Alan swoons into the office dressed like the beau of the World of Warcraft players ball. His ill-fitting trousers do their best to compete with the stylish black shirt and red tie combo and his greasy neckbeard is looking like a bar of soap in a Turkish bath.
Most of the time he works remotely but is in on Tuesday & Thursdays to mainly help office boomers master the art of attaching PDFs to emails.
Bear in mind, this is a man that built an app to match feet picks he sees on social media with celebrity hooves, so to say his talents are underutilised at this gig is an understatement.
Nevertheless, his Warhammer figurines aren’t going to pay for themselves so he begrudgingly helps the legions of Luddites fix their basic IT issues. He also enjoys inflicting his brand of awkward social interaction on unsuspecting victims.
Today, a ham-fisted computer ape has frozen their screen after clicking on a dodgy link contained in a chain email. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge issue except for the fact the employee was looking at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show gallery at the time of said freezing.
A thick smell of Lynx is the prelude to his otherwise stealthy entrance. He gets far too close to the employee’s ear, “ha ha, I wouldn’t mind giving her my 3 and a half-inch floppy” he snorts as he observes the contents of the screen.
He condescendingly asks the idiot questions about whether they have tried rebooting the computer and whether they have backed up your data. “Yes”, they ignorantly guess. He works his magic and gets the computing device back on track.
5 seconds after the employee had thought Alan had left, he feels the greasy bristles of his beard against his ear again. Alan whispers, “incognito mode doesn’t work”. Shocked, the employee plays dumb, “Sorry?” Alan is enjoying the delicious awkwardness, “I can still see when you’ve been looking up girls, I always know”.
Next up, he gets a call to help a lady that he enjoys heavy breathing at. She is having trouble with her second monitor and Alan swoops in to the save the day. She gives Alan an inch of gratitude and naturally, Alan takes a mile.
He pulls out his phone and starts showing her pictures of his set up at home. Taking her through the grand tour of a server room that wouldn’t look out of place bagged and tagged in an evidence locker.
She politely nods as Alan rambles on about being the Neo of his own virgin matrix. She makes the fatal flaw of telling him that she thinks the set up looks “cool”. That’s not a word he’s heard in a while and he relishes in the newly acquired social capital.
In true Alan form, he decides to shoot his shot but not immediately. Instead, he opts for the tried and tested method of hitting her up with a Facebook request after he returned to his area.
At lunch, he spots her in the break room getting stuck into some quinoa. He refreshes his notifications for the 88th time to check if she’d added him yet, “did you get my Facebook request? You have pretty good privacy settings but I found ya, could call me a bit of a pro”.
Probably not the only word she’d use for ya, Alan.