in the Men’s. Even as a boy Roy had been what the Sears Roebuck catalog called husky, and over the years he had gone on quietly expanding. Sears did not have a name for adult men with a six-foot waist, and eventually Roy had had to stop ordering his clothes from a catalog; for a while he had taken to buying his clothes at Walmart. Then he had come to his senses. As a personnel officer he knew none better that it’s important to accept yourself the way you are. If you look at Minnesota Fats in the movie The Hustler, Minnesota Fats is actually better dressed than the Paul Newman character. Fats knew he was the best, and he dressed the part. So Roy had bought a five-hundred-dollar tailored suit at a time when five hundred dollars was a lot of money, and he always flew first class when he flew, and he always used the disabled cubicle in the Men’s Room.
One day he was sitting on the toilet in the disabled cubicle, taking his time, when a couple of guys walked in and started taking a leak. One of them laughed to the other, “Jeez, it’s fucking 9:15 and somebody’s on a disability. Hoo boy.”
That was all Roy heard. He got up with help from the bar, and thought no more of it. But the next day he was in the cubicle and a couple of guys came in and they were talking again.
One said he was going to take his disability and call it quits for the day.
The other guy said, “Hoo boy.”
Now what Roy naturally thought was that this was some kind of variation on calling in sick for the day. The fact that this practice, whatever it might be, had developed its own slang, showed how far things had spread. Something was afoot that was going to have to be nipped in the bud.
The first thing Roy did was to go back to his office and check up on absenteeism patterns in the past month. Plenty of men his age swore at computers. Roy swore by them. You could get an overall picture of what was going on in a place of work in five minutes that you couldn’t have gotten in a year fifteen years ago. The thing to remember is, a computer is a tool. It’s there to help you do what you want to do. Used properly, a computer can be a valuable aid in determining what exactly it is that you want to do. But at the end of the day it’s just something to take care of things that would bore a human because they would take too long. It’s a machine, if you will. Neither more nor less.
Anyway, in five minutes Roy had gotten a picture of absenteeism in the past month that had him staring and scratching his head. “Holy son of a gun,” said Roy, looking at the little chart the computer had produced on his screen. In thirty years he’d never seen anything like it.
Absenteeism in the firm had reached an all-time low. In a building that housed 500 employees, ten had had a sick day in the last month. The rate was the same for the previous month. Roy went back six months. Month after month it was the same story. Then six months ago the figures were back up to where he would have expected them to be.
Something had been going on for six months and it had taken him completely by surprise.
“Holy moly,” said Roy. He took out one of the jumbo bags of peanut M&M’s that he kept in his bottom drawer and tore a small hole in the corner.
He decided that today he would start with green.
He shook a few M&M’s onto his pad, ate the green one, and put the rest in a bowl.
“Darned if I ever seen anything like it,” he said, popping another green M&M and tossing a few more into the bowl.
One of the great things about a computer is it can tell you just about anything you might want to know without even getting up out of your chair. All you have to do is ask it the right question is all.
Roy decided that he would do a breakdown by number of days off work. He got through three or four M&M’s setting up the search parameters, and then he ran the search.
“Jumping Jehoshophat!” exclaimed Roy.
Nobody had been off work for more than one day except