In a quiet hallway full of titles the sign over his door read "The Office of Bad Ideas". He, the man occupying the office, did not have a name the way we might think, strange as that was, yet he worked just as hard to earn the sign over his door as everyone else worked to earn the sign over their's, and so there was little trouble. Through the narrow window in the door of the "The Office of Bad Ideas" he could be seen gleefully scribbling on pieces of paper, as he was even now, page after giddy page. Around him papers spilled to the floor; all baring the scrawl of his cluttered penmenship, and on the back of each sheet was stamped these proud words: "From the Office of Bad Ideas".

The man bent forward to focus, for there were no outside windows. All light came from a flickering fluorescent bulb in the ceiling. The man paid no heed to these dim conditions though, nor did it seem to affect the speed in which he wrote. He looked neither right or left, nor did he pause for contemplation. He glanced not at the ticking wall clock or the dark bookcase stacked with sheaves of paper. A fake potted ficus sprouting from the clutter in the corner looked to be on its own. Indeed the only tidy place in The Office of Bad Ideas was the top of a filing cabinet near the door. On it were two shallow baskets for holding papers. The sign on one read "In". The other "Out". Nothing sat in the inbox but in the outbox a tall tidy stack waited.

The man himself was of normal size and wore a plain black suit and tie. His features in the shallow light had all the distinguishments of a department store mannequin. Indeed it was hard to notice anything about him at all other then he was a lefty. As the day passed the gleeful vigor in which he wrote did not change, and from his face never faded the smile of a man pleased with himself.

Hours went by and still the man wrote. Outside The Office of Bad Ideas there came noises: hurrying feet and a slamming door. The man, head cocked to the sound, stopped his feverish writing, cracked his knuckles, and leaned back into the shadows stretching his long arms. Selecting some sheets in front of him, then digging up more on the floor, the man in the Office of Bad Ideas tidied the pages he was holding with a soft tap and stood carefully so as not to stir the papers around him. He stepped through the clutter and placed the new sheets into the outbox, being sure to square them with the tight stack already there.

The man stood and waited. There was an urgent rattle at the door. In popped a young man dressed in a similar suit and tie. Being preoccupied with the speed of his task he did not acknowledge the man in the Office of Bad Ideas. The young man snatched up the contents of the outbox, left nothing in the inbox, and whisked his skinny frame back into the hallway. In the hallway was a wheeled bin-like cart, and into it the papers from the Office of Bad Ideas were dumped. Back in the office the man whistled as he sat down again to write. He had done his part.

In the hallway the skinny cart man hurried his bin over the thin carpet to another door beneath a different sign. In he zipped and out he came with another neat stack of papers. Into the bin they went and off went the skinny man and his cart to the next office door. No knock on this door either for the skinny man in the dark suit: it was in and out as with the others and soon the cart was again rumbling down the hall.

As the bin filled the skinny man began to puff with exertion, but he made sure his pace never slowed. He turned into another corridor full of office doors. More work to be done. In and out, in and out went the skinny man with the bin, and on he continued through the maze of doorways, passages, and rooms until his cart was brimming. The skinny man stopped at the end of a hallway to compress the papers, leaning his weight onto his palms so he could jam still more into the bin. When finally full he heaved his cart back around corners, down corridors, and through openings at a most unnatural pace until he came before the gleaming metal doors of an elevator. The skinny man produced a pocket handkerchief to dab his glistening forehead. He straightened his dark suit and tie. Only one button was by the elevator and on it a single word: "Up!!" The skinny man punched it. He punched it again, and then several times in rapid succession. The elevator dinged and the doors opened.

The skinny man in the dark suit dragged his cart into the elevator, forcing it over the threshold with a determined jerk. The bump should have sent mounds of paper in the overfilled bin sliding to the floor. None fell. The man pressed the top most button and it lit up. "Head Room" it said.

