Diaries / The Minutes of Assassins Anonymous
The official minutes of the firm that works on floor seven and a half: motions, biscuits, the noodle order and the strangers who keep turning up in the office.
Fiction. The characters, diaries, legends and reports are invented. The lift and the lair are real.
Meeting No. 1
Meeting called to order at 7.30 pm by the Chair. Present: seven members, identified by code name only. Apologies: none. Biscuits: shortbread.
Motion: that members stop wearing name badges, as we are Anonymous. Carried, six votes to one. Members agreed to keep wearing the name badges anyway, as they are “very nice badges”.
Action item: order fewer name badges.
Meeting No. 4
Members raised, again, the matter of the lift. During Tuesday’s storm it stopped at our floor and a group of strangers came in carrying noodles. They were very polite. They left by a route the Chair would prefer not to minute.
Motion: that we move to a floor that exists. Lost, on the grounds that a floor that exists can be found.
Noted: the strangers took nothing but a great deal of interest.
Meeting No. 7
The Employee of the Month was awarded, for the thirty-ninth month running, to our top member, who was not present, being downtown on business.
One member asked whether anyone else might be considered. The Chair reminded members that the last person to ask that question now works in accounts, and moved on to the biscuits.
Biscuits: custard creams. A vast improvement.
Meeting No. 9
The Chair reported that the Thursday noodle order is now forty-two serves, and that Frankie at the Lucky Noodle has started including fortune cookies reading “I know where you work”.
Motion: that we find a new noodle shop. Lost, unanimously. Nobody makes noodles like Frankie.
Action item: tip Frankie more. Much more.
Meeting No. 12
Correspondence received: a letter from the building’s electrician, asking politely whether we might stop rewiring the lift. The Chair confirmed we have never touched the lift, and that the lift does this by itself.
Also received: a postcard from Perth, showing a lift panel with the 7 and the 8 lit up. No message. The Chair has pinned it to the board.
Question for next meeting: do we have a branch office? Nobody remembers opening one.
Meeting No. 13
Under any other business, a member reported that the top man’s office had visitors again last night, who found a way out with four minutes to spare. The top man returned at the sixty-minute mark, found the office empty, sat down at his desk and asked who had left the noodle box.
Nobody answered. The Chair closed the meeting at 9.02 pm and took the biscuits home.
Next meeting: same floor, same time. Bring an umbrella. There’s a storm forecast.
— The Chair (approved, with one abstention)
