Memorandum:
Candidates wishing to be taken seriously at this firm will not neglect to sign all legal documents and financial instruments in blood. Blood of the incorrect origin and dweomer has unpleasant consequences vis-à-vis incompatible documents, and candidates will sign in unauthorized fluids at their peril.
Beyond performing legally and sidereally binding signatures, best practice for elevation is scrupulous attention to the written word. This firm has standards for all operational documents compiled from two hundred years' experience with the necessary and contingent factors in the success of our operations. The manual of standards details the formatting, mnemonic sequencing, duplication, distribution, retention, conditions and methods of disposal of all written materials in any media. Verba volant, scripta manent.
Candidates may become intimate with some of the knottier nested contingencies in the standard by reformatting their C.V. prior to submission to the directing body. In compliance to commands from beyond the wall of sleep, we no longer call these documents 'resumes' or 'vitae,' but rather 'concordations.' They must be six pages, circular-spaced, with the approopriate sectional diacritics.
Concordations exceeding six pages are, by definition, no longer concordations. Any candidate, parner, or post-morlock who so far forgets themselves as to wantonly inflict category errors may be found in violation of causality by a Post-Morlock Resources officer.
First offenders must take a refresher course on the learning slab.
Second offenders are eligible for translation to departments in cosmoi tangent to our own, where different topologies may apply. This is not a demotion but a chance to learn about topology from the inside out. Undergoing translation also provides first-hand experience with this firm's contractual partners and the many intermediating agents that all our operations depend on. Keeping our partners and their agents happy is in the best interests of all concerned.
Third offenders will to have always been going to be degraded from the status of "being" to that of "text", reformatted to meet concordation topology, if possible; the resulting concordation will be filed at this facility for no fewer than five years and no more than 13, after which the concordation will go its eternal rest with all our other old documents in the caverns under Lexington, Kentucky.
(Third violators whose topologies cannot be rendered in concordation format in fewer than 7.5 hours will be deleted before any overtime hours accrue. At that point the supervising manager will mark the violator's dosier as MISFORMATTED and retroactively subtract the processing costs from all past earnings.
The dearly deleted will be honored with twenty-one overwritings of random digits onto the disc blocks previously holding the file. That's this firm's Personal Privacy Protection Promise.)
Two Grey Men sit in the partners' club, the penthouse suite of the offices at ground level. The sun has set, the air of the upper half of the club shell-pink with indirect sunlight trapped in evenly diffused smoke. The hues of daylight seep away by the minute, and every surface and shadow grows massive with indigo twilight effulgence. The Day is that part of the cosmos nuzzled close around a star: The immensity of the world of day is invisible on the scale of the Night, and so at night the old world comes into its own.
"Not going to lie to you, Tillinghast, seeing their faces when they realize they shouldn't have started with their own damn blood, three, four, one time seven new junior execs, year after year! Oh... mercy."