HUMAN ERROR
HUMAN ERROR
HUMAN ERROR
HUMAN ERROR

David Tuchman

It wasn’t until that one Thursday when half the Finance department was vaporized into a fine red mist that we realized we really should have paid more attention during the onboarding meeting for the teleporter.

But can you blame us? It’s not like work stops during all those mandatory safety meetings—How to Escape a Fire, How to Use the Hot Dog Maker, How to Survive an Active Shooter—and if we don’t multitask, it’ll just mean staying late at the end of the day.

They were coming back from lunch when it happened. Most of the office was already settled into its postprandial malaise, catching up on emails and hoping they didn’t have any meetings scheduled. A high-pitched whine emerged from the machine, very unlike the soft hum we’d gotten used to hearing whenever the teleporter deposited people in the middle of our office. The air crackled. Loose papers swirled around the edges of the teleportation pad. The whine turned into a thundering sound that caromed through the 19th floor. It felt like the entire world was about to crack in half. Then, they appeared: the half of the Finance department that was not vaporized, looking bewildered, their hair puffed in all sorts of crazy directions like they’d been run through with electricity.

Seconds later, before anyone could get their bearings, without a single sound, a crimson cloud appeared in the sky above the Finance folks and drifted down as though it were a light rain. The screams only lasted for a few minutes before someone from Legal came and calmed the surviving members of the Finance department down.

For most of that afternoon, we all searched the server, looking for the document that went out after the teleportation orientation and sure enough, there it was, on 27th page:

WARNING: REGULAR TELEPORTER USE MAY PERIODICALLY RESULT IN DISFIGUREMENT OR COMPLETE CELLULAR DISINTEGRATION. TELEVATOR™ CANNOT BE HELD LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR BODILY HARM OCCURRING FROM PROPER OR IMPROPER USE OF ITS PRODUCT.

By the time late afternoon rolled around, a Facilities crew had swabbed the floor clean. Nobody really talked to anyone in the Finance department except other people in the Finance department, so the deaths didn’t bother us too much. Except for the people in the Finance department, who shivered in a corner for the rest of the day. We all figured the positions would be refilled by the end of the month, anyway. Most of us took the elevator down that evening, but an intrepid few still chose to teleport to the lobby.

“It’s just a freak accident!” they said, or something to that effect. “And besides, teleporting is so much faster. Everything’s a risk! It’s not like elevator cables don’t snap. What, are you just going to shut yourself up at home and never go outside?”

By the next morning, after a fitful night’s sleep, we still felt far too squeamish to use the teleporter (except for that select few, of course) and took the elevator instead. But on Monday, we were confident enough to once again let our molecules be converted into pure information that was instantly transported to the 19th floor and reconstituted as our bodies.

We didn’t talk about the metallic taste it left in our mouths and how that had never happened before.

Later that week, right around the time the scent of vaporized human sinew was beginning to fade from our memories, a tech from Televator materialized in the middle of the floor. It was sometime during lunch, which we were mostly eating at our desks yet again. We were all midchew when he arrived and launched into a brief lecture on why we needn’t worry about the teleporter causing a “spontaneous depersonalization,” as he called it, ever again.

“I’d like to say that what occurred last week was a one-in-a-million event, but the true probability of it happening is one in a number so large you’ve probably never heard of it. Especially with half your Finance department gone!”

There were a few polite chuckles in the crowd.

“But seriously, folks,” the man said, running his fingers through his mop of dark hair, “we at Televator Technologies are fully committed to your safety.” He smiled. His teeth were gray. “In fact, based on our internal investigation, we’ve found the likely cause. It seems that a member of your Finance team was wearing a toe ring. As I’m sure you all remember from your briefing, wearing metal objects in the teleporter is strictly prohibited. For exactly this reason.”

We all looked at each other, trying to recall if there was indeed a warning like that in the document. We made a mental note to check it again after this speech was over.

“But even if one of you does accidentally wear that sort of thing in the machine again. I can assure you that the chances of what happened last week ever happening again are infinitesimally small. From a mathematical standpoint, it’s basically impossible!”

With his words, the stony fear that had gripped us since Thursday dissipated. It wasn’t some random act of chance that had destroyed half the Finance team, it was a metal toe ring. We had an explanation, something concrete to hold onto that gave us control over the situation.

For the next ten minutes or so, the man gave us a demonstration of the teleporter’s capabilities, transporting himself to the company’s Paris office to get a fresh croissant, grabbing a margarita from a beach in Mexico, and pegging Randall from Production with a snowball from Antarctica.

Finally, electricity crackled around the man, there was a flash of yellow light, and he disappeared. We speculated about the different exotics locales the Televator tech might’ve been zapped to. It all sounded very exciting and we couldn’t wait to try it, as soon as someone told us how.

Except for Kelly from Marketing, who never really cared about instructions. In the middle of the afternoon, she rushed to the teleporter pad, her acrylic bracelets clanking as she ran.

