a tiny man. He was eerily reminded of thing one and thing two from the Dr Suess book The Cat in the Hat, but shook it off as he brought the shell to his boss. He was still terminated after much wailing and screaming by his boss about destroying to flow of the world and the oncoming apocalypse. Some people can be so dramatic, Ted thought on his way home before stopping at the library to jump online.

After an hour of searching for descriptions of the creature shell he had found, Ted reached to turn of the monitor and a spark from his finger tip rebooted the system and loaded up the program from the job he no longer had. Having no appetite for the actual tasks, he switched to shut down when he saw the log of activity for that afternoon had his name on it. The user BlueManintheRoom had logged on around the time Ted was sneaking into the office and a log showed Ted's boss was forcibly delayed from reaching the office earlier and preventing the escape. Ted jammed his finger into the power button and jogged quickly to the exit to get home.