Zach Pritchard, an IT worker at a health facility where 90% of his coworkers are women (wilparu)

Note: This story follows Zach Pritchard, a 29 year old guy working in regular IT job for a small health center in a large city. Zach’s life is solitary but OK, and work is fine, but due to his location he finds himself one of only a couple of men in a large office with dozens of women. Zach is mostly ignored and only barely tolerated by the nurses and clerks that surround him, until one day he tries to start up an old server that was stored in his office. Next thing he knows, an ancient office application starts up for the first time in decades. But what on earth could ‘The Affection Multiplier’ be, how could it be running on a piece of computer hardware older than he is and how does it know his name?

(This route will be fairly lighthearted. Zach does not want to rule the world or become rich or sleep with every woman he sees… but how long can he resist the temptation to sleep with some of the attractive women he works with?)

Monday, May the 25th

You take a sip of your overpriced but very tasty iced caramel macchiato and walk into the staff entrance of the Bathurst Health Centre ready to start your day. A stranger looking at you would see a pleasant but nondescript face, made somewhat more interesting by a frame of shaggy blond hair and hazel eyes. They would see a 29-year-old in tan khaki pants and forest green short-sleeved polo shirt and would, instantly and correctly, assume you are an office worker. The laptop bag on your back would make an especially canny watcher guess you were in IT or some similar position, and that would also be accurate. A swipe of your laminated ID card opens the door to the stairwell, and while it gives your name, ZACHARY PRITCHARD, below a fuzzy photo of your face you insist on going by Zach.

The BHC takes up a large stone building on the corner of Bathurst and Lennox streets in Toronto. In the early 20th century it had been a city hospital with 400 beds, a morgue and a coal burning smokestack to power the new electric lights. By the 1960’s it was a teaching hospital churning out dozens of nurses a year. But being in an old, somewhat rundown building in an awkward location meant that in the 90’s it began to transition to a community health center with a small staff of doctors and health care providers serving the neighborhood from a walk-in clinic. Most of the upper floors were simple office space for the large public health and other government-funded health departments in the area.

You are well aware of the history of the building, having read a local history blog about the place that charted its slow decline as larger, more modern hospitals in the northwest part of Toronto became more convenient for patients. Taking the back stairwell, with it’s old-fashioned, almost ornate granite steps, to the third floor you nod hello at a few familiar faces.

Your office is in the corner of the building with nice big windows looking down both Bathurst and Lennox. Large, with a huge desk and plenty of space, it would have been a premium office for any manager on the floor. In fact, it would normally house at least two desks. But you have it all to yourself because it had been the server room back when BHC had its own servers and network infrastructure. Now almost everything is hosted by the big centralized data centers that Ontario Health manages, and you lucked out into a great office, which you share only with a big, almost empty network rack that exists only to connect the local network to the outside world. It is pretty much ideal.

As a level 2 Network Analyst you enjoy your job. It is easy, giving you a lot of downtime, but you do help hundreds of workers do their jobs. And since almost everyone there was in some way in the health care industry, you rather enjoy the feeling that you help the people who help the community stay healthy. The fact you are fairly well paid to do a job that only takes half your time in a typical day - but that almost everyone seems to think is magic - is a bonus.

Putting your laptop bag down on the small table you keep in your office, you set your drink down and leave your office to go check the mail desk. One anachronism of the place is that mail for everyone ends up in the old mailroom where it was up to every department on the floor to go find it themselves. You don’t get much mail, but you still make sure to get the unsolicited junk mail that gets routed to IT just in case.

On the way down the hall, you nod to Tessa and Mary as they walk the other way. Looking out into a large open area full of tables and unassigned desks for the public health nurses to use, you see Alice, June, Kat, Catherine, Mati, Kyrie and a few others you don’t recognize. In the mailroom Morgan, Jazmin, Beatrice, and Emily were engaged in what seemed to be two different but passionate simultaneous conversations at the same time about the Bachelorette. None of them react to you sticking your head in the door to confirm you have no physical mail. Karissa, the pretty young clerk, catches your eye and gives you a cheerful smile and nod as she sorts through the mail to see if her managers have gotten anything.

