For Pam it began with rain and Angela’s birthday. At NBC Universal, it also began with a birthday—but on a bright sunshine-y day a couple of years before. The birthday in question belonged to an intern in the IT department named Dave, and he was only too aware that his friends had planned a really great party for him that night. Unfortunately, it was already past 7, and he had a stack of requests from PR left to deal with. He burned through them at record pace, his own excitement and the fact that these were really easy requests combining to help him through. Finally he reached the end of the stack, the final request between him and a keg of his favorite craft beer (though he secretly would have preferred Natty Bo, being a Baltimore native). He looked down at it and saw:
“Hey Dave,
I know we finalized the embargo software for that new documentary last week, but PR just reminded me of one last loophole we need to close: the fans. Can you set something up that stops the subjects from accessing fansites of the show?
Thanks in advance,
Joe”
Joe was his boss. Joe was full-time and salaried. Why wasn’t Joe dealing with this himself, so that Dave could take his part-time, undercompensated self to his own party before the keg was entirely tapped? Dave sighed. Then he had a brilliant idea. He repurposed a bot he’d already written for a PR request last week (Dave, can we get something that helps us find out which of the Office characters people are responding best to? The camera guys can’t cover everyone equally) that skimmed major existing fan and review sites for the favorite tags and keywords people would use to reference the show, slapped it into the embargo software, and headed for the door. Now the software would find those key terms and block access to sites and searches that came too close—meaning he wouldn’t have to create a fansite blacklist himself. Instead, the keywords would do it for him. Easy-peasy.
Dave drank well that night, woke up with a giant hangover, lingered on in his internship for a couple of months, and was working for Amazon in Seattle before Pam ever typed the word “jam” into Google.
**********************************
As the clock meandered on (honestly, sometimes she would swear the thing went backwards), Pam tried not to think too much about jam, or what it might mean. It should have been easy. It was already three-thirty, after all. But at four she heard a crunching noise from the copier beside her and looked up to see the word itself flashing brightly at her:
JAM
JAM
JAM.
She was saved from staring by the face of Dwight Schrute peering down at her.
“Pam, why is my report not printing?”
“Um…I think it’s jammed.”
“Pamela. Because Jim has been out of the office for” (he checked his watch) “two hours, twenty-seven minutes, and eighteen seconds, I do not believe this is his handiwork. If, however, you have graduated from participating in his juvenile behavior to initiating it yourself, I would appreciate if you would cease and desist from it immediately.”
She sighed.
“No, Dwight, I think it’s just a jam.”
A thought occurred to her.
“Does Jim usually use paper jams to prank you? I didn’t think it was his usual approach.”
“It is not one of his preferred tactics, but it has been used in the past. Rarely, however, I will admit."
She hesitated.
“What about…other kinds of jam?” She faltered a little at his inquisitive look “…not paper ones? Does he use those a lot in pranks?”
“I am not certain of the reason for your interest.”
“I just…heard…something about jam, and I was wondering if it might be prank-related.” At his look she quickly added “Not from Jim! This isn’t a prank itself.” He seemed satisfied.
“Well, assuming you are referring to jellied comestibles, I will have to consult my documentation.”
“Would you?”
“Only if you, Pamela, will treat this distinctly papery jam with the respect it deserves. I expect to come back to a working copier when I return with your information. It is, after all, your job.”
Pam sighed and reached into the copier. It was a relatively simple task to pull out the offending paper (Dunder Mifflin standard 20lb copy paper, no finish), press the correct buttons, and restart Dwight’s print job. As the copier spat out two sheets of sales reports, Dwight returned to the desk.
“I have found two such incidents on record. In one, I came back to find my phone attached to its base by a sticky gelatin-like substance, which visual inspection suggested might be jam, jelly, or a related food. In the other, the sheets of my weekly sales report were stuck together with a similar substance. Neither is properly categorized as a prank—the first is under “minor nuisance” and the second “work impediment”—but they appear the closest to what you inquired about.”
She shrugged.
“Guess it wasn’t a prank I heard about then.”
“When did you hear about it?”
“Today?”
“Then perhaps” (here he bent over to whisper to her almost conspiratorially) “you heard about our plans at Schrute Farms for our new beet jam.”
“What?”
“Fact: the jam and jelly market is an expanding proportion of the overall condiment sector. Fact: jams and jellies are preserved fruits and vegetables with added sugar. Fact: the beet has the highest easily accessible sugar content in a vegetable. Therefore, Schrute Farms is preparing a new beet jam, to appeal to the health-conscious and beet-aware consumer.”
“…that sounds…delicious?”
“It will be. Thank you for your interest, Pam. With your permission, I will consider you as a test taster when we begin production next month.”
“…thank you?”
“Thank you. And thank you for fixing the copier.”
With that, he turned back towards his desk with a superior look in his eye.
Pam was pretty sure that Schrute Farms beet jam was not the reason jam was blocked on her computer, and now she knew that it wasn’t some prank she had missed. She was also sure that she now had three things to talk to Jim about on Monday: the error code, Dwight’s new jam, and the fact that he (Jim) was definitely insufficiently inventive on the jam-prank front. Really, just sticking items together? There had to be something more interesting to do.
She looked up at the clock. Her jam conversation, the copier error, and her musings had whiled away another hour and it was time to go. Seeing no one urgently flagging her down, Pam turned the phones to voicemail, grabbed her coat from the rack and her Tupperware from the fridge, slipped out, and headed home.
