[crow]

No, he drained it empty, then handed it back to Cocoa. The heat must have made him real thirsty. Well, he'd been out in it presumably more than Lacuna had been.

"H-Here... I'll go get you a refill," said Cocoa. He rushed off to do just that. If Lacuna wasn't mistaken, he actually seemed a bit relieved. He wasn't sure what else he could do to help, but at least getting Fluffmutter another drink was something he could definitely do.

[crow]

There was nothing for the rest of them to do but to wait while he figured himself out. They knew Fluffmutter well enough to read him, and they could tell that he was eventually going to talk about it, one way or another. But it would take some time for him to work himself up to doing that, and in the meantime the most they could do was just be patient about waiting for it.

Eventually, Fluffmutter spoke.

[crow]

His voice was slow, and low, so that you had to listen carefully to catch all the words. Thankfully the cafe was empty and quiet, thanks to the party. The loud ones were their friends, who were currently being quiet out of respect... and probably out of curiosity too.

"There's clear skies for the next few days, so I was on phone duty," Fluffmutter began.

Another set of wincing went around their little circle. Right, phone duty...

[crow]

Lacuna didn't know about the rest of her friends but she personally honestly forgot that that was even a thing for the weather department to have to do.

You didn't think about someone handling the calls when you thought of the ponies who were responsible for making it rain in the right parts of the city... But every organization had to stay connected somehow. Some organizations had customers and suppliers and such that they needed to keep up with.

[crow]

Other places had clients. Almost everyone had to at least be available to both the authorities and to the ponies that ran their utilities, and this included the weather department.

And the funny thing about the weather department was that they didn't actually have anything like a dedicated secretary. The writer's guild certainly did, and that had been Lacuna's job at one point, so she knew all about the finer details of this whole answering phones business.

[crow]

She understood exactly how miserable it could get too. And to be sure, it was pretty much never a fun job, and she hadn't cared for it the entire time that she had worked it, and she'd been pretty vocal about that, but...

There were definitely days where the shit had hit the proverbial fan. There had been one occasion, during her reluctant tenure in the position, where one of their major published authors had had a public scandal.

[crow]

And that had been the day from hell for poor Lacuna, not to mention her brother, and everyone else working the phones at the time.

It stayed bad for weeks, but the first day had still been the worst. Some of her less creative nightmares still made use of it sometimes.

The weather department's situation was a mix of just never having bothered to hire a secretary, and the difficulty of finding an adequate one for the job.

[crow]

Or maybe, looking at it another way, it had been a cost cutting measure by the ponies in charge of running the staffing. Actually, it probably was that.

The thing about it was that the weather department's calls tended to be filled with a lot of questions about the weather. As a result, answering them wasn't a simple matter. You had to know what you were talking about, or you could end up spreading a lot of misinformation...

[crow]

And the weather department already had to deal with the misinformation that was already out there, being spread around by normal ponies, both the well meaning and the deliberately malicious, without becoming a source of it themselves.

Besides, the wrong type of misinformation could even cause widespread panic. It had happened once, with an intern who should have known better, back when Fluffmutter himself had just begun interning with the department. It hadn't been pretty then either

[crow]

Though on the bright side, at least they knew where the blame lay, so he got out of the worst of it. It had just been tense at the weather department for a while, for everyone, that was all. And maybe the interns that year had been watched a little more closely than they might otherwise have needed, but... It was hard to blame them for wanting to be careful after that.

And the part about cost cutting... well.

[crow]

The weather department employed a lot of ponies who specialized in creating or mitigating certain specific types of weather. But the thing about the weather was that it changed, and it wasn't one thing or even a certain mix of things all the time. So at any given time, there were ponies whose primary responsibilities were nowhere in sight.

And the higher ups, having had a stroke of brilliance, had seen fit to assign these leftover ponies to phone duty.

[crow]

They clearly didn't want to waste a single individual who might be on their payroll.

So the theory went, this meant everyone had something to do every day. And it wasn't wrong of them specifically. In fact, on paper, this was a very neat solution to the problem that they were experiencing regarding needing qualified staff on the phone. Lacuna was sure that when the idea was first pitched, there had been a lot of laughter and clapping on the backs involved in that office.

[crow]

But the problem was that not everyone had the personality for phone work. If you wanted to talk about customer satisfaction, the weather department probably wouldn't have rated very highly on the tone of their service lines.

They had some ponies who were perfectly nice and accommodating, of course, but then they also had plenty of taciturn fellows like Fluffmutter, or just really angry ponies who had no patience whatsoever. When it was their turns on the lines, well...

[crow]

There was only so much they could do about their actual personalities. And many of them didn't care to do what they could about the matter either, since they didn't see why they had to answer phones in the first place.

If the weather department started hiring only pleasant personalities though, they wouldn't get enough ponies. Or maybe they would, but then those ponies wouldn't be adequately talented at other things they needed to be talented at...

[crow]

These would be important things too, like actually managing the weather. That would be pretty bad too.

And if they wanted to only let the pleasant ponies man the phone lines? Well, they could try it, but there was a good reason they hadn't bothered. It just wasn't fair to stick someone with an unpleasant job all the time just because they were good at it. They would have gotten less pleasant over time, and probably mutinied about it.