#some profoundly stupid things happened at work so I made these memes about my boss

[wildspaceyokel]

[madibyrd]

TASK #001: THE LAST NORMAL DAY • broken promises

Flight 441 disappeared on October 16th, Friday, but Madi hasn’t heard about it until the following day, well into Saturday. She got home around 6:30am after finishing a 24 hours shift, remembered to send her sister a message that she wouldn’t be able to make it later to their house to lunch, apologizing for it profoundly, and then knocked out and slept a good twelve hours because she was exhausted. It was a long, hard shift, one of the roughest she’s had in months, constant calls through both the day and night with barely a moment to rest, and she needed to refuel herself.

She woke up to an empty house - Talia was off on some conference being awesome -, and a whole bunch of angry messages from her sister along with several missed calls. She wasn’t in the mood to argue with Liz, but she also knew the more she pushed off the call, the angrier her sister would get, so she let out a long breathe, headed to the kitchen to make herself a coffee and called her sister.

“You promised, Madison, you promised you’d come over for lunch and try out Jake’s soup, he was so excited for you to try it.” No hello, no greeting, and Liz even called her Madison. She really was pissed. She turned on the coffee maker to do its magic and then moved to the living room to turn on the news.

“I promised I would try, Liz, that is what I promised. If my shift went okay and I could get some sleep. I didn’t get any, I literally just woke up.”

“You could have set an alarm.”

“And be a useless sack of potatoes when I go over? You know how I am when I don’t get a proper amount of sleep. It was a really hard shift, Liz, I swear, there were several pretty brutal accidents that we were called to, one of them had a whole family... anyway, aside from those, there were two fires as well and two freaking prank calls that lead to nowhere just us in gear going to the furthest of our district when we could have used that time at least to rest. And this was just the night of the shift, don’t even get me started on the rest of the 24 hours. if I could have, I would have made it over there.”

There was a long pause from the other end of the phone.

“No sleep at all?”

“None until I got home,” Madi promised.

A sigh. “Okay, maybe I forgive you, but you’ll still have to make amends with Jake. Starting with trying out his soup. And groveling a little.”

“Give him the phone and I’ll start, but that kid loves me way too much to need that much groveling.” Which really only made it worse, but she even told Liz not to promise anything to her nephew, so if she said anything more than a really weak maybe, it was on her, as far as Madi was concerned. Not that it would stop her from apologizing to Jake, but still.

“He’s out in the garden playing with...” Liz jumped into a long explanation about what Madi’s nephew was doing, but Madi was not listening to any of it, because when she looked up at the tv, all she saw was the flashing headline - “Tragic plane crash - plane still nowhere found”. She quickly turned the volume on and tried to listen, but with Liz in her ears, it wasn’t the easiest of moments. “Liz, sorry to cut you off, but... what is this plane thing they are talking about on the news?”

“Oh, you didn’t hear before? A plane full of people was heading to LA from... not really sure where, some European city, and then it just vanished. Nobody knows what happened or what happened to them, but they didn’t arrive in LA. Everyone’s freaking out.”

“Yeah, I can imagine...”

Madi got her coffee and chatted a little bit longer with her sister, but she wasn’t really there in the head, she kept losing focus to watching the news and trying to figure out what more there is to know about this accident. She didn’t know anyone on the flight, she knew that - Talia would only be flying back home the next day and nobody else she knew or were close to were planning flying anywhere anytime soon - but still, it wouldn’t leave her mind. To the point where after a couple of hours (which included trying to distract herself and talking to her nephew, promising him that she would try his soup soon), she reached for her phone to text her coworker about the flight, that turned into a phone call that turned into the two of them googling if there were any need for volunteers to go and help with the search.

They found a phone number, they called it, and in less than an hour they were already set to fly to LA, from where the boat they would be on would leave. Their boss wasn’t happy about the development, but he also understood the sentiment, and it wasn’t the first time one of his firefighters went off to volunteer somewhere else. They would make it it work.

The harder conversation for Madi was her family - her parents already didn’t like that her profession included running into burning buildings and risking her own life. They’ve accepted it at this point with grumbles and occasional suggestions to other jobs (her mom’s pitches really were ridiculous, “I’ve heard tv reporters got hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly. Madi, my dear, you love talking, don’t you think that would be a fine job for you?”), but they didn’t like the idea of Madi putting herself in other type of danger, even though Madi insisted she wouldn’t actually be in danger. She would be on a boat, she wouldn’t do the actual dive work, she’d just help out whenever she could (technically she didn’t know what her job would be, but if she said that, her parents would imagine her dangling feets above the water on a hook without any safety, and nobody wanted that). They ended the call on “let’s talk about this more tomorrow” and Madi told them she’d call them from LA. They were not happy about it at all.

Her sister was... both more and less understanding. She was mostly annoyed she’d have to tell a 9 years old her auntie would have to disappear for a while and no, he wouldn’t be able to come over or play with her. And then turned on the worried sister mode and made Madi promise that she would be careful and not do anything stupid like jump into the water to save somebody. Madi did promise. Her best friend simply made her promise to bring her some souvenire and told her that she admired her for wanting to do this and then they spent the rest of the call talking about the guy she was seeing and how she got to a whole new level on one of the video games she was playing at the time that Madi didn’t understand but liked listening to her friend talk about it.

The last conversaion, and weirdly the one that she was both the most anxious and not at all about was Talia. She didn’t call her, she just sent a text - neither of them were really the calling type, and they very rarely actually talked, usually just texted.

[Madi]: So, I’m not going to be home for a while... [Talia]: What have you done? [Madi]: I might have volunteered on one of the rescue teams for that flight that disappeared, did you see that? Or were you too wrapped up in your historical facts? [Talia]: Madiiiiii [Madi]: Yes, that’s my name, though I usually use a lot less i’s :P [Talia]: Your desire to act like a hero can be quite annoying sometimes, you know [Talia]: I was looking forward to a chill night on the couch tomorrow, watching some dumb movie [Talia]: But I guess you’ve already decided, right? [Madi]: Yeah, I fly out to LA tomorrow. We’re just missing each other [Talia]: Somebody is gonna write a book about you and they are going to interview me and I will tell them about that time you got home at 3am and spent an entire hour singing itsy bitsy spider on the foot of my bed, crying about how much spiders are misunderstood and mistrusted even though they are the cutest things on the planet [Madi]: HEY! [Talia]: I know, I know, it’s bees [Talia]: And speaking of them, I won’t have to deal with them, right? [Madi]: Nope, I’m gonna check on them before I leave, they can take care of themselves while I’m gone, you don’t have to go anywhere near them [Talia]: You’re amazing [Madi]: Now tell me about your super historical, super nerdy presentation, did it go okay?

They chatted for a little while longer, Madi happily hearing about Talia’s presentation, being so proud of her. She might have not been there to see it, but she was sure Talia rocked it. And they could celebrate when they would be both back in Boston.

It was evening by the time she was done with everything, and she ate some leftovers from the fridge, watched a sitcom episode on Netflix, and then went to bed early. She wasn’t in the mood for anything else, she was excited to help in something so huge and curious what she would have to do, what kind of job she would be trusted upon. The next day she flew to LA with her partner and spent the remaining of her days on the boat, searching and searching for the disappeared plane without any kind of luck before the fateful accident happened and she’d end up on Meridium.

What she didn’t realize on this Saturday night is that these interactions would become the last she had with them. She talked to Talia and her sister during the trip, and she exchanged a couple of LA memes with her best friend, but there was no end, no goodbye, no finality to any of it. Promises, however, of her return that much more. And all of them would be broken the moment she washed ashore on the sandy beach of Meridium.