Your boss laughed, and you were shocked to see that the second tooth upon the left-hand side of his mouth had been very badly stuffed with gold?
I’m a mod. I can make bad things happen if you don’t make with the details.
What cruelty did we ever inflict on you to make you tease us so mercilessly?
Spill it. This is just cruel.
Wrong request. Show us on the doll where the bad deity touched you.
If you don’t fess up then we’re just gonna start speculating…
Okay. It’s more like a realization of something that may have been going on since early last week.
Early last week we had a meeting in the conference room. It was a remote thing with another office. One of the managers had a small handheld voice recorder that he apparently was recording the meeting with.
After the meeting I went back to my office and began working. He came in a minute later to use the printer / scanner I share my office with. As he entered he absentmindedly sat the recorder on the corner of my desk, presumably to free his hands.
I was concentrating on my work so I didn’t pay attention when he left with it still lying there. It’s a makeshift office that’s a bit cluttered with cables, plugs, various electronic gadgets, etc. so it pretty much escaped my attention until today.
He came in to use the printer again today and I thought of the recorder, and said something like “is this your’s”? He smiled and told me to just set it on the computer next to my desk. I did so and he left the office, leaving it lying there.
I was struck by the oddness of this but it still didn’t click and I continued working.
As I worked my subconscious must have been thinking about it… voice recorder… left in my office… deliberately?
I looked over at it, wondered if it was recording, and hit the stop
button.
The small formerly blank LCD display now had 01 in the middle, presumably indicating the number of recordings it held.
Either it had been recording and I stopped it, or it hadnt been recording and I had simply caused it to display an indication of its current contents (last week’s meeting?).
Why record a meeting and then just leave it in my office, even after being reminded of it?
But why record me? And if they were recording me, why not hide the recorder?
I’m being paranoid, right?
Yeah, a little. It got left behind b/c it’s unimportant as a backup to the meeting.
Unless they’re frightfully inept, if they wanted to record you it would be in a way you’d never discover.
Well they certainly wouldn’t get anything interesting. Just me clicking on a keyboard, and exchanging greetings or discussing work with coworkers.
So, you listened to the recording, right? That’d tell you whether it’s just the meeting on there, or if he’s got you calling the corner deli to check on whether they’re open.
If you haven’t listened to the recording, turn in your Junior Hardy Boy decoder, and promise to check it out asap!
People are walking in and out of the office at random times (because of the printer) and I didn’t want to get caught screwing with the boss’ recorder.
This latest update in the story is where some of my friends start shaking their heads and saying “get out” or suchlike. The ones that didn’t already do that after the very first post, that is
I think I might be liable to the contract company if I left so soon.
Another theory is that he left the recorder there to see if you would be the petty thief type.
I may have missed it in the myriad twists and turns in this story, but is this a large public company, or some small private deal. Because I can see petty ass bullshit like recording you or baiting you in a small company but that would be totally off the wall in a larger outfit.
They also installed recording devices in your apartment just so they don’t miss anything. It is company policy.
Seriously, it sounds like you are getting paranoid.
It’s a small private company.
The baiting theory makes a little more sense.
If some guy that looks like Ed Harris tries to talk to you then you are in big trouble.
OK, here is the plan for tomorrow. Bring some small ear buds in. Take the recorder into the bathroom and see what is recorded. Look at the screen before you touch any buttons and see if it is blank, touch the stop button and see if you get a 1 again. Just because.
Don’t leave the building with it. If you somehow get busted, tell the truth. “I think someone is recording me.”
Bring plenty of tinfoil …
Honestly this could be nothing or some sort of petty ass bullshit. If you need the check or you actually like the job, just keep showing up and see what happens. I’m betting this outfit is going to continue to be a little off.
What you do is hit YouTube for a recording of one of the old KISS or Alice Cooper albums and use an MP3 editor to play it backwards while the recorder is running.
Enjoy!
Buy an identical recorder and put it next to the existing one. They’re expecting the number to decrement by 1.