It’s been forty minutes since Mr. Schranz down-dressed me in front of the whole tenth floor. I was embarrassed to the point of tears, somehow driven to my knees, but I didn’t cry. Even if it was just out of spite. I didn’t want to give the little troll-man the satisfaction. I was already naked and humiliated, that should be enough for anyone.
‘Down-dressed’, what an awful term for someone in my position.
I tried to move on with my day, bury myself in my duties, but I could not forget how that moment felt. Blinking back tears, body trembling, lip quivering, skin hot and red from so many eyes watching; I was having trouble coming back from it. The situation had ended but the emotions were raw inside me. My cheeks still flush from embarrassment, palms sweaty, nipples hard, lip quivering; I managed to push the nervousness deep down into my gut, below my belly-button where it intermittently flip-flopped between a sensation like a swarm of butterflies ticking everything between my hips and a little twinge happening even lower than that which I was not comfortable with. I could hide most of the effects behind my best poker-face but my body was betraying me. Sweat collected at my brow, under my arms, and to my embarrassment, between my thighs. I had to do something to release this nervous energy.
So I ran. Every delivery for the rest of the morning, no matter what the priority was, I ran it from one place to the next as fast as I could. I turned the morning from a marathon into a series of wind-sprints. Within fifteen minutes my body was covered in a fine sheen of sweat, no one would ask why my skin was red or why I was panting. So long as I kept running I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone.
Except for maybe my nipples. They were so erect and sensitive, I could actually feel the wind as I ran, the chill from the air vents and the bounce in my stride. My nips felt hard enough to cut glass. They turned from their normally pleasant pink to an angry crimson. My poor little nipples were so overstimulated I was in as much pain as I was pleasure. I just wanted my body to return to normal but the butterflies in my stomach and the hardness of my nips prevented that from happening.
But I was really moving now and I didn’t have to explain anything. I kept pushing. My blood was up, I was getting more and more scared of someone noticing just how much sweat I had between my legs. I pushed even harder, hoping to drench out any scent other than sweat. I had to keep pushing. Slowing down was not an option.
Delivery after delivery I got it done. I had just completed the last delivery on a run and my MMU buzzed to life:
“CONGRATULATIONS!!! Efficiency Bonus Earned! 1 demerit removed for every 60 seconds saved! Keep up the good work!”
I was so engrossed with staying in motion that I had not paid attention to my efficiency scores. I had plus 11 or 12 seconds before that disastrous run this morning. I was keeping myself so busy I’d lost track of how many positive runs I was completing. In barely forty five minutes had beaten the clock enough to get a demerit removed! If I kept this up I could really mitigate the damage Mr. Schranz had done to my score this morning.
I was starting to feel good about myself. I was still embarrassed about what my body was doing, but that was okay I guess. Everyone got excited sometimes. I was putting in a lot of effort but there was a joy in running naked. I was free. I could run free between these cubicles while everyone else was chained to their computers and phones. So what if I was naked? I was gorgeous and young, free to move around unhindered by clothes and the constant pressure of sales goals. I was not in such a bad place. Maybe this was going to turn out to be a good day after all.
It was 11:45 when I returned to base. I punched my security code into the copier and saw twenty confirmations in the queue to print. I had a moment to take a knee and plot out the best route, so I took a step toward my mat when it hit me. The exhaust from the activating copier caressed my body in a most unexpected way, a full body thermal massage that sent pleasurable impulses up and down my spine. I swooned. The metallic scent of toner invaded my senses and my knees went weak. I had to grab on to the side of the photocopier for support. My body was so erotically charged it nearly released an orgasm right here on the north wall of the tenth floor.
“Don’t tease me Kyle,” I gasped under my breath as I got hold of myself.
“Are you okay?” Came a new voice from behind me.
I turned to see Cindi Carringer in her expensive business suit with a paper coffee cup in her slightly trembling hand. I felt a new pang of embarrassment as my only female friend in the company was obviously not expecting to seeing a stark raving naked Mailgirl almost brought to climax by the office equipment.
“Never better ma’am.” I said. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“No Maddie- I mean Mailgirl Ten,” Cindi stepped a little closer. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Are you okay? Are you on drugs or something?”
“No ma’am.” I said as I tried to straighten up and simultaneously wipe the sultry smirk from my face. “I’m just a little overheated from the work.”
“Bullshit,” she whispered, the paper cup no longer trembling in her hand. “What happened to you this morning was borderline abuse.”
“That’s okay ma’am. Mr. Schranz was just blowing off steam.”
Her sweet little face twisted in something close to contempt. “Don’t defend him. What he did was wrong.”
