Chapter 23: Working

"Where are you two going?" Jade yelled out to Ethan as he walked back to his car.

"I'm going to work, apparently they expect me to show up every day or something. If you ask me, that's asking too much from someone. I'm bringing Nikki along to keep my company, I know you have better things to do, she doesn't though."

"Hey!" Nikki said as she shoved Ethan's head into the hood of the car making a loud banging noise.

Again Jade yelled out of the house. "What was that loud banging noise?"

"Nothing dear, Ethan tripped and fell into the hood of the car, he'll be alright" Nikki called back. She whispered to Ethan "Noses grow back eventually right?"

Ethan holding his face said "For your sake, I hope so! Lets go already before I have any more accidents. By the way, wasn't it convenent that the reward for completing that quest with the homeless guy was a Green Mustang in roughly the same shape as my old car before the cats blew it up."

Nikki laughed. "You'd have figured he would have used it as shelter instead of that box"

Ethan sighed. "That's not how quest givers work. They take everything that people bring them from completing the task, destroy it and they have a constant supply of the reward just lying around. Did you see that car lot on the other side of the alley he lives in, filled with green mustangs in roughly the same shape? There's a provider for everything I hear. You want half chewed pieces of mint flavored dental floss, you just need to call up Minty McGinty."

After a quick drive that involved the use of a couple sidewalks, the bottom of the lake in the middle of the city park, and a shortcut through a golf course, they arrived at Ethan's place of employment. He worked at a computer lab helping people with their technical issues. Upon arriving, he took his position at a round table in the center of the lab. This table was on a slightly raised rotating platform. As time passed, his view would slowly rotate around the room. Ethan liked to mess with the motor that controlled the motion of the platform to make it spin fast enough to throw all the computers off the desk. The management recently had been trying to cut down on the destruction of equipment in this manner and had asked him in the nicest way possible to 'knock it off with the knocking things off'.

Almost immediately after sitting down, a woman came up to him looking all distraught. "Can you help me sir, I'm having problems finding my files."

"Sure lets see what we got here." Ethan followed her back to a workstation which had a large folder open with about one hundred thousand files in it, all seeming to be composed of random letters in the file names. "Your files are in here? What did you call them?"

"Oh that's easy, I named each file with a combination of 8 to 14 random letters that have no pattern at all and saved them in this junk folder filled with garbage files named with a combination of 8 to 14 random letters."

Ethan frowned. "And you lost your files in here? Do you remember what the random file names were or write them down or something?"

"No"

"Then why did you do that, didn't you realize you would get them lost if you put them in this folder and gave them random file names?"

"It hadn't occurred to me at the time. So can you get my files back now?"

Ethan's jaw dropped a little bit as he stared blindly in the direction of the computer screen. "No I'm sorry we can't help idiots on Tuesdays."

"But today is Thursday"

"Yeah we can't help idiots on Thursdays either. Actually I'll go so far as say you should leave now." Ethan unplugged the monitor and computer calmly. He then pushed both into the burning barrel at the end of the table. "I hope the fires can cleanse the stupid from this computer" he added as he stared at the dancing flames.

"What am I going to do now?" the woman asked.

"Go rent a car, that always makes me feel better, goodbye now!" Ethan said as he pushed her out the door.