This is the first Ogden story I ever wrote for my department. You can read about why I did this here.

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It was October, and the folks on the seventh floor of JamsCorp’s building 223 knew what that meant. For the past several years, there had been sightings of a non-corporeal entity, in the shape of a man in a business suit carrying a briefcase, floating through the cubicles in the early evenings of the fall. Seventh floor employees feared more sightings this year.

 

Old-timers on the floor (JamsCorpers who had been there for more than ten years) recognized the account given of this apparition to be a fairly good description of a man who left for work one Thursday evening and never was seen in the Demand Chain Department again.  This Thursday was the thirteenth of October 1998. The man’s name was Mortimor Scarneycreelpy.  

 

And the next day, on his computer monitor, his coworkers found the ominous message:

 

“The Redbrick Detail database has been updated with September data.”

 

It gave some of  Ogden’s coworkers chills to look at the message. This meant that the dreaded data was ready for querying.