Odd Minds Unite: Saving the Intergalactic Union

The days had been dark for our group of heroes. Our boss was out of town; we were understaffed and over-stressed. Our clients were getting pickier by the day, our job was getting harder, and we were just trying to get by while keeping our sanity in check. Some days I wanted to pull my ears off just to stop hearing the sound of my own voice.

That's why I can't believe what happened today. You know how you have one of those days where everything goes wrong? That's today for me.

I woke up late this morning, because the alarm clock decided to stop working last night after a particularly loud thunderstorm, waking me up every hour with a dull, flat beep that would make an Amish person say "Oy." I skipped breakfast because I couldn't find my keys, so I had to take an Uber to work. When I got there, the coffee machine was broken again.

"It wasn't broken yesterday," said Latte, who'd been waiting in line with me. "My barista friend told me it broke overnight."

"Weird," I replied as we got our drinks elsewhere. "But at least we didn't get too much caffeine last night." Sometimes those machines mislabel their cups and people end up with ten cups' worth of coffee before they realize it! A lady once had a heart attack in front of me after that happened!

After all that stress, everything else just seemed like a breeze. Mr. Redwood had gotten some new writers from somewhere who could write better than us, but he refused to pay the extra money for them to proofread their work before sending it out! Most of the stuff he sent me for editing was barely readable! We had so many issues going on at once that it took us three hours just to make sure everything went through properly and made sense.

Mr. Redwood must've noticed how stressed we were because he asked us if anything was wrong when he came back from his business trip yesterday afternoon. It took us two hours to figure out what was wrong with the machine that kept making bad cups of coffee -- turns out someone had placed a cup containing a small bomb in it! The explosion blew up half the kitchen and created a fire that took another hour to put out! Another staff member almost died after being hit by the shrapnel! We were lucky no one else got hurt in this whole mess!

That's not even mentioning how only one of us came in today: KitKitty! She showed up late this morning as usual and then said "I'm still tired from last night!" and then fell asleep in her chair during our staff meeting! I don't know what she does with her time outside work but she never seems tired or sick during work hours! We've been asking her about it for years now but she always ignores us or deflects the question with something about quantum physics or something else that is above my head!

So yeah, today has been pretty stressful for us -- especially since we've been investigating a series of kidnappings reported by our last client (who had hired us before their company went bankrupt). Apparently these kidnappings were caused by evil robots who were trying to steal artificial intelligence technology from other companies through trickery and subterfuge...but we can't be sure that any of this is actually true because Mr. Redwood doesn't want to pay for more security guards to protect us while we're working on this case! If those robots ever find out where we work...we might never see the light of day again!