Non-Standard Termination by Josie Gregory-Walker
Non-Standard Termination
The last thing the government did before it dissolved so that all the politicians and similarly elite folk could go into their private bunkers, was to put the rest of the population into little groups. It was thought that small groups of six to eight people would have the best chance of surviving the apocalypse given they had a suitable distribution of valuable professions. However, there weren’t quite enough valuable professions to go around.
Everyone wanted to be in a group with a doctor of sorts. They wanted to be partnered with botanists and engineers and the winners of reality survival television. However, there weren’t really enough of these kinds of people, so it quickly became evident in the deliberations that they would have to be rationed.
There was a great uproar from the public when many started fretting over the possibility of being saddled with some sort of art historian or comedic improv freelancer, who they feared would be dead weight to their survival mission. Yet in the end, there turned out to be far less Arts students than was originally thought, and only a small portion of groups contained them. Even then, groups with gender studies PhD candidates and slam poetry semi-finalists actually turned out slightly better off, where many developed the habit weekly performances or lectures, tending to the weary souls of dwindling survivors, which curiously happened to lessen the instances of cannibalism.
No, the real trouble turned out to be not with what to do with the creative types, nor even with the lack of medical professionals, but with the troubling number of middle management. When they set to dividing up the doctors, nurses, physicians and paramedics, the politicians and strategists figured out that they mostly had enough to go around, but when it came to all the people with “executive” in their title, they were buried in them. Rather than dividing society up into well-balanced and diverse groups, they were forced to buffer them out with regional managers and performance reviewers. The groups began to resemble and assortment of people with valuable skills who would function as a lifeboat to keep the middlemen afloat. When the organizers began to get concerned about this revelation, the alarms started blaring, and they all hastily retreated to their helicopters to fly off to their strongholds in the mountains, which coincidentally resembled evil lairs.
When the notices of the groups were put out, there wasn’t really anyone left to enforce them. The police and military had all been carted off to guard the billionaire’s bunkers from any of the ordinary apocalypse survivors who may wander into the area. Nevertheless, there was a brief period of time after the departure of the riches and the total collapse of society where many ordinary folk were, understandably, desperate to cling onto normalcy. So, they did as they always did, which was that they did as they were told. They met up with their groups in the designated spaces, arriving with bags of whatever they thought were absolute necessities, and made plans to either head into the bush to be rugged survivalists and establish a new community, or to try and hunker down in the cities, planning to scavenge and loot what they could.
The medical people turned up with duffle bags of bandages, antiseptic, vaccines and all manner of things for stitching wounds. Tradesmen arrived with tools and torches and various ropes and wires of evident yet miscellaneous use. The ones who brought heavy books and stationary and laptops and the likes turned out not the be the long bemoaned creatives, but the middle management folk. When asked why it was they brought such things, most proclaimed that every group would need some sort of leader, and that they were simply bringing leadership material.
‘How is a clipboard, pen, and a ream of papers with empty check boxes leadership material?’ enquired a fashion student in the inner suburbs of Sydney, who had brought enough sewing equipment and materials to fashion them all suitable clothing for all seasons.
‘It’s so we can set goals and tasks, and keep track that we’re doing them.’ Replied the Executive District Coordinator of Urban Operations for a car rental company.
‘Would you have an example?’
‘So we make sure we collect enough food for the day.’ The group had decided to follow a hiking route north along the coast, fishing and scavenging rock pools. ‘Each day we’ll probably need at least three fish.’
‘Do we need a checklist for that? Don’t you think we’ll just remember?’
‘Well, when we do catch the fish, we’ll be able to tick it off on the daily checklist.’
‘I don’t really see the point of that.’
‘It’s for the report I’ll write up at the end of each week.’
‘And why would you do that?’
‘So I can keep track of our productivity.’
The group lapsed into a frustrated silence. It was at that point that even the tenured Emergency Room attendant began to think quietly that at least, when worse came to worse, they would of course be able to eat him.
