[...] Jay Landauer feels absently at his face. Every love story is a ghost story. Ryne Hobtratschk turns a page. [...]

[...] Not to mention once when in a burst of absurd half-drunken freshman hubris he'd accepted a massive assignment that involved auditing a Russian Existential and Absurdist Literature class and writing the papers for a wealthy and tormented son of a Rhode Island State Supreme Court justice who was actually enrolled in the class and discovering that not only all the reading and critical background but the seminar itself was actually held in Russian, which David Wallace did not know or speak one garbled syllable of, and had to sit there with an enormous rigid grin, transcribing the phonetic versions of whatever unearthly and incredibly rapid sounds were being made by everyone else in the room every Tuesday and Thursday from 9:00 to 10:30 for three weeks before he was able to think of a plausible excuse and backed out of the arrangement. Leaving the client--who was still enrolled-with his own very special sort of existential dilemma. [...]

Lane Dean Jr. [...] did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf as instructed in orientation the previous month. Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once except to put the completed files and memos in the two Out trays side by side up in the top tier of trays where the cart boys could get them when they came by. After just an hour the beach was a winter beach, cold and gray and the dead kelp like the hair of the drowned, and it stayed that way despite all attempts. [...]

[...] He had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor. Never before in his life up to now had he once thought of suicide. He was doing a return at the same time he fought with his mind, with the sin and affront of even the passing thought. [...]

[...] He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn't already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat and he looked quickly around to see if any of the examiners around him had heard it or were looking at him. [...]

[...] To the medicine cabinet's mirror in the home's bathroom, for instance, where he could not help but reread and internalize them as he tended to personal grooming, were taped inspiration mxims such as:

'NO BIRD SOARS TOO HIGH, IF HE SOARS WITH HIS OWN WINGS--BLAKE'

'IF WE ABDICATE OUR INITIATIVE, WE BECOME PASSIVE--RECEPTIVE VICTIMS OF ON-COMING CIRCUMSTANCES--BEECHER FOUNDATION'

'DARE TO ACHIEVE!--NAPOLEON HILL'

[...] 'ghost conflation' problem for employees with identical names had been recognized as early as December 1984--thanks mainly to a hideous mess involving two separate Mary A. Taylors at the Southeast Regional Service Center in Atlanta--and Technical Branch programmers were already in the process of inserting a BLOCK and RESET sub-subroutine that overrode the GO TO subroutine for the thirty-two most common surnames in the United States: viz., Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, & c. But Wallace was, according to 1980 US Census figures, only the 104th most common American surname, way down the list between Sullivan and Cole; and any override of GO TO that countenanced more than thirty-two surnames ran a statistically significant risk of reintroducing the original 'ghost redundancy' problem. In short, the name David F. Wallace fell in that statistical middle area where the original debugging's consequent 'ghost conflation' bug could still cause significant problems and woe, especially for any employee too new to understand why or whence these accusations of everything from contractual fraud and 'impersonation of an immersive' [...]

[...] It was not just that at almost sixteen Stecyk was 5'1" and 105 pounds soaking wet, which he was (soaking wet) when the boys in his PE class's shower all urinated on him after knocking him to the tile floor, which ritual they called a Stecyk special [...]

'[...] The sort of guy who comes to your party and you get him drunk enough to pass out by nine and put him in the Rescue Rangers minibus and strip off everything but his shoes and socks and leave him propped up on a bus stop bench in East St. Louis and he'll not only survive somehow but the next night he'll be back at the Jaegerschnitzel punching you in the shoulder and saying Good One like you'd just given him a hotfoot, desperate to be one of the guys.'

[...] It's interesting that the two false administrative styles--the tyrant and the fake friend--are also the two main stereotypes that books and television shows and comic stripes present administrators as. One suspects, in fact, that the mental picture the insecure administrator erects inside himself is based partly on these pop culture stereotypes.