6.r.
Somewhere on
the twenty-sixth floor. The personnel
department. A bored, balding man walked
into a waiting room full of short, runty men with various styles of meager
upper lip hair. He kept his eyes
half-closed to mask his shifty nature and avoid betraying the aloof appearance
he cultivated.
“Okay,
Koreans. We’re ready to see the
Koreans,” he said, gesturing toward the office door. A group of seven or eight men stood and went
inside.
“Hey,” said a
short man with a dark, tightly-cropped moustache. “When are you seeing Filipinos?”
“We hired a
bunch of Mexicans yesterday,” said the bored, balding man.
“We are not
Mexican. We’re from the Philippines ,”
he said, his tone nearing a shout.
“Fine. Irregardless, we saw all of the Hispanics
yesterday. You’ll have to wait–”
“We are not
Spanish!” the Filipino man yelled.
The bored,
balding man shook his head as if this was the most useless information he had
encountered in a very long time.
“We’ll see
about that,” he said, bored. “Are you
cheap?”
“We can do
better than those Koreans.”
“What about India ? Can you beat the Indians? Or the Chinese?”
“Try us!” the
man said proudly.
The bored,
balding man shrugged and scribbled something across the screen of his
phone. Then he said, in a very dry
manner, “Right. Looks like… oh yes, here
it is. The Philippines . You’re up next.”