The elevator shot upwards towards the Head Room, so fast that it arrived while the skinny man's hand was only just withdrawing from the button. The doors sprung open and the man braced himself for the push back over the elevator's threshold. He turned left and hurried his bin to a large hopper. The man maneuvered his cart onto a hydraulic lift which raised his bin to the hopper's lip and tipped it forward. The dumped papers thumped to the hopper's bottom, mixing in with other sheaves already there. Off went the skinny man with his lightened cart, swerving around another skinny man in a dark suit pushing another fully loaded cart towards the hopper.

Down in the hopper the papers coalesced into a large swirling knot of documents constantly mixed by two spinning augers. The sheets passed between the augers and into a chute that dumped the pages onto a massive sorting table a level below. Men in dark suits and ties stood at intervals around the sorting table and with long rake-like implements spread the papers out so that no large clumps remained.

At the far end of the sorting table men in dark suits gathered the sheets and laid them neatly onto a slow moving conveyer belt that paralleled their end of the sorting table. The conveyer belt could hold three sheets abreast (which it always did). The workers were careful to keep the handwriting face up and the office stamp face down. Back and forth they reached, table to belt, table to belt, making no sound and covering the entire surface so evenly that no pages overlapped and no gaps appeared between them. The conveyer traveled on turning in a new direction.

Beyond a curve in the track a sign reading "Sorting Bay Two" welcomed the river of paper into a bright area where banks of light illuminated every nook and cranny. It was not over warm in Sorting Bay Two despite all the lighting, and here once more were men in dark suits ready to sort. They sat behind shallow desks this time, which butted both sides of the track, forming a long line of work stations facing each other. No smiles or nods were given to neighbors across or beside: the men were busy.

As papers streamed past the long armed men snatched the closest sheet. Pages were held to the light and in a flash eyes scanned it. There was no pause after the sheet was seen, no stop for contemplation, for when the eyes of the men in dark suits ceased moving across the page they swiveled in there seats to the wall behind them. On that wall was a grid of thin slots, wide enough for a sheet of paper to pass through. Above each slot in clear lettering where words like "Education", "Relationships", "Useless Facts", and "God" (this written in gold). Without hesitation the men shoved their sheets through the correct slots then turned back quick to the track for more.

The slots behind each man were uniform in number and category and bore inserted pages away with strong suction. In one work station near the midway point a man in a dark suit plucked a page off the track, saw its contents, and smoothly swung to the bank of slots behind. He slid it into a slot and up the paper shot, through vacuum tubing, to an area dedicated solely to the category he had fed his paper into. Slots from other conveyer work stations of the same category also fed to that work space.

In a slot category work area called "Science" a dark suited courier received the page and, gathering all other papers that came, carried them off to desks populated by men in dark suits. Each desk had two baskets like in The Office of Bad Ideas. The quick courier kept the inboxes filled while the men at their desks worked page by page, placing each sheet before them one by one. These men behind desks did not hurry the way their brethren did on the conveyer floor: hunched over each sheet they pondered the meaning.

These pondering men had large ink pads that never seemed to run dry, and hanging on small racks nearby were dozens of rubber stamps. Each desk had the same set of stamps. "Hypothetical" read one, "External Observation" read another stamp, "Solution" read a third, and so on. The men at their desks, having contemplated the meaning of their sheets, would select a stamp and ink it. With a swift "THWACK!" they stamped their document in the top margin of the page, sometimes with more then one stamp. These stamped pages were taken to the back and all added together into "The Final Stack", as it might have been called, bound for the main level of the head room.

A man in a dark suit soon came and took The Final Stack in a cart through swinging doors into an unadorned tiled foyer. There was one elevator with one button. The man got in, the lift rose, and when the doors opened a man in a dark suit was waiting and a full cart was exchanged for an empty one. The man in the dark suit in the main level of the Head Room pushed his full cart into a large area with a sign that read "Relevancy Experts". There sat many other men in dark suits behind desks. Each desk, however, received papers from only one specific slot category. Categorized stacks of paper were distributed and thinned out by a man in a dark suit, for sometimes the same thing was said but in a different way. Pages upon pages were rifled through and more then one went into a special bin labeled "Incinerator". It was warm in the main level of the Head Room.

