Palatia rode the bus to work that morning.

She walked up to the back door and rang the bell.

A security guard answered.  “Palatia G. Spaut?”

“Yes?”

“Follow me.”

Palatia walked with the guard to the manager’s office.

“Palatia!  You made it in this morning, I see.  Feeling better already?”

Palatia nodded at Veruog, her shift manager.  “Yes.  Thanks for asking.”

Veruog waved off the security guard and pointed at the chair next to the manager’s desk, with about all the room left on the office floor taken up by a tiny desk.

Palatia sat on the edge of the seat and looked up at Veruog.

“Palatia, first of all, I want to say you have been a good employee.  Don’t say we haven’t noticed that you can handle the cash register and the food line with little supervision.”

“Thank you.”

“But…but yesterday, you called in sick.”

“Yes, I wasn’t feeling well.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Ohh…you know, aches and pains.”

“I see.  And you spent the day at home in bed?”

“Pretty much…”

“Pretty much?  What if I was to say that we have video evidence that you not only left your flat but you also went to a local park with friends, not returning until later in the afternoon, perfectly healthy-looking the whole day?”

“How can you say that?”

“Funny you should ask.  You see, we consider you a valuable employee since you haven’t quit in the first six months of working long hours and low pay at a fast food joint.  Therefore, we registered you with a security service that has links to many traffic cams, security systems and other monitoring devices so we can make sure you are out of danger.”

“Out of danger?  You mean you’ve been spying on me?”

“Oh no.  Let’s just say our company has health insurance policies on our best employees and to make sure our policies are well protected, we ensure that your habits outside of work are within the actuarial predictions of your overall value.”

“Huh?  You pay someone to follow me?”

“No.  We…or, rather, the security service uses the latest in face and body motion recognition to monitor your whereabouts and warn us if you are in imminent danger.  From what we received yesterday, it appears you hiked near the edge of a canyon where several hikers died earlier this year and where some campers died of a hantavirus infection last week.”

“What?  Are you kidding me?  You mean you know, or think you know, where I was yesterday?”

“Yes.  After we received the message from the security service, we attempted to contact you at home but got no answer.  We then sent a security guard to your flat and, again, no answer.  We contacted the building supervisor who was worried that one of his tenants had died on his watch, so to speak, raising his insurance premiums.  He gladly opened your flat to reveal you weren’t home, which, we believe, verifies that the person we have in this recording right here…” Veruog pointed at the flat screen mounted on the wall above the desk.  “…indicates, through deductive reasoning, was you.”

“But I…”

“Do you deny that you went hiking yesterday?”

“No.”

“And do you deny this scene we’re watching from satellite imagery which indicates your hiking path reached up to and over the safety barrier of the canyon edge?”

“No, but…”

“Then we have only one conclusion to make here, Palatia.  You have voided the contract you signed when you agreed to work for us…”

“But…”

“…and further, based on the fine print here just above your signature, you are hereby terminated for endangering the efficiency of our company by exposing yourself to nonwork conditions that not only make us liable for training a replacement employee but also liable for health insurance coverage we had not calculated in the actuarial tables generated by your user data, including your social media profiles and the application you submitted to us.  The only exception to this contract would have been if you died and, in that case, we would have collected a tidy sum.  However, since you are still alive…”

“You can’t fire me!  I quit!”

“Ahh, see, that’s where we differ on this issue.  We have already posted the change in your employment status to our social media site which we hope you will be kind enough to reflect by changing your employment status on the various social media sites you frequently use that we agreed to document when you signed the contract.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Again, Palatia, it’s a matter of perspective.  We both have our reputations to manage, including, these days, our online presence.  We have held up our part of the bargain, providing you not only a safe and secure work environment, but also compatible employees, a steady paycheck and a guarantee that you are a stable, if somewhat independent type personality.  Any questions?”

“Yes?  What about my last paycheck?”

“We will issue you your last paycheck as soon as you return the uniforms we provided you.  According to the spreadsheet, you have three uniforms issued in your name.”

“Yeah?  Well, fuck you!”

