02-07-24
I was in a museum late in the afternoon, where I was supposed to meet with an old female coworker (who does not exist, I'll call her Anne). She had just gotten a job there somewhat recently in the Egyptian history section, and she invited me for a tour and to spend more time together after her shift ended.
As I entered I saw a scrap of paper on the floor in a section far away from where I was headed to (maybe the modern architecture exhibit?). I thought little of it and kept walking towards the Egyptian history section. Once I got there, I immediately saw Anne walking around and we greeted each other. She was different from the last time I saw her, with her hair being vastly shorter than before. It looked great on her, I thought.
We walked around with her telling me about how she loves the job and explaining a lot of details of the artifacts she works with and how they have to be preserved and maintained. Her favorite being one of the ancient Book Of The Dead papers. In between her explanations, we caught up since we hadn’t seen each other in over two years. Eventually, the museum was approaching its closing time, so we made our way to the main entrance to the museum.
As we walked, we talked about what we were going to do for the rest of the evening. She seemed extremely excited, and wanted to go eat a lot of food (the type of food was yet to be determined). As cute as I found her excitement, I was not exactly excited for this plan since I had been trying to cut back on eating. Still, her excitement for this won over that and I thought ‘I can at least sit with her and we can talk longer’.
Right before we left, Anne was stopped by her manager, an older woman in her 40s. It turns out an artifact that was supposed to be under Anne's care turned up just lying about on the floor on the other side of the museum. It was that scrap of paper I saw earlier in the day. Anne had no explanation for how this happened, so the manager gave her a stern lecture there on the spot about being more vigilant over the items she was responsible for. I felt bad for her, as there was not much I could do to help. 'Perhaps I could have prevented this if I investigated the paper or gone to throw it away,' I thought.
Eventually the lecture ended, and the manager pointed out that the museum staff are holding a small dinner event nearby, and that Anne could bring one other guest with her. This cheered her back up as the event solved the issue of us not having a place to eat picked out. Though she said we could head over to another restaurant after the event ended, which made my stomach immediately feel overburdened before even looking at any food. Despite this feeling, I thought she looked very cute at how excited she was for this, so I went along with it. The event started and we took our seats at a table next to her manager since it was the only spot left. Only just now did it occur to me how odd it was for Anne to be working here since she was supposed to be working another job under a tight contract. Upon thinking this, I woke up.