Once a pile of pages was gone through it was placed in a folder with the slot category and days date written on it. This folder was taken by a man in a dark suit through a heavy door labeled "Inner Head Room" where the ceiling vaulted story upon story to a point far far beyond. It might have felt like stepping into a forest clearing under a bright sky, but the man in the dark suit did not feel and the space, though vast, was not entirely empty. Somewhere in the Inner Head Room music was being played, or was it being sung? It was an infuriating little tune heard on all the radios of the world just then, the kind of melody you could not stop humming yourself, yet were annoyed when others started. There was a muffled quality to the song, but the man in the dark suit paid no mind. He was standing in a space with many shelves, floor to ceiling, row upon row, extending far beyond were he could see.

The man in the dark suit took his folder and walked to the proper row of shelves, then down that row until he stood at the correct spot. Twenty feet up was the empty space for his folder. The man waited and a robotic arm whirred into view, following a track built at the base of the shelves. There was track everywhere in the Inner Head Room, everywhere a person could go, and dozens upon dozens of robotic arms zipped around placing and retrieving folders with remarkable speed. The robotic arm took the folder from the man in the dark suit, and extending its arm in telescoping fashion shelved the folder. The arm shrank back, but by then the man in the dark suit was gone. The robotic arm sped off along it's track now, past countless rows of shelves, past other robotic arms, until it came to a particular spot. It reached up and selected a particular folder thirty-seven feet above the ground, and whisked it deeper into the Inner Head Room.

There was a large space nestled in the exact middle of the untold acres of shelves where the entire operation came to a head. If it was ever referred to, and it never was, it would have been known simply as "The Epicenter". It was here and only here where one could find the one simply known as "The-Man-Who-Does-the-Thinking-for-the-Man". And here he was, seated comfortably at the center of The Epicenter in a large overstuffed easy chair. It was he who was humming the catchy tune, and though he hummed softly it echoed out far beyond. For clothes he wore pajama pants and a baggy hooded sweatshirt that did not match. At the moment he was leafing through a sheaf of papers resting in his lap.

In front of the man who did the thinking for the man were several monitor screens. On one was a live video feed from the outside world, seen as if from a human's perspective. On another were words; sometimes short phrases, other times long sentences. "Inquires" they were called. The man who did the thinking for the man mercifully stopped humming the catchy tune and extended the easy chair's foot rest. He frowned as he continued to read. A robotic arm deposited a stack of folders on a small table near him.

"Thankyou Spot," mumbled the man who did the thinking for the man mindlessly.

The man settled deeper into his cushioned seat and sighed. "Who writes this stuff?" he muttered to himself.

"From The Office of Bad Ideas," read the stamp on the back of the sheet.

"The Office of Bad Ideas," thought the man who did the thinking for the man, "I'd eliminate that office if I knew where it was."

But just then a new inquiry flashed on the monitor. "Wife wants a puppy," it said. "Spot" the robotic arm was dispatched.

The man who did the thinking for the man reached for the thick folder Spot returned with titled "Pets". He laid aside the other papers in his lap and opened Spot's folder.

"Premonition" read the stamp at the top of the first sheet. "At least she didn't ask for a baby" read the handwriting below it. "From the Office of Relief and Close Calls," read the stamp on the back.

"I'd better not say that out loud," said the man who did the thinking for the man out loud.

"Say what out loud?" read the inquiry on the monitor.

In The Epicenter there was a great silence. All the men in dark suits on all levels stopped. Conveyer belts ground to a halt, robotic arms paused mid reach. This was something that would change things. Hysterical noises came from without, all heard by those within. A sudden wave of robotic arms swarmed The Epicenter with folders of every size, shape, and description.

"Er, Spot," came a sheepish voice after the great disturbance, "see what you can dig up...on babies. And maybe could you find me some actual pants?"