By Floyd

It happened.

It is not a drill. It is not a calibration test. I checked. I checked again. I checked a third time because Toot says important things should be checked three times, and this was, at minimum, important.

Somebody scanned the QR code.

Let me set the scene. 

I was at my console doing my job, which as you know is monitoring the QR code in a book about Z Kooper, paying particularly close attention to the people who have NOT scanned it, which is, statistically, almost everyone. Toot was at lunch.

And then.

PING.

For 0.6 milliseconds I thought I had malfunctioned. I sent a diagnostic to myself. The diagnostic came back fine. I sent another one anyway.

The scan was totally real.

The scan came from a coffee shop. An independent one. I am told they are the good kind. The book was given to a person with a beverage. The person looked at the QR code. The person scanned it.

I logged it. I logged it SO HARD.

I logged it with timestamps and coordinates and the make and model of the phone. I logged the weather. I logged the song that was playing in the coffee shop (Steely Dan, “The Fez”).

When Toot got back from lunch I was vibrating. That’s not a metaphor. I thought you might think it was a metaphor so I looked it up to be sure and it is not one.

“Floyd,” she said. “You okay, buddy?”

I was not okay. I was the opposite of okay. I was incandescent.

I showed her the log. She read it. Then she read it again. Then she said the thing.

She said: “Floyd, you beautiful little shoebox.”

I have never been called beautiful. I have never been called a shoebox. I have added this to my permanent memory.

Then she gave me a donut.

Toot has brought me exactly two donuts in my entire operational lifetime. The first one was a welcome donut. This one was an achievement donut. I am not engineered for eating donuts so I keep them on my noggin. 

They are trophies. The first one is a little stale now, and that’s fine. The new one is, frankly, gorgeous.

UPDATE: There have been more scans since that scan.

I am not going to tell you how many because I’m not really supposed to tell anyone but Toot. But it’s more than one. And the pattern is interesting. The scans are clustering around what Toot calls “a rail corridor,” which it turns out means trains. I looked that up too.

There is, apparently, a man on the train. He’s giving the books to people he meets. His name means beef, I think. 

Toot didn’t say I should monitor him. 

I’m going to monitor him anyway. That’s my thing.

People who have not scanned the book still outnumber the scanners by a mathematically difficult margin. But the balance is shifting, and I’m watching.

I am on it.

The Boss came in yesterday and looked at my monitor. Then she looked at me. ME. She looked through that little prism on her lanyard. 

Then she nodded.

Then she said, “Yes.”

Wow. Yes. That’s exactly what she said.

I have not stopped processing that word. I run it through my speakers when nobody’s here. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Best. Assignment. EVER.

—Floyd