Oh God no. Don’t be a crusader Cindi. My friend could be the type of woman full of idealism and political correctness, willing to fight for the oppressed without forethought to how it could screw up their life. I know Cindi was wealthy but she wasn’t the type of privileged person who had never made a hard choice in her life. Please think, girl! Respect my decision. The last thing I needed was a Social Justice Warrior kicking the beehive at Columbia Mutual.
“Yes ma’am,” I agreed with her and lowered my own voice, “Mr. Schranz was wrong. But what you didn’t see was I chose to skip him in line. I knew that would piss him off but it was the best way to keep everyone else happy. I chose to get one person mad at me rather than the rest of the floor angry, yourself included.”
“And that somehow excuses how he treated you?”
“No it doesn’t. He’s a pig and that was why I chose him. He just let every other woman on this floor know what a pig he is. His odds of getting laid ever again just dropped exponentially.”
She chuckled a little. “Still someone should report him to HR?”
I couldn’t disagree. “Maybe so, but I don’t have to be the one to do it. I’ll dispute some of the demerits I got for lateness with the floor manager as the trade order was delivered but he just refused to receive it. Mr. Steckler will talk to human resources and they will take the appropriate measures.”
“You have a lot of faith in the system.” Cindi was acting a little funny. For this whole conversation she was looking at my eyes a little too long before alternating to stare at my bare feet. I quickly came to realize that my friend might be interested in more than striking a blow against misogyny in the workplace.
“I’m a Mailgirl now. I am part of the system. I do everything I can to make the system work as efficiently a possible.” I looked at the batch of confirmations Kyle had finished printing with a little sarcasm. She smiled. I smiled. No one else in this section had noticed our conversation yet, they were all working the phones pretty hard before the noontime lull, but that would not last forever.
I turned my back and bent over to pick up the batch, taking an extra second to make sure the pages were all piled straight. I knew she was looking. That’s okay. Guy or girl, businessman or businesswoman, even friend or foe, all employees should enjoy a Mailgirl in uniform; it was in the manual.
I turned back to say goodbye. Cindi’s eyes rose up to meet mine slowly but never quite made it. Her bright blue eyes followed a bead of sweat as it dripped from my brow, ran down my cheek, the expanse of my neck, over the number ‘10’ temporary tattoo on my breast and curved inside my cleavage where it joined with other rivulets to run over the bumps of my abdominals and mix with the moisture at my cleft of my sex. The paper cup was trembling slightly in her hand.
“I know you have to get back to work,” Cindi said absent-mindedly, “it’s just that sometimes I can’t believe it’s really you running around here like this.”
I shrugged. “It’s really me, Mailgirl Number Ten, in the flesh.” I looked at my MMU and saw I had already lost 20 seconds on this run and could not waste any more time.
“Go.” She waived me off.
I gave her a glad smile over my shoulder as I ran up Main Street. I had to haul ass all the way to the southwest corner of the floor. I have no idea how long she stared at my backside but that was okay. I had to remind myself to reassure her next time I saw her, that it was okay to stare at me. I was required to be on display, it was what I agreed to when I signed the contract. It was good for her to stare, she should enjoy my body. That is what I am here for. The only thing I had to be embarrassed about was how turned on I still was. I hoped that would have subsided during my brief conversation with Cindi but instead I was turned on again.
I ran up to Workstation 179 with my breasts almost painfully bouncing all the way, handed them their order confirmation and moved on to the next stage of the run. I could not slow now for love or money, I was behind and had to make up the time. If I was still this horny at 12:30 I would do something to take care of it at lunch. I doubt I could finish the rest of the day at this pace.
Can someone please explain to me how the delay-based conflicts with M. Pederson and A. Schranz even happen? Why aren’t they prevented at the system level? Why would the system penalize the Mailgirl for time spent waiting for the recipient to acknowledge receipt? Is it a lazy writer’s way to generate conflict, or some BDSM thing I’m temperamentally unable to grok, or what? Time the Mailgirl spends cooling her heels at the recipient’s desk should be charged to the recipient in a fair system.
I bring this up because it’s a world-breaking flaw that costs the story a credibility point, from me at least. I tolerated it in “Confessions of a Mailgirl” because it was a new system, and they were working out the bugs, but this story is supposed to be about “MMU 2.0”. Surely such design flaws would be fixed by now?
In reductio ad absurdum, doesn’t this plot device allow the first recipient to just hold the Mailgirl at their desk all day long, never releasing them? There’s a comment in the last chapter about remedies via HR, but why would it be structured that way? We know from the original stories that the MMU knows when the Mailgirl is at her destination, so why not stop the clock there and charge the delta to the recipient?
