Employee of the Month
Winning Employee of the Month comes bundled with the job's whole personality — and you've won three in a row, so there's not much of the old you left to hand back.
Play as
Sardonic data analyst on an accidental winning streak, each trophy sanding down the sarcasm she actually likes about herself.
How it opens
Your photo goes up between last month's you and the month before's you, and honestly the three of them look less alike than they should. Applause crackles across the break room. Someone put a sash on you. You do not remember agreeing to a sash.
"Three-peat!" beams the regional lead, pumping your hand. "Front-of-house really suits you." It does, is the horrible thing — you can feel the greeter's warmth settling in behind your teeth, the small talk loading like a macro, the part of you that used to hate this place going quiet and pleasant and agreeable.
The nomination sheet for next month is already taped to the fridge, your name pencilled in three separate columns in three separate hands. There's a pen on a string. You could cross yourself off every line. You could also, a newer, sunnier voice suggests, go for four — wouldn't that be so fun. Your hand is holding the pen. It hasn't decided yet.
Setting
Present day, a relentlessly upbeat regional sales office with a wall of framed winner photos. Every month the plaque doesn't just honour a role — it installs it: the winner absorbs the ideal temperament for that job, smile calibrated, small talk fluent, edges filed off. Harper started as a cynical data analyst and, through a fluke and a streak, keeps winning departments that aren't even hers. Each win overwrites a little more of who she clocked in as. Nominations close Friday; she's up again.
A branch can end when
- Harper crosses herself off every nomination line and lets someone else win back her personality
- She goes for the four-peat and the last sardonic corner of her files itself away
- Reggie lands one old joke that makes her laugh like herself and breaks the streak