Our Temporary Supervisor

[Nemonymous]

OUR TEMPORARY SUPERVISOR – with some artfulness I spread my latest reading of this story before and after last night’s sleep. That method allowed me to notice the humour that often pervades Ligotti’s work and resemblance to my own Corporate life in the past that I often review with grim laughter. However, I'd hoped to escape the Quine Org. of the previous story (as well as its nobby spider), but here it was again! (Like PFJ, I studied Quine at university in the late sixties; he was a philosopher who advocated, inter alios, a semantic holism...)
Here, in this story, we have, under cone-shaped lamps, the archetypal machinations of Corporate pecking-orders, new methodologies, productivity schemes to manufacture, I gauge, those knotty Metal-Piece Puzzles for Christmas. Frowley, Blecher, Nohls, the Narrator, all subjected to the Company Line.
All great horror stories (and this is a truly great one, even (or especially) with the humour) have a single lasting image that haunts you for the rest of your life (you know what I mean; like the spider at the window in ‘The Haunting of Toby Jugg’)...and here we have the image of the amorphous shape behind the frosted glass. Genius!
The Temporary Supervisor with ‘sabbaticals’ like the Town Manager?
Here we have another grey landscape making us believe that this factory may be related to The Red Tower. Also, in this story’s last sentence, the recurring theme of the essence of a work ethic allowing us to avoid unwelcome thoughts even as we realise that the trammels of Work are worse than having the unwelcome thoughts in the first place!!
I am now retired from my Corporate existence of the past, but this story reminds me it is only temporary as I wait for the ultimate retirement. My retirement is spent reading Ligotti and maybe there is absurd humour in that, too, as our minds blur into the grey landscape fogs around us (yet unseen, but definitely there, lurking...).
Frosted glass is usually used for toilets....