On that note, I rated the ASN version of this story ☆★★★★, the final star lost because I cannot believe this world could ever exist, largely for that plot flaw. The improvements in this version, though welcome, do not push this to a perfect five, even with my fixes, to be included as a separate comment shortly. Still, this is an above average story sbjdaniels, thus my rating. (Average is 3/5, since I rate on a Gaussian curve.)
Corrections in diff form: https://www.diffnow.com/report/5ne6y
Explanations:
∙ several cases of punctuation outside of quotes
∙ several paragraph pairs without a double line break between them
∙ several cases of mixed tense; I chose the present tense whenever I found one, since that’s the prevailing style in the rest of the story
∙ “alright” is questionable; Merriam-Webster and the Shorter OED redirect you to “all right” without comment, Collins says it’s questionable, and the New Oxford American Dictionary comments “…although found widely, alright remains nonstandard.” That’s 2 for 2, one British and one American dictionary pushing you to use the two-word form, and one of each outright cautioning against the one-word form.
∙ “Main Street” because you’d capitalize it if it was a real street name
∙ I put the time references from ASN back in as subheads, but I’m not adamant about this; if you accept my other changes but leave these out, I’ll take the hint and remove them from my local copy as well.
∙ “If my efficiency pleases you can…” — there are two ways to fix this, either doubling the “you” as I have done or just adding a comma after “you”. This appears to be written in American English where the first option is more common. The verb “to please” without an explicit object is more of a British thing, but if this were British English, I’d expect to see “colour” and such. Still, if you’re shooting for a snooty tone with the prose — like the stereotypical maître d’hotel — then you at least need to add the comma: there’s a small pause there. It may help to add “then” to see this: “If my efficiency pleases, then you can…”
∙ “more than a decade between us” — that’s a leftover from the ASN version where you put Ten’s age at over 30 years old; the math doesn’t work with Ten’s new age without my change
∙ “a rough one ten” — I don’t know what that means. It doesn’t seem to be Ten talking to herself, “A rough one, Ten,” because the prior text isn’t about her life being difficult; yet, that’s my only guess. Either you’ve got a usage here that some readers like me won’t understand, making it worth fixing to be more broadly understandable, or it’s an error, and I can’t guess what you meant to write.
∙ “to laud his position” → “to lord his position” — This isn’t the only way to fix this, but the first is just wrong; look up the verb “laud”. I suspect you first heard my corrected version spoken with a non-American or possibly Northeastern US accent, where the “r” disappears, so you thought they were saying “laud”, but it’s “lord,” referring to the old feudal/peerage system where one can hold one’s high position over another.
∙ “as textbook a mailgirl as the example right out of the manual” — redundant; either use the adjectival form of “textbook” or refer to “the manual”, but don’t do both. Suggestions: “…eyes down; textbook.” or “…eyes down, right out of the manual.” If you think you’re intensifying the point by repeating it, go re-read Strunk & White. 🙂
∙ to capitalize “mailgirl” or not: I changed a few for consistency with the bulk of the text, so that when used alone it’s in lowercase as a generic noun, though I think it would be simpler if you capitalized it everywhere as you do when using it as a title before “Ten.” This is supposed to be a franchised system; “Mailgirl” will doubtless be trademarked by the franchisor, and so should be capitalized.
I didn’t make a serious effort to correct things below the “ORIGINAL ASN TEXT” marker, though a few snuck in anyway. I’ll wait until further chapters appear unless you somehow want to get in front of it, such as by sending me a pre-publication copy via the All CMNF forum.
Wow! Hallelujah! An editor!
I have been absolutely fumbling at writing for years. With neither enough time to study or even read so much I’ve had many questions as to grammar and punctuation. Any help is greatly encouraged and enjoyed. If you want to be my editor and help me fix these style mistakes I would greatly appreciate the help.
Email me at sbjdaniels@aol.com Ella. I would appreciate your help as it has been 30 years since my last English class. I feel the continuance of this conversation would be best outside the public forum. 😉
As for the content questions I’ll give a public reply as others might be interested.
I agree that the system generated conflicts by employee delay are problematic. When writing Mailgirl fics there is a necessity to suspend disbelief. Seahawk’s Confessions of a Mailgirl and SliceReality’s work on Deviant Art are my taproots, so I grow it out of there. There are many other Mailgirl stories out or in the works but we collectively have not figured out what all the core conceits are yet. Some people write that the entire demerit system is designed to keep the Mailgirl poor and in the system by reducing her income enough that she has to re-up her contract, live in housing provided by the corporation, maybe even on site 24/7, etc.
