PREVIOUSLY:
1. Dear world, writes Andrew, suicidally, I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing to inform you of a major, life-changing decision I have made that will involve my taking drastic action as soon as I finish this letter, which you will want to read in order to divine my motives. I will reveal my intended drastic action in the sentence that follows this one.
2. "The mail is on the table," says Scott. "Looks like you got a letter."
Olive swallows a lump of dread (metaphorically; dread does not actually come in lump form).
"Another one?" she says.
3. [The letter Olive receives]:
Dear world,
I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing to inform you of a major, life-changing decision I have made that will involve my taking drastic action as soon as I finish this letter, which you will want to read in order to divine my motives. I will reveal my intended drastic action in the sentence that follows this one.
"Do you know the extension for human resources?" Olive asks Lois, with whom she shares an office.
"I do not care for the term 'human resources,'" says Lois. "In my day (I am old), we used 'personnel.' I do not consider it morally defensible to think of humans as a type of resource. Humans are ends in themselves. Immanuel Kant said--"
"Found it!" says Olive, holding aloft a company directory.
"HR," says Carol in HR upon picking up the phone.
"Hi," says Olive, "I am a new employee, and I was wondering if you could give me some information."
"Didn't you go through new user training?" says Carol in HR. "The answers to any conceivable questions should have been supplied, along with a reasonably priced lunch."
"My question is not about my work," says Olive. "It's about another employee, Andrew something-or-other. He shared an office with me on the first day, but when I came into work the next morning, he had been replaced by a Lois something-or-other."
"I am sitting right here, you know," says Lois. "You could just ask me my last name."
"What is your question?" asks Carol in HR.
"Well, by any chance, did he kill himself?" asks Olive.
"I'm afraid I cannot divulge that sort of sensitive information," says Carol in HR. "Besides, without knowing your colleague's last name, I couldn't check the Employee Self-Downsizing Database for you anyway."
"The what?" says Olive.
"The Employee Self-Downsizing Database," says Carol in HR. "It's a list of employees who have chosen to terminate their temporal existences."
"You mean to tell me so many employees at this office have killed themselves that you've started keeping a list?" says Olive.
"I'm not at liberty to divulge that type of sensitive information," says Carol in HR, "but just between you and me, I blame the beige walls. Beige is the color of despair, you know."
"What if I found out Andrew's last name?" says Olive. "Could I look him up in your death data-bank then?"
"Of course not," says Carol in HR. "It would violate the privacy of the possibly deceased."
"But what if I had reason to suspect that I had been sent, through the ordinary postal system but with no postmark and no return address, Andrew's suicide letter, the latest in a string of strangers' suicide letters that I had received over the course of several weeks for reasons unknown and that I had begun to suspect, further, that my mailbox has become some kind of supernatural repository for the final thoughts of depressives about to off themselves, and so I needed to confirm that Andrew had indeed killed himself so that I might confirm, in turn, that I hadn't lost my mind? What then?"
"I would have to ask my supervisor," says Carol in HR, "but I doubt she would grant you access to the database. She's been in a mood ever since they ran out of non-dairy creamer in the breakroom. She really loves her non-dairy."
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