A fictional company

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Brammel and Tosk, Ordinary Supply for the Outer Reaches, buys ordinary goods in bulk and ships them so far that they stop suiting the customer by the time they land. Socks go to an outpost where nobody has feet, come back, and have done for eleven years. Its customers are forty-one species, and each one breaks something built into Quill, the company’s old ordering software. The quantity field stops at 999, and when anyone asks why, the answer is “Brammel.”

I made it the setting for the Workshop SeasonWorkshop SeasonSix one-hour workshops I ran for coworkers inside a company that doesn’t exist, where everyone played an employee and left curious about their customers’ days.Application. For the hour, everyone plays an employee, so the room can pick apart screens, forms and habits that nobody in it built. The world keeps a few rules. Nobody is the villain, because every strange thing was once a reasonable answer. The jokes live in the paperwork, never in the physics. And since nobody at the company has ever met a customer, no customer is ever pictured: you see their record, the field their body breaks and the paper they leave behind.

The frame above opens on Quill, the company’s ordering software, running in the browser: pick a customer card, sign in, and try to place this season’s order under that customer’s limits. The world reference reads the source document into cards: six named characters, two newcomer customers, thirteen species, eight places, twenty-four catalog items and the company’s paperwork, with one search across all of it. Lenses re-cut the same facts. The engines view draws every species against every assumption the species break, and pressing an empty cell hands you a prompt for a scenario nobody has written yet.