Two secretaries sat at their desks side by side typing in a desultory fashion, at nine A.M. there was little work to do. Both of them wore nearly identical dark blouses and knee length charcoal gray skirts, blond hair tied back severely and pearl earrings in their ears, gold necklaces around their necks. They could be sisters, no, carbon copies churned out of the same factory; but they were neither and none. In fact one had just graduated with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, possessed of an IQ through the roof she was from Main and dreamed of much bigger things as soon as she got a little money socked away.

The other, the same age, had barely graduated high school, a little stupid she grew up in a group home located inside a trailer park, just outside of the city, and had never dreamed of having a job which paid this good. Both of them sleep around with the upper management in order to ensure they kept their jobs and got regular bonuses.

One would quit within a year as she moved into a big mansion on the arm of a man who would croak ten years later leaving a fortune to the Executor she would screw daily so as to maintain a lifestyle to which she had by then become accustomed.

The second would toil away in the same secretarial job for the next twenty years, before retiring to live a comfortable but not glamorous middle age. Five years after her lonely death in an old folks home, her cousin would discover the life altering philosophical examination of society's darkest mysteries which the girl had penned on lonely nights after screwing the boss to keep a job she loathed; and upon publishing it in her own name she would reap the benefits of book deals and a TV movie. Living happily after-someone-else's-labors with the handsome man she married.

A third secretary bustled in, steaming cups of coffee from the nice place a block over held in her manicured hands. She was dressed the same as the other two but, five years older her hair was a little longer, her skirt a bit shorter, and her clothes and jewelry although also cheap knockoffs of a name brand, were slightly more expensive versions of the cheap knockoffs the other two wore.

All excited she caught her sister's attentions with an exclamation of surprise. 'Guess what?'

'No! Tell us!' The first one exclaimed. Office gossip was the sword of the drone, and the shield as well. Both weapon and armor it could defend from sudden job cuts and incise a blazing path to the top of whatever particular ladder they were climbing at any given moment. Cooperation just made it easier until it was time to conk your friend over the head, bend her over a desk, lift her skirt up high, and screw them hard. Sometimes literally.