On 9:00 on August 17, 2135
Ed Newton began another day as an office worker. The hardest part of
Ed's day seemed to be the beginning, when he had to walk up 35
stories to his office on the 35th floor. They didn't use
elevators at Ed's building, because elevators used too much
electricity. As part of the global agreement to reduce fossil fuel
emissions, part of a late effort to try to reduce global warming,
non-essential examples of energy use had been banned. The ban
included air conditioning, elevators, and power lawn mowers.
Ed's life as an office
worker had some similarities to the life of an office worker in
the early twenty-first century. One major difference was the
clothing. Around the year 2015 men came to work in “business
casual” long sleeve shirts and khakis, if they were fortunate
enough to work at a company without rigid dress requirements.
Otherwise they might have to wear ties and perhaps even suits. But at
Ed's company people dressed much more casually. All of the workers
wore bathing suits.
No one at the company had
mandated that workers must wear bathing suits. It simply became
necessary to do so. The temperature inside the building was
typically 115 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes climbing to 120. With these
temperatures you could no longer wear pants or shirts without a high
risk of fainting.
Many of the employees wore
hats indoors, but they were very unusual types of hats, what they
called water hats. When you wore these hats, you looked kind of like
someone wearing a big bowl on top of your head. But the bowl of the
water hat had lots of little holes in it. The idea is that you would
fill your water hat with water, and then water would gradually drip
down on to your body. This might be enough to keep you from fainting
from the heat.
But the water boys kept
things from getting too bad. The water boys were summer interns whose
sole work was to keep employees from fainting because of the heat.
The water boys would walk the office floors, armed with plant mist
sprayers. Whenever they saw signs that an employee was close to
fainting – signs such as a little pool of sweat on the employee's
desk – the water boys would start spraying their plant sprayers
around that employee's body.
The glass parts of the windows on Ed's
skyscraper had long since been removed, so that air could get in.
This created a fierce competition for cubicle spaces close to the
window holes, which employees battled out with great seriousness. Back
around the year 2015 you might want to get a cubicle near the window
so that you could enjoy the view. But in Ed's building the employees
knew that their lives might depend on getting a cubicle close to a
window hole. It was no secret on Ed's floor that the five employees who
had died from heat prostration while working at their cubicles had
all worked in cubicles near the center of the floor, away from the
window breezes.
The bosses on Ed's floor
knew how to exert power with an iron hand. To force obedience, they
didn't need to threaten to fire people or lower their salaries. The
bosses would merely threaten to relocate workers to cubicles at the
center of the building, which didn't get any breezes.
At 4:07 PM a summer
thunderstorm started. Whenever this happened all the people on the floor
would drop whatever they were doing, and move over to the open window
holes, hoping to catch a little bit of coolness
and mist from the falling rain. Some would reach their hands out the
7-foot tall window holes, trying to wet their hands. They would then rub their
hot faces with the cool raindrops.
Ed saw his boss Mr. Fields
reach his arms way out the window hole to catch some falling
raindrops.
“Be careful, boss,”
urged Ed.
“I know what the hell
I'm doing,” said Mr. Fields, who reached his arm out a little bit
farther out the window hole. Then Ed heard a sickening shriek which
started out loud and then gradually died away into silence. Ed heard
no noise when the body of Mr. Fields struck the ground 35 floors below.
“Damn!” said Ed.
“That's the third employee we've lost this year in one these
'rainstorm cooloff' accidents.”
But later Ed realized that
there was a silver lining in this dark cloud. For he realized that he
would get Mr. Field's cubicle space closer to one of the window
holes.
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