The Puzzle (standard:other, 2030 words)
Author: Unsun	Added: Jan 28 2001	Views/Reads: 3715/2268	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A piece I wrote for a class. It's a fiction story......go ahead read it.

The Puzzle 

Hello, my name is Roger. I've been living in this house for twenty
years, with its 2 bedrooms, 3 baths, dining room with a solid oak 
table, living room with a chestnut coffee table, tall simple stairway 
to the upper floor, and a short dank stairway to the basement. I can't 
complain, I own it after all. It's comfortable, warm in the winter, 
cool in the summer. Good neighborhood, close pubs, pretty girls, with a 
nice office close by for me to sit and work. To slave over a computer 
growing pale, old, and thoroughly disgruntled. My job is to sit hunched 
in my little cubicle of existence and prevent the old haggard slave 
masters from seeing that I'm really playing Quake. This was my source 
of pride. 

Needless to say, it sucked. I was bored with the normal life, eating,
working, sleeping with an occasional dose of fun. Fun being the 
morphine for my illness, sheer and utter boredom. It came to the point 
where I stopped playing Quake and watched my colleagues scurry about. 
There goes Fred hunched nervously, scuttling off with a mess of papers 
clutched in his hands. And of course Sarah, nose upturned strides down 
the hallways. Her brown hair trailing behind her, exuding an air of 
complete and utter superiority, she carries a coffee cup. ‘I don't do 
manual labor, I supervise.' He thought she was always good fun in 
meetings, haughty till the end. Even the managers never dared to ask 
her questions. She was always so angry about questions, as if they were 
worse than insulting. 

That kept me going for a while, in fact I rather enjoyed my people
watching. Truthfully, I started watching my neighbors. The man who 
always started his walks at exactly 5:45 p.m, without fail. Marching 
sharply down the street, quickly disappearing around the block. And it 
was around this time that a plan started forming in my mind. I enjoyed 
watching people, they were like soap opera's, they were terribly 
stupid. But who can stop watching them? I wanted to watch people more 
often. It became a hobby. I was the local anthropologist, a new Jane 
Goodall, if you will. 

My first experiment as observer of the town was to go to a local pub. I
thought the more people, the better. I'll be able to observe clothing 
and music trends, social interactions, diet, courtship, mating rituals, 
and of course beverage choices. Unfortunately, the club scene proved to 
be my defeat. The loud music and incessant chatter did not lend itself 
to interpretation and study. It was like trying to decipher the lyrics 
of a punk song while it was being played backwards on a tape deck. My 
notepad and pencil also rewarded me with strange looks from my 
subjects. Clearly, from an anthropological point of view, I was 
disturbing the very culture I wished to observe. This would not do. The 
clubs I had once frequented for my vital anaesthetizing doses of fun, 
were now the bane of my amusement. The Club, with its noise and the 
cursedly paranoid denizens of its blaring chambers, could not be 
observed and analyzed without my being drawn into the mix. 

Work proved to be infinitely better. People scurried about in their
various gaits, from a frantic scrabble to a confident feline strut. 
They paid me no mind. I was just another face in the crowd. My 
scribbling on a notepad was rewarded only with a raise. The assumption 
being that my diligent note taking was "For the betterment of the work 
environment." Ahh yes that brought a smile to my face, twice as good as 
playing Quake. But the office, too, held its fair share of problems. 
People in the workplace, fall into a routine. I grew bored once more, 
and the clubs no longer held that endearing morphine effect. I had 
become so adept at my observations that I often knew what the workers 
of the colony would do before they did. Fred, for example. Would come 
in early before anyone else was around. Confident, striding coolly and 
calmly down the corridors, to drink his coffee and relax, in his 
cubicle, only slightly larger than mine. It was the people, you see, 
that made him skitter about, quaking in his fine shiny shoes. So when 
they arrived, he would begin his darting and dashing about the office. 
Practically running from his cubicle to the copier. 

You see? Everyday he did this. I knew them better than they did
themselves. I was a great detective, not just a simple minded 
anthropologist. I was in their heads. That was where the thrill came 
from. Spelunking in their shallow simple minds. But soon I knew every 
nook and cranny. Those simple problems solved, I quested for better and 


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