She was eighteen and not going anywhere when she landed the job.
She was not a particularly bright girl, although a lot of her friends would say she was fun to be with. That probably carried more weight in her world than an elevated intellect. She had worked mainly in departmental stores since school, with nothing coming of it. Boyfriends just came and went and she was content to live at home with her mum and dad. In some respects, she supposed, it may have been her ordinariness that had made her right for the job. And what a job it was! There were rules to it, pretty strange ones at that, but the pay? The pay was great!
On reflection, there was no real accounting for how she got the job. It was just a call to her mobile phone coming up as a blocked number. She always answered those. She saw the call as being an interview, albeit a peculiar one. The man’s voice was very kind and the office rules were simple. No food or drink. No smoking. No phone or other personal electronic devices. She was to wear plain office attire. Carry no bag or purse of any kind. These instructions, along with a number of others, including her office hours, the address and a key, came through the post the day after the call. It was stated that the letter and the key were the only items she was allowed to have with her when she entered the office each day.
In short, all she had to do was answer the phone, and having no problem with the idea of having to do that, went along with the whole thing. The office was located through a door at the end of a hall. It was not really an office, more of a room. It had no windows and only contained three things, a chair, quite comfortable, a desk, quite small, and what she regarded as an old-fashioned telephone, the type with a rotating dial on the front.
At first, she regarded the entire thing as rather exciting. She caught a bus to the city centre each day. She entered the building. It contained a variety of companies, all providing different services. She took the elevator to the fourteenth floor. She walked the entire length of the hallway. At the unmarked door at the end, she would turn the key in the lock and enter. Just doing that, day after day for several weeks was quite exhilarating in itself.
However, human nature being what it is, the ugly spectre of boredom slowly raised its head. She sat thinking about that, about the ugly spectre of boredom slowly raising its head. She had read the phrase in a book once and it had stuck. She whispered to herself, “The ugly spectre of boredom slowly raised its head.”
She was musing like this to herself, when the phone rang…