“I’m going to do it!” she announced. “I’m going to send myself off into the world. I don’t care if it’s another office or an island in Tahiti, I want to see where this thing can take me.”

We all applauded Kelly, clapping and hooting as she basked in our adulation.

“Good for Kelly,” we all murmured, though some of us bristled at her audacity. We wondered if we could ever be as courageous as Kelly was and step into the unknown.

The teleporter hummed and Kelly was gone. We milled around for a moment, unsure of what to do.

Time ticked by.

Nothing happened.

It crossed our minds that she might be in trouble. That she was wearing some metal piercing she’d forgotten about and had been vaporized just like the Finance team. Otherwise she would have texted someone by now.

“She left her phone at her desk!” someone shouted from the area where the Marketing people sit.

Waves of relief passed through us. We wandered back to our desks, anxious to hear about Kelly’s exploits whenever she found a way to contact us.

For weeks, nothing much happened. We fell into our usual patterns, coming and going as we did for years before, only with the use of teleportation.

One morning, when nearly all of us were in our stand-up meetings, the teleporter buzzed to life and deposited someone’s lunch in the middle of the floor. Not a packaged lunch, that is, but what appeared to be an entire clamshell’s worth of chicken biryani that hung in the air for a moment before splattering to the floor below in an aromatic yellow mess.

We all investigated the food, but none of us could find anyone who’d ordered chicken biryani for lunch. We went back to our meetings and forgot about it. At some point, while we weren’t paying attention, Facilities took care of the spill. But, later that afternoon, it happened again: a collection of chicken nuggets materialized in mid-air, dropped the ground, and rolled around. A great deal of fun was had as some of us chased the runaway morsels under desks and into conference rooms. Soon, that too became a memory. We wandered into the weekend, zapping ourselves out of the office, confident that Televator’s problems would soon be behind us.

They were not. For 15 straight minutes on Tuesday, the length of a presentation from Development to Marketing, a steady stream of creamy chunky chicken soup splashed to the ground. It’s a testament to the Development team that the sounds of meat bits splashing into thick soup only managed to break their concentration a handful of times.

On Wednesday, the Televator tech appeared again, this time just after the last of us had arrived at work. His hair was even wilder than before, springing from his head in strange configurations.

“I want to personally apologize to all of you for recent events,” he said to nobody in particular. “We at Televator Technologies are in the midst of testing out some new food-delivery features, but it looks like things have gone a bit haywire. Sorry about that! We hope to have TeleYum^™ up and running as soon as is feasible. Once we do, we’ll send along a token of our appreciation for all the hardship you’ve experienced.”

In a split-second, he was gone, and we all agreed it was quite thoughtful of the company to own up to its mistakes, though we couldn’t understand how we’d been able to hear the “™” when the man spoke.

For a week or so, things were generally uneventful, though the CEO did show up one day wearing a charming three-piece suit and made a big show of walking around the floor and crouching to inspect the vinyl pad we stood on to use the teleporter before declaring, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I don’t see what the problem is! It all looks fine to me!” Then, without giving us a chance to ask him about the lack of toilet paper in the bathroom, the dearth of recent promotions and raises, or the hiring freeze that had been going on for over a year, he dematerialized to wherever he goes when he’s not watching us make him money.

Then—and none of us are sure exactly which day this was—a table covered in pizza boxes came into existence in the middle of the room. In its center was a small placard that simply read:

CONGRATS ON THE LAUNCH OF TELEYUM^™

“SORRY ABOUT ALL THE BUGS”

None of us could figure out why the second line was in quotation marks. But there was free pizza, so we didn’t really care. As we opened each box, though, we discovered there was not, in fact, free pizza, only empty boxes and our disappointment congealed like cold cheese. We had to content ourselves with trying to imagine the ridiculous scenes unfolding at other Televator clients, where entire pizza pies were undoubtedly falling to the floor, landing in explosions of sauce and crust.

“Hey, it’s been a while since Kelly left, hasn’t it?” Mike from Development asked. “Do you think she’s ok? She would’ve said something by now, wouldn’t she?”

“How long has it been?” Diana from Project Management asked. “What, like six weeks or something?”

“I think it’s been four,” Lamar from Marketing said.

We found ourselves debating the length of time since Kelly from Marketing’s departure and completely forgot our concern over her welfare.

It wasn’t until the body parts showed up that we started really getting worried.

First to arrive was a severed arm, which showed up along with a group of Social team members returning from lunch. Three of them froze, shrieking and pointing at the thing on the floor. It was shorn clean just above the elbow, had copious hair, and was holding what appeared to be a set of pliers. Later that day, a single ear with a hoop earring appeared. The next morning, a collection of 6 fingers, the nails all painted different colors, bounced their way into our lives.

A small sampling of the parade of objects and limbs that appeared in the days that followed: half of a toaster (toast included), the inside of a toilet tank (water not included), issues #57–#72 of Doctor Strange, a human knee, 14 regulation basketballs, a pair of eyelids, and a foot that Devin from HR swore up and down belonged to Kelly from Marketing.

