Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [59]
“Actually, is there anybody here that does not want to be here? Is there? Raise your hand if you do not want to be here right now. This is going to be rough. If you do not want to be here, then just raise your hand and you can leave.”
Everyone was looking around. Was anyone brave enough to raise their hand? I wish I had raised my hand. I didn’t though. Just then a few people raised their hands! People were actually raising their hands. Wow! I sure thought about it. I did not dare raise my hand. Nothing happened around there without giant strings attached.
“Good,” Mr. Byrnes continued. “You guys go ahead and go into the Hubbard Communications Office and we will make sure you guys are out of here right away.
“Anyone else think that they cannot make it here? This is it. This is your chance to get out now. You will get a one-way ticket out of here right now, with no questions asked.
“Okay, no more people. More of you will be leaving. We will find you and the weak will be sifted out of this group and gotten rid of. Only the tigers will survive this evolution.
“Ten Hut.
“Dismissed.”
By now it was 9:00 a.m. and we, the night shift guys, were stuck here. We were standing there talking to the day shift trying to figure out what we were going to do.
“Well you guys should at least stay all day because we had to stay all night,” Rosi said.
“Now, why would we do that?” I barked out.
“Well, we all had to stay here! Why should you guys not have to stay as well?” answered Rosi immediately, as though she had been planning this all along.
“Good. It’s decided, you guys are staying,” Rosi said, and walked away towards the building.
All three of us on the night shift crew stood there deciding what to do.
“Get into production! What are you guys doing still standing around here?” Greg Wilhere barked out at us.
We scurried off towards the building, not wanting to risk any trouble.
Since we were rarely on post at the same time as the day shift guys, we were not going to be able to do anything that would benefit us so we decided that we would do preps for our shift. There was the matter of competition between the day and night shifts. Even though we were only three people, we regularly out produced the day shift because we had a lot less distractions during the night shift. No phone calls, no hour-long musters, no executive inspections, no people coming in asking for stuff, overall we worked more and got more done. This always pissed off the day shift and they would generally leave stuff for us to do to try and load us up with more work.
Taking out the trash and doing the shredding was almost always left undone when the day shift crew ended. If the shredding was not regularly done, security could come by and assign whomever was responsible for this a condition of Enemy for violating the security regulations. If it was paper and had writing on it, it had to be shredded and could not be thrown away or leave the property for any reason.
So we did the shredding, got supplies in place for our shift and used the time to prepare to get more done later on that night. This was going to be a long shift.
At lunch muster, we were told about a new procedure that was being put back into place, “overboarding”. Mr. Byrnes read an order from Hubbard that covered the exact procedure for being thrown overboard.
Something about having oneself blindfolded and being thrown into the ocean, someone was even supposed to read a short passage as this was being done.
“We commit your sins to the depths. May you arise a better thetan!”
I was wondering if I was the only person in the mustered crowd who knew that we were about 100 miles to the nearest ocean. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind when Mr. Byrnes said that we would be doing all of the overboarding at the lake on the property.
The lake was a sludgy disgusting body of water about 200 yards from Building 36. On a hot day, you could sometimes