Heading back to your office, you see two immunization nurses whose names you don’t know talking to Doris McCorrister, the manager of nurses for the whole facility. Doris gives you a quick glance but as usual does not seem to see anything that impresses her very much and she instantly goes back to her conversation, a slight sneer visible for a moment which you notice but ignore.

“Oh hey Zach,” a voice called out. Pausing, you wait for Jayne Hall to catch up. The 29-year-old office manager is your best work buddy in the place, partly because her small office is next to yours and mostly because you’re the same age and her no-nonsense hyper-chatty personality meshes well with your quiet demeanor but secret love of juicy office gossip. Since she is in charge of the clerical side she is in contact with you often for work orders and trouble tickets, and your easy rapport makes it a happy relationship on both sides. Tall and almost awkwardly skinny, Jayne has long straight dark hair and glasses, which rather accentuate her round face and minimal makeup. You once heard one of the younger clerks, angry at being chastised for her poor work, snidely call her “Plain Jayne” to another clerk, but you suspect that had more to do with the handy insult than any real comment on Jayne's looks. Not that you think of her as more than a friend - well not really - but you've always thought she was attractive in a slightly unconventional way.

“Hey Hallsy,” you say with a smile.

Eyes narrowed, she replies, “Hallsy? Come on, that’s the worst one yet! It’s like a zero effort hockey nickname, just adding a ‘sy’ to the end of my last name!”

“Fair enough, I’ll workshop it some more. But I still maintain I can think of the perfect nickname for you. Something so obvious and effective your parents will hear about it and instantly say yeah that’s totally better.”

“Hah, based on your awful attempts so far I’m pretty sure I’ll just be Jayne forever. I can’t believe you tried to call me ‘Pool’ that time, what the hell was that?”

Sighing, you look to the heavens and say, “Yeah that was a Game of Thrones deep cut of a nickname. I still maintain it had potential but since you're a Philistine and only ever watched the TV show instead of reading the books it was wasted on you.”

Smirking, Jayne looked around before lowering her voice conspiratorially and saying, “I heard a rumour about the big Ontario Health reorg they have been planning. Might actually impact us here at Bathurst after all.”

“Hmm, tell me more? I can’t imagine they’d ever actually close this place down, they’d need to find office space for two hundred people anyway, never mind the walk-in clinic downstairs. The old people in the neighborhood would have a fit,” you say.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I have a meeting in 5 minutes, but if you’re around for coffee at 10:30 I’ll grab you in your office and tell you all the gory details.”

Nodding acceptance, you watch Jayne hurry down the hall to one of the meeting rooms. As usual, you can’t help but notice that Jayne’s long legs end in a shapely butt, well framed by the tight black slacks she favours.

Looking up, you realize one of the public health nurses had seen you looking at Jayne’s ass. Her disapproving frown is enough to make you quickly turn tail and hustle back to the safety of your office. The last thing you need is for people to be saying you were ogling your co-workers, even though you had kind of been ogling Jayne a bit. As you sit at your desk you look out into the hallway and see Jameson Cano walk by talking with another nurse.

It is a good reminder to avoid, at all costs, any sort of reputation in the office for creep behavior, even subtly checking out the women around you. Because one day you had been bored and did the math - counting all the full-time workers of the BHC or Public Health on the third floor and the rotation nurses who used the open office space, there are 48 staff not counting the custodians and building management crew. You can easily count all the men off-hand, since including Jameson the nurse and yourself the count is exactly... 3.

One of your old buddies from back west had said that you must love working in a big office that was more than 90% female, but you had to admit it mostly meant you are ignored at best or made to feel like your presence is inherently annoying at worst. And after catching up on your support tickets and emails you go down the hall to the men’s room - that venti iced caramel macchiato just blew through you - and you are reminded again just how second class your status is.