When the floodwaters began to rise, the food ran out, the power grids shut down and the groups began to depart upon their survival journeys, the middle managers, when they were done bemoaning the death of the stock market over dinners of boiled seaweed or scavenged tins of beans, became deeply invested in instating themselves as group leaders. However, their authority was, of course, undermined by the fact that none of them were very good at it. In every group, a former middle manager had promptly declared himself as group leader and written out some sort of charter or statement of values, which he insisted on reading aloud to his hungry and tired survival band. He would speak a lot of ‘passion’, ‘partnership’ and the benefits of staying at work late, which he translated into a call for the group to stay out hunting or gathering later into the night. When they objected that it would be too dark, cold or dangerous, the ‘leader’ would simply give them a complaint form to fill out, which would promptly be used as fire kindling.
The managers soon began to struggle in their manufactured hierarchy, because they found that there was not a comfortable degree of separation between the top (themselves) and the bottom (those doing the actual work). They didn’t like the idea of being directly contactable by their lowest employees, who would often come up to them with complaints about how they were not employees at all, and it was weird that they kept being called that.
To remedy this, the managers attempted to instate the doctors and nurses as assistants. However, the medical professionals were too busy both saving lives and helping with the hunting, fishing, scavenging, gathering firewood, building shelter etc., and so the managers had to question their commitment to the company, as they thought of it, and let them go. Instead, they decided to spend long periods of the day apart from the group in order to establish their desired unreachability, returning only at mealtimes after everyone else was done with the real work.
Eventually, groups tended to get sick of this act. They provided their ‘leaders’ with the ultimatum to bog in and help scavenge the abandoned houses or hunt rabbits, or they could get lost. The managers attempted to chastise the group for unionizing against them, claiming they instead should take up any issues with HR. Upon this note, many either sustained serious head injuries or were refused food. After the managers had either been abandoned or driven from the group, the working people sat happily eating their meals and speculating just what it was Dan considered HR to be, given the unfortunate collapse of society.
It was in this way that a few months after the apocalypse fell, the many former middle managers began to separate from their groups with resumés in hand. They would stumble upon other survivor groups, and begin to list off their accomplishments, including ‘standardizing the hunting knife cleaning procedure’, ‘overseeing the construction of shelters both including and excluding caves’, and ‘increasing fireside safety awareness’. When they were promptly turned away, they cursed their former groups for refusing to provide references.
Eventually, disheveled and dehydrated men in button shirts and company-branded puffer vests found each other wandering the highways of South Australia, the docks of Melbourne and the beaches of Queensland. A few fortunate groups were able to eek out survival together, following rivers and spending the day grazing on grass, because for many groups the investigative reports on how to deploy hunting operations were still under review by whoever had appointed himself CEO first. However, this was just the lucky few, and the desolate cities and farmlands of Australia were littered with skeletons wearing slack trousers.
These few surviving managers would make their way around the country bumping into now thriving groups of survivors who had managed to set up shelters and homesteads. They would wander into a commune and give impromptu and uninvited spiels about the importance of company directives and outside reviewers. When the survivors would retort that their self-sufficient communities were, in fact, not companies, the poor, starving middlemen would shake their heads and babble in confusion. They were often given some form of fruit or leftover dried meat out of pity, then sent on their way.
And so, years after the apocalypse, (which turned out not to be one single event but dozens of events happening, unfortunately, at the exact same time) many surviving communities were beginning to thrive. As they were expanding their agriculture and beginning to get to a phase beyond survival, where all the creative types were coming of great use in seeding cultures and other things to nourish the souls, the last middle manager happened upon one of the strongholds of a billionaire politician. Rather than being shot senselessly by the former military, he was taken in as one would a stray dog. The billionaire kept him many years as a sort of pet, bringing him into dinner parties to briefly explain the findings of fabricated performance reports, whilst his drunk guests laughed and tussled his hair. Eventually, he died of a preventable disease due to poor sanitation in his quarters, because he had too much trouble finding a third-party company to contract cleaners in the post-apocalypse.