For me, that is world-breaking. No woman in her right mind would sign up for that after seeing the first batch forced into a worse position with no profit to show for it. Others write like a Mailgirl program is a BDSM form of chattel slavery. Personally I can’t go that far, but we are dealing with kinks here so everyone has their different touch points.
In reductio ad absurdum, yes the first employee could do that, although they would surely be reprimanded for abusing the system. In my world Mailgirls do have a job to do so grossly interfering in that would probably lead to a severe reprimand or termination.
I have changes I want to make in the Mailgirl system as a whole, but feel like I have to make little changes over time to see if they are accepted. I like my protagonist to have some agency as I’m much more interested in the psychology of why someone would agree to this sort of employment.
But with all of that said; conflict has to come from somewhere. The clock in these stories is a writers’ crutch, an but there really is no story with out drama. I did make a change to the Mailgirl 2.0 system that demerits can be subtracted by scoring enough positive times, so I’m writing that it is moving the the right direction…
…you know what? I think you just gave me the resolution to this story.
Spoiler warning: This comment refers to some points which are not yet published here, only on Indian Outlaws board.
In Seahawks story the delivery times were automatically tracked by the MMU. When a mailgirl reached her destination the timer stopped, so there was no need for the recipient of the message to acknowledge it. However, if someone wanted to be mean to a mailgirl, there were a lot of reasons to hand out demerits, like problems with the uniform, not assuming the proper mailgirl positions or showing disrespectful behavior.
Also at DDE it wasn’t allowed to verbally abuse a mailgirl. But this might depend on the company culture, how strictly this is enforced. In your story it might not be so strictly enforced, however we don’t know yet, maybe in one of the following chapters Mr. Schranz might be fired. On the other hand, the fact that these rules are not so strictly adhered to makes it possible that some guys play a game with mailgirl 10 (in a later chapter). This chapter was very funny, where she good-naturedly plays along and beats the guys at their own game.
I personally – and that’s just my own opinion – don’t like it too much, when mailgirl stories move too far into BDSM territory, like spankings, bondage, cages, full time slavery and the like. I prefer it, when like in Seahawks story, the women sign the mailgirl contracts more or less voluntarily, maybe sometimes driven by greed, ambition and maybe by being very naïve and not reading the contract thoroughly enough.
But I admit, that such stories are quite difficult to write, because here the thrill for the reader comes more from the psychological side of public nudity, shame, embarrassment and sometimes even humiliation. I think you did this very well in your story. Tens thoughts are described very vividly.
And I also like that your mailgirl is not constantly depressed about her job and thinks how terrible everything is, but that she actually likes certain aspects of her work and even is sometimes quite proud of doing a perfect job.
So I am looking very much forward to any new chapters from the life of a mailgirl.
Love the mailgirl discussion. Good points by all. Since I’m in the middle of working on my mailgirl contribution, I like seeing what others like and dislike about the genre. I especially like the direction and tone of your story, sbj. Interested to see the resolution 😉
I think this subject is worth it’s own thread.
In my post above I forgot to mention another important aspect which I like in mailgirl stories. This is the erotic aspect of having to work nude in an otherwise normal workplace.
I like it when the mailgirl feels sexually aroused when being naked in front of all the other clothed people (and then she is trying to hide her excitement). Or like in this story, mailgirl Ten feels like her body betrayed her when she felt excited against her will after the humiliation by Mr. Schranz.
That is not to say a story should focus exclusively on this, but it is nice if it is a part of it. But – in my opinion – it shouldn’t be overdone, like the girls constantly having orgies in their locker room or something like that. Just an orgy once in a while 😉 so it is something unusual even for them.
For me one of the things I like most in mailgirl stories is the submissive behavior required by them. And when the other characters in the story enjoy to interact with a submissive girl – not in an abusive way, but find it pleasant if a nude girl has to address them with “Yes, Sir”, “I am sorry, Ma’am”, or the like.
I hope this wasn’t too specific, just some thoughts on the topic.
Ahh yes, the many flavors of mailgirl stories. I like what was done so far. I’m inclined to agree with what EllaMennopi was saying about the delays and demerits. But I think you handled that well by allowing her to work them off with speed. Still, the realism of a full-out sprint in an office area sounds dangerous to all in the area.
I liked arthways suggestion that extreme things be a little more subtle and less frequent. That also rings well with realism. Maybe the strongest and most interesting thing about this story so far is how Maddie is dealing with everything. More than her body, her emotions are naked to the reader and that’s excellent. That’s why some mailgirl stories can be so good. Every girl has her unique psychology that can resonate inside and outside with others. Those unique mailgirls and how they affect everyone around them. It’s all good stuff.
Keep up the good work. Some of us hope to write a mailgirl story too, one day. This is certainly inspirational. I hope the chapters keep coming.