"Peter! Get the hell in here!"
Peter Johnson looked up from his cubicle. "Aw, I wonder what the dragon lady wants now," he said as he walked past his cubicle neighbor's desk.
"From the tone of her voice, I'm guessing she wants your balls on the end of a sharp stick," his neighbor, Roger, joked.
Peter threw him an annoyed look. "Very funny. If I'm not back in an hour, you'd better call the police."
"You got it, bud."
"Peter!" Veronica's voice boomed from her office. "In here! Now!"
Peter headed towards his supervisor's office, though it was the last place that he wanted to be. He had gotten his customer service job at Globo Vision Cable over a year ago, and he had not once seen Veronica in a good mood. It was even worse for him since he had once made the mistake of calling her Ronnie. He and his co-workers had all sorts of nicknames for her; Dragon Lady, Beelze-Babe and the Castrator were just a few of them. She was actually pretty hot looking for a women in her mid thirties, but her personality was pure B-I-T-C-H.
Peter peeked his head into the doorway, hoping that it wouldn't get bitten off. "You wanted to see me, Veronica?"
"Of course I wanted to see you! Do you think I enjoy yelling for no reason?"
Peter decided that it would be best to keep his answer to himself. "What did you want?"
"The storm has been knocking down tree branches around town and our signal just went out. I think that a branch may have fallen onto our satellite dish on the edge of town and knocked it out."
Pete didn't know what any of this had to do with him, besides a tidal wave of calls from cable starved customers. "And you called me in here because... why?"
"Because, Peter," Veronica said, "I need you to drive out there and see if you can get the signal back."
"What?! I'm customer service. You want a technician to fix something like that. Besides, it's practically hurricane weather out there. Nobody's going to climb up to the dish!"
"Well, I know that you went to school for that technical crap..."
"Computer repair," Peter corrected her.
"And I would think that you'd rather get rained on a little instead of hearing all our customers yelling in your ear all night about how they can't order their pay-per-view porn."
Pete hated to admit it, but Veronica was probably right. It was prime time right now and he could already hear the phones ringing off the hook out on the floor. The last thing he wanted to do was hear every viewer in town demanding a refund. Pete sighed as he realized it was a no-win situation. "What exactly do I have to do?"
"Just drive out to the dish and check it out. If you see something wrong, fix it. And to show you how thankful I am, if you can get the signal back on, you can have the rest of the night off."
"And if I can't, I get to come back here sopping wet and listen to the customers bitch, right?"
"That's what we managers like to call incentive to achieve," Veronica said with a devilish grin. "Just fix the damn dish and you're home free."
Peter could see the rain coming down in sheets outside, but there wasn't really much of a choice. "Okay, I'll do it," he said, "but I'm taking one of the tech's vans."
"I don't care. Just get that signal back." Veronica tossed a set of keys to Peter.
Peter slipped out the building's back door and ran through the rain to the only tech van still on the lot. His clothes were already already soaked after a ten second run to the van. He started up the van and left the parking lot. He headed out towards the edge of town, but he stopped at the Whatta Burger and picked up a combo meal before he went to the dish site.
He had to get out and unlock the gate of the fence surrounding the massive satellite dish the cable company used. There were no lights around the dish, but when the lightning flashed, he could make out the shape of something sitting in the dish from the van. He sat in the van and finished his burger before he grabbed a flashlight, got out and approached the dish's ladder. At least when he was directly under the bowl of the dish, he wasn't getting quite as wet.
He started his way up the ladder and his feet slipped on the wet rungs several times before he reached the hatch onto the dish. Then he held onto the ladder tightly with one arm and tossed the hatch open, only to have water from the dish pour down on him. He clambered up onto the surface of the dish and slid a little as a strong gust of wind blew past him. As he felt the freezing rain pelt him, he gritted his teeth and pulled the flashlight out of his pocket. He pointed the beam at the shape on the dish and found that it was a deflated kiddy swimming pool. "Wind must've blown it up here," he said to himself. He carefully moved over to the deflated pile of plastic and saw the little cartoon characters printed on the side of the pool. "Fucking Yu-Gi-Oh... I hate that show." He gripped the plastic and swung it out over the edge of the dish. "Mission complete, Mister Johnson," he joked, "Let's head home and take a nice hot shower." Peter slowly made his way back towards the hatch.
Just before he reached the hole, the wind gusted again and caught him, blowing him across the smooth, slick with rain surface of the dish. He almost fell on his ass, but grabbed on to the spire in the center of the dish just in time. "Next time Veronica has a special job for me," he said as he used the spire to steady himself, "I'm going to tell her she can kiss my aaaaaAAAAAAAAARRRRGGGGGGHHHH!"
Lightning flashed and struck the spire Peter was gripping. An incredibly bright white light blinded him and the electricity burnt through his body, feeling like a thousand red hot pins.
The lightning, which only lasted a split second, disappeared and so did Peter. All that was left was a melted flashlight and a stream of smoke coming off of the dish's spire.
******************************
Back at Globo Vision, the cable came back on in Veronica's office.
"Hmmph, maybe Peter isn't a total fuck up after all..."
******************************
"Uuuuuggghhh..." Peter moaned. "That sucked."
Peter opened his eyes to see that it was bright out. Very bright. Probably past noon, judging from the sun. He looked around him and saw that he was no longer at the dish site. He was lying in an alley way, just off of a busy street. "What the hell happened to me," he said as he sat up. He patted himself down as he looked himself over. "No broken bones. no unsightly electricity burns. Hmmm. I seem to be fine. Which is odd, considering the last thing I remember is straight lining a gigawatt of electricity through my body..." He was still wearing the same clothes from last night, but they too, were dry and undamaged. He climbed to his feet and walked out of the alley. Looking up and down the street, he realized that he didn't recognize a single building on it. "Where am I?"
Just then he saw a trolley car go cross the intersection a couple blocks away. It took a couple seconds for it to click. "San Francisco? How did I end up in San Francisco?" He pinched himself to make sure that he wasn't dreaming. "Ow! Well, I'm not dreaming. I'm not sure if that's good or not. Maybe I'm in a coma..." He started walking down the street as he tried to make sense of his current situation. "Wait a second! Maybe this is all after the night up on the dish. Maybe I went out drinking last night, got totally wasted and this is just a result of the black out..." He grinned as another thought hit him. "Ha! Maybe I got laid."
An elderly couple steered clear of Peter as they watched him talk to himself as he walked down the sidewalk.