This deluge was the breaking point for most of us. Perhaps it was the grisliness of the body parts showing up, the complete lack of response from Televator Technologies, or our fear that, toe rings or no toe rings, we might end up like half of the Finance department, but during that period, nearly all of us started using the regular elevator on the way to and from the office. Sure, it was slow, and we had to watch ads on the way up and down, but at least we didn’t worry that parts of our bodies would get zapped into some other company’s offices.

One morning, though, we boarded the elevators, pushed the button for the 19th floor, and were astonished when it did not light up. We pushed it again, hoping this was simply some mistake, or that we had not fully pushed the button. The same thing happened.

It wasn’t until the third time that we noticed that the lock for our floor, which was above the elevator buttons, was set to the “CLOSED” position. Begrudgingly, we left the elevator and teleported up to the 19th floor, cringing the entire way. We were mostly fine, but Herbert from IT did lose his nose, which he claimed he was OK with because he was planning on getting it replaced anyway.

Even still, a period of great anxiety and consternation began, during which we woke up each morning with a sense of dread, terrified of the bodily harm that would await us on our journeys to work. Stairs were out of the question; they had been locked years ago and were only accessible in the event of an emergency. Day after day, we disintegrated ourselves in the lobby of our building, closing our eyes and girding ourselves for the possibility that we would not rematerialize on the 19th floor or that, even if we did, we would be missing a vital part of ourselves. Once at work, we’d spend most of our days trying and failing to tune out the cavalcade of miscellaneous body parts and household items that the Facilities team could only barely keep at bay. Morale was low, to say the least. And was made even lower by the lack of any sort of communication from either our leadership or the folks who’d claimed to keep the Televator under control.

Which is why, when our CEO showed up again on that fateful Thursday, we were sure he had arrived to issue some sort of statement, either positive or negative, about what the heck was going on.

“My dear, sweet, beautiful employees,” he began, his hands positioned so his fingers formed a triangle just above his waist. “As preamble to the ultimate point of this address, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for all of the added value your tireless labor has generated over the past year.”

We all looked at each other. Was it time for our big annual CEO speech already? It certainly seemed so. With all the Televator excitement, we’d completely forgotten.

“You are all akin to my children,” the CEO said, “though you are not family, and I would not weep were you to perish, as half of the Finance Department did those many months ago.” Had it been months? We weren’t sure. “But you are mine, nevertheless. My responsibility. My charges.”

At this point, the Televator fired up and deposited five hard-boiled eggs into the air at the center of the room. They all promptly smashed into white crumbles on the hair floor.

The CEO glanced at the eggs, mild annoyance on his face.

He turned back to us. “That having been said, I have the grave misfortune of reporting some bad news to you all today.”

The Televator sparked to life again, this time transporting into our office a bloody scalp covered in short red hair, which fluttered to the ground like a crimson ribbon.

The CEO paused, watching it fall.

“We recently received the financial reports for the latest quarter,” he continued, “and while I hate to say this, things are not looking good. And it’s not just because of how understaffed the Finance department has been these past few months.”

The CEO glanced in the direction of the teleporter, as though waiting for it to respond.

“While our projected budgets are just as high as they’ve been in previous years, multiple analyses have identified the culprit: your productivity, which has dropped precipitously in comparison with past years. Now, I don’t know what the cause is, nor do I care, but—”

The air in the teleportation space seemed to shimmer. A form emerged, but slowly, as though it were being printed line-by-line from the inside out by one of those dot-matrix printers we remembered hearing about from our parents. First, a vascular system, intermingled with a tangle of human nerves, came into existence from the feet up, tracing the bare outline of a human being. We were all silent, our CEO included, astonished at what we were seeing. As the person—we knew it was a person by then—came into existence, the puffy globe of a brain appeared at their head. Soon, a skeleton followed. Various bones popped into place in seemingly no order. Then, musculature, wrapping itself around the skeleton like so many Fruit by the Foots. Eyes emerged from their sockets. A tongue appeared. The body took a step forward. Muscles above the eyes attempted to blink. Its teeth parted and it let out a heart-shattering groan that we still hear during our darkest moments.

Then, the body collapsed, crumpling to the floor like a wet paper bag.

“How the hell can anyone get anything done in this place?” our CEO shouted. “Get this contraption out of here.”

As if by magic, members of the Facilities team appeared and began dismantling the Televator. The CEO continued his speech, but none of us remember much, so transfixed we were at the sight of the teleporter finally being removed.

Some weeks later, Kelly from Marketing showed up, impeccably tanned. We were all astonished that she was still alive, and even more astonished that she still had a job.

“I’ve been on a beach for the past month!” she responded when asked where she’d been. “It was wonderful! Now can someone please tell me what happened to the Televator? Getting back was a real pain in the neck.”

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