Fiction

The Office of Unfair Reclamations

For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to work at the Office of Unfair Reclamations. Guys that worked there, they got it made...

Posted: 17/05/2006

Everyday is the same

I sometimes wonder if the glass was really bullet proof. Madame Profusion told me that it was and I believed her because she’s been to Paris and that means she knows things. I still had doubts, however. I should not be admitting this, not to myself and certainly not to you, but sometimes I pressed my finger against the glass to see if it would crack. It ballooned out and flopped back like a bubble. Just like Madame Profusion does. Still, it kept me amused while it lasted.

My name is Ghiocel. In Romanian this means snowdrop but that’s not my fault. It was my own mother who did this to me. My own mother! I was much too small and weak to prevent her at the time. Later on I snuck out from home and tried to get it changed officially to Snowgal, after my hero – Ladies and Gentlemen – Mr Steven Seagal, the saviour of our crime-ridden cities.

I could not get the official approval though. This was because I filled out the form with a blue pen instead of a black pen. I asked for another pen but they just told me that I should be ashamed of myself for trying to alter the God given name that my kindly mother chose especially for me and to go back home. So I went home and today I am still Snowdrop. My mother made me a huge bowl of mamaliga as a reward.

For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to work at the Office of Unfair Reclamations. Guys that worked there, they got it made. Money, women, food – you name it. They just sat there all day, raking it in. I wanted a piece of that and I got it.

The Office of Unfair Reclamations is where you must go if you want to make a fair reclamation against someone who has made an unfair reclamation against you. You need the original form of their reclamation plus the form that states you want to undeclare the previous declaration plus their declaration of agreement, the signatures of all their neighbours and six labels from a litre bottle of Tuborg. I put an official stamp on one of these forms, but I am not allowed to tell you which one. You could win a prize though, so it might be worth a try.

We open at eight thirty so I usually arrive at around ten. Yesterday morning I installed myself in my place behind the glass as usual. Madame Profusion flopped down into the seat next to mine and killed the hairs in her nose. She uses a special tweezers. Sometimes I think I can imagine all those little hairs, terrified of the giant Tyrannosaurus Tweezers that will just pluck them out of that warm nose and end their existence forever. Madame Profusion says that everyone in Paris is completely hairless, which is why they can cook so well over there.

Security opened the front door and in they came. Hundreds of them, all waving their forms like their lives depend on it. Short ones, tall ones, round ones, women with beards, men with swords, dancing bears, teenagers on roller skates, marionettes and guardians of the dust. The reckless, the feckless and the little guy who only speaks Armenian. Screaming babies, quiet babies, big babies, small babies, bouncing babies and babies on springs. Old men in top hats, women spinning yarns, flying fish, donut vendors and dog trainers. Not that I notice anything. They are all equal to me.

What I do notice, mostly, is their hands pushing up against the glass. You just don’t know how many different kinds of hands there are. Fat greasy hands, wafer thin skinny fingers, big rings, chocolaty children. Someone should make a study of hands at the academy. It might help our police catch the criminals.

But that is not important. What is important is that none of these hands are ever holding the right form. And if you don’t have the right form, what can I do? It’s not my fault. You have to go somewhere else.

This is not an easy job, I tell you. People get angry. If just one of those old ladies pulled a gun on me that would be the end of it. I would die like a rat. My own mother would never forgive me. There would be a big headline in the paper: “Snowdrop Shot by Crazy Old Woman in Office: Dies like a Pathetic Rat”.

This is why I am so grateful to God that I make it to the end of each day alive. I was very happy when I took the number 130 tram out to the edge of the city, and not many people on this tram are very happy. The tram rolled and bumped. I clung to the strap and tried to make some space for myself, thinking about the Steven Seagal movie that they’d be showing when I got home.

It turned out to be one of my favourites, I Make the Rules. Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Seagal has to protect his family from a gang of ruthless lawyers. You can take his car, you can take his cheese, but don’t try and take his kids. They bring him to a cave in a forest and try and confuse him with all these big legal words, but he kicks a rock out from under one of them and runs away.

I didn’t get to see the end of the movie because all the power went. So I fell asleep and dreamed of America. In my dream I had a big long white car with ashtrays in all the doors. I had a house like from the movies, filled with endless rooms, and a woman. I phoned Mr Seagal, Ladies and Gentlemen, and he came over and we drank beers and played football. I didn’t tell him my real name, though. I told him my name was Dirk Snowgal.

Someone came in the room but they had the wrong form. We pulled out our pistols and blew them through the window.

Then I woke up and it was time to go to work. My mother was making me a bread roll with cheese for breakfast when the doorbell rang. Of course, we both hid ourselves when that happened. The doorbell can only mean bad news or bills so we never answer it.

But it kept ringing and ringing until I could stand no more. Steven Seagal always answers his door with confidence, and so should I. My mother begged me not to but I just told her that if maybe she hadn’t called me Snowdrop then people would take me more seriously in life and that was her fault, not mine.

When I opened the door, it was a postman. He was very surprised to see me. He had a letter for me to sign and he was even more surprised when I did. Handing him back his pen, I asked him if there was anything left in the world that he considered worth fighting for. He considered for a minute and then he said: “Better sandwiches for postal workers.” I had to agree with him. We shook hands and he left.

All the way to work on the number 130 tram, I had this letter in my back pocket, unopened. Something, call it a voice in my head or the hand of God, prevented me from opening the thing right away. I figured I’d just get to the office, get through a few of the regulars and then read it afterwards.

When I got there though, I saw that Madame Profusion was clearing her things. She put her tweezers into an ivory box and threw an ashtray into the bin so hard that it made a dent in the side. I asked her what was wrong and she told me to read my letter without even looking at me. That was when I noticed how empty the place was. There was no security and the door was padlocked. I pressed my finger against the glass and a big crack appeared, making it look as if the whole office was split in two.

The letter was from an American firm: Supercharger Condominium Inc. Apparently, they just bought us, and now they are giving us away to the world for free. They are the new owners of the Office of Unfair Reclamations, all the chairs, walls, floors and ceilings. They intend to demolish everything and build a casino that is also a shopping centre and television set all rolled into one. I am to be phased, folded, mashed, sectored and factored out in a rolling process that will last for five minutes - basically the length of time it took me to read the letter.

It ended with a piece of advice from the chairman:

Don’t take it hard, Snowduck. You've got to roll with the punches. Change is a good thing. Fight your corner, if you have a corner, and good luck.

If you believe yourself to have been misrepresented in any way during this recent and most beneficial transaction, please fill out form 266/gh/b/44/rt/555/z/23/ghj/266/dd/fff/34/92/hj-b and bring it to the new EU Funded Office of Irrational Rationality.

Hardwick Fundlebuggy,

Human Processing Manager

I walked out of the place and went to a news vendor and bought a paper. Today’s movie is a new one. It’s called When Will I Get Mine? Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Steven Seagal is an honest lion tamer who’s forced to leave the circus by a group of clowns who are secretly dealing in drugs. Instead of going back there with an AK47 and blowing those clown bastards away, Mr Seagal just joins a big queue of people waiting for soup. That’s it. That’s the film. They say it’s a comedy but I don’t see it.

I threw the newspaper away and went to an office to get a form.

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