Veruog pressed a button on the edge of the desk and the security guard immediately stepped into the doorway.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“We have a set of clothes in Palatia’s size.  Here’s the ticket.  Get one of the guys off the line to open the supply cabinet and return with the clothes.  Palatia, I’m sorry, you have given me no choice but to demand that you return the uniform that you are wearing right now.”

Palatia got up to run and noticed that all the order screens in the fast food restaurant changed to an image of her jumping up from the chair in Veruog’s office.

“As you can see, Palatia, it’s up to you whether you want to turn this into a criminal act for the police to investigate.  The security guard has already requested a patrol car to swing by our restaurant as soon as possible.”

Palatia, caught between wanting to maintain a viable employment record and wanting to tell this whole system off, stopped in the doorway.

She wondered if her friends, all of whom depended on shaky job histories, would take her in if she bolted.

Surely, there was more out there than background checks and slave labour jobs like hers.

Palatia quickly stripped off her clothes and ran out the back door.  If Princess Kate and
Prince Harry can make millions with their clothes off, she…well, there was also that stripper named Katrina Darling…she could make herself famous as the first employee who was fired and ran naked from the premises.  How much was 15 seconds of fame worth in this YouTube era of celebrity scandals and embassy burnings?

News headlines the next minute reported a naked bandit who was shot and killed by brave police officers called to the scene of a crime in progress, said an iNews reporter who had pulled up into the carpark and was shooting video of the restaurant sign when a woman, running as fast as she could, flipped a bird at the police, ran straight toward them and screamed something unintelligible.  “The next moment, a manager walked out with a security guard, both of them looking panicked, saying that the dead assailant, named Palatia, had stolen two uniforms from the restaurant and threatened harm to the reputation of the establishment’s owners.  The police clearly had no choice but to protect themselves from this crazed individual!  Here’s my video and I thank you for watching.  You can see my other videos at…”  The instant news stations switched to the next forgettable crime in progress, posting a link to the video at the bottom of the screen.

= = =

While investigating what makes some people vote for one U.S. presidential candidate over another, I came across the book, “What’s the Matter with White People: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was,” by Joan Walsh, referred to me by the website, salon.com, which has provided many a relaxing and entertaining moment of reading in the past.

However, after reading the following 2-star review of the book on amazon.com by Tom Peterson, I’ll have to encourage myself in the future to be open-minded about book suggestions (and, most importantly, subsequent reviews) by websites I review habitually, before I automatically jump to their linked commercial content:

The basic theme of this book is, why do some Whites refuse to fully cooperate with the destruction of their own people and culture? Why won’t they more eagerly promote the genocide of their own children and grandchildren. The policies the author promotes are Anti-White. Open borders, mass immigration, huge transfers of wealth and opportunities from Whites to non-Whites, all of it to the detriment of Whites. Lest someone think genocide is too harsh a term, note that what China is doing to Tibet is rightly called genocide, even though it is largely “non-violent”. Most of the time, genocide does not involve outright killing.

In 1965 the US was roughly 90% White. Today, a minority of children born are White. This is the most rapid demographic change in the history of North America – far more rapid than what followed the arrival of Whites to this continent in 1492. Four hundred years after that date, Amerindians and Whites were still fighting! We now witness a crushing dispossession of Whites in just a few generations. Apparently some Whites are not quite as enthusiastic about the genocide of their people as the elites would like, and this disturbs the author.

The shocking fact is that in 50 years, there will be NO majority White countries anywhere on earth. Yet every Asian country will remain Asian. And every African nation will remain African. It is White countries and only White countries that are being flooded with non-Whites and it is every single White country without exception. None of that is of concern to the author.

Imagine if Africa was undergoing forced assimilation and mass immigration of non-blacks to the point that every single African country would be non-black in a 40 or 50 years. It would rightly be called genocide. Yet this is exactly what is happening to every single White country. This is the central fact of our age, and the one the author willingly ignores in this book

Can I guess who a person like this would vote for in the upcoming U.S. presidential election?  You get three guesses and the first two don’t count!