Technical Difficulties

“Derek! OOOHHH, DEREK!” the manager's voice howled through the bullpen office to the ears of the sleepy IT worker. It was 9:15 a.m., and he was barely through one-quarter of his morning coffee as he heard the manager's footsteps bumble over louder and louder to his tiny desk.

“Ahh, Derek, there you are, good morning!” The energy in the manager's voice could have only been the result of the two cups of espresso he had just injected directly into his veins moments earlier. “You’re going to be so excited because I have a job for you! One of our clients runs a hiring platform app, and they're experiencing some technical difficulties. I want you to put on your smile and get over there and help them!”

“Uhh… okay,” Derek moaned as he took a massive gulp of his morning coffee. “Did they give any details about the nature of the problem, such as a downed server or…”

“Ohhhh, Derek, hilarious as always! I actually have no clue, but you’re one of the sharpest pencils in our pencil… holder… thing, so I trust you can catch up to speed on-site! It's about two kilometers away, so you might as well walk so we can save on gas!”

Derek moaned under his breath, drank the rest of his coffee, grabbed his toolbox, and headed towards the door before he heard his manager screech, “WAIT, DEREK!!!!”

Derek halted and gritted his teeth as he felt the insides of his ears churn. Then, he promptly turned around to face his manager, who was standing only centimeters behind him with a grin from ear to ear. “You forgot your smile! Silly Derek, here you can borrow mine. I have plenty more at my desk!” The manager pinched his fingers near his mouth and dropped his smile as he moved the fingers that pinched nothing over to Derek’s face. “Come on, take it, Derek!”

Derek forced a smile as his facial muscles tightened to unnatural proportions, providing a grin that seemed to leave him in pain. “No thanks, boss, I've got mine right here!”

The manager stared soullessly into Derek’s eyes as a single tear dropped from his right eye before he quickly moved his pinched fingers back to his face and grinned again ear to ear. “Whatever, more for me, hahahahaha!” The manager quickly scurried away back to his office. Derek turned around and said a prayer to whoever was listening that he wouldn’t see his manager for the rest of the day.

Derek arrived, sweaty and with sore soles, at what seemed like a normal office, walking in to be greeted by a woman waiting near the receptionist’s desk. “Wow, I only ordered my Uber Eats two minutes ago! Thank God they're finally making their orders faster…”

“Uhh… no, ma’am, I am from your IT firm. You called saying you had an issue with… technical difficulties?” He dropped the smile as soon as he left his own office and did not try to hide the annoyance in his voice at all.

“Oh, of course! Sure, right this way!” She led him up two flights of stairs to their office, walking to the server room located directly across from the break room with a coffee stain on the table and some guy whining about the inconsistent spring weather. She pulled out an ungodly amount of keys attached to a ring two keys away from exploding in a freak key accident and spent the next five minutes going through each and every one while Derek impatiently waited, passing the time by learning about the personal allergenic history of the weather guy in the break room.

“Ah, here we go!” She opened the door and turned on the lights, and Derek experienced a sharp force pulling him and her into the center of the room towards a small black ball hovering ominously and pulling bits and pieces of the nearby servers into it. They both grabbed on to some loose-hanging wires to stop themselves from being pulled into the ball.

“What… What is that?!” Derek exclaimed as he tried to get his feet back on the floor.

“Oh, that's the black hole we had installed a month ago!” the woman said as her shoes flew into the hole. “Ugh, those were new shoes, too! Anyways, as a hiring platform, we get way too many applications that we could never read, so we created this small black hole to send 99.9% of applications in to save costs on storage and hiring people to actually review them!”

The black hole swiftly pulled Derek’s toolbox out from under him and swallowed it whole. “I… What? I don’t understand… How did you create this?”

“Oh, my boss’s cousin is a renowned physicist who got laid off due to the government cancelling her research division to get more funding to start a war, so in exchange for making this cute little cosmic horror, we got her a job as a barista at the coffee shop next door. Let me tell you, she makes a mean latte!”

The black hole made a strange whirring noise and began to slowly grow bigger. “Ohh, that looks scary! Anyways, you should get to work; you do charge a pretty penny by the hour after all!”

“What? I don’t even know where to—” he was interrupted as the woman put her whole hand on his face to use as leverage to pull herself out of the room.

“Oh, I’m sure there's a manual nearby you can learn from. Anyways, after you’re done, if you see pizza from my Uber Eats order left unattended, that doesn’t mean you can have any. Good luck and finish quickly!” she said cheerfully before promptly slamming the door shut.

Derek was now hanging parallel with the floor and felt the wires he clung to for dear life begin to break. He tried reaching for the doorknob as he heard the whirring grow louder before the wires broke off and he was violently sucked into the expanding hole.

The black hole grew at an exponential rate, swallowing the building, the entire town, the country, and then the planet in a matter of minutes. Two astronauts in a space station watched in horror as they saw the Earth be consumed right before their eyes. After a brief silence from astonishment, one said to the other, “Lord have mercy, this is going to be terrible for the stock market!”