Life Among the Mailgirls Ch. 02

Mailgirl Number Thirteen knelt, naked, on the middle of a well-decorated office on the 26th Floor of US Financial Plaza. Her head was bowed, and she stared emptily at a point on the carpet a few feet in front of her; a mailgirl dared not to make eye contact with her superiors without express permission. Her arms were behind her, her right hand locked around her left wrist. But her shoulders were back, so as to better project her naked breasts into the room. She was on her knees, with her thighs spread so that her bare pussy – warm, wet, and expectant – was entirely exposed. Her buttocks were back on her ankles, so that she could rest.

In front of her loomed the desk of Joe Hoblitzel, an Executive Vice President in USF's Asset Management group. He sat, mostly ignoring her, while he bounced between typing something on his desktop and flipping through pages of the Wall Street Journal. He was middle-aged – late forties, maybe early fifties – but handsome nonetheless. Dark hair, dressed in an expensive suit, with a strong, clean-shaven jawline and a solid build. He was too old for her, of course – almost twice her age – but the twenty-six-year-old couldn't help but find him attractive. He reminded her, ever-so-slightly, of her step-father – a realization that, once made, somehow only made him that much more attractive in an honest-but-uncomfortable way.

Thirteen had been coming to Hoblitzel's office regularly, for the better part of the last month, but she still couldn't have explained exactly what his job was. He was in Asset Management, she knew, and he had a team of portfolio managers that all rolled up under him; she'd be making the rounds to them next. Number Three could have told her, if she'd asked, as Three had worked in this department before "volunteering" to become a mailgirl. But Thirteen had replaced Three in this little morning exercise that Hoblitzel put her through each and every day. And, as much as Three was probably relieved by the fact that she no longer had to routinely traipse through her old department in the nude, Thirteen didn't want to tip her own hand, and accidentally give Three the impression that she actually enjoyed her mornings on the 26th Floor.

Because, even though she was loathe to admit it, Thirteen's mornings with Hoblitzel were the best part of her day at the Plaza. He was kind to her, relatively speaking, even if it was in a dominating and sometimes demeaning way. Sure, he'd pat her on the ass on the way out, an act that was technically against the rules but often overlooked – especially among executives at his level. But he meant it as both a compliment and a sign of encouragement. And he often had a piece of hard candy for her – peppermint today. Which, although being the smallest of kindnesses and although she to take it out of his hand with her mouth only, was nonetheless a rare kindness in the life of a mailgirl.

The truth was, if Joe Hoblitzel had unzipped his fly, and produced his cock, Thirteen might have happily taken that into her mouth, as well.

Luckily, Thirteen had not been faced with that temptation. Even among the most senior staff, full-fledged sexual activity with the mailgirls was strictly, strictly forbidden – even outside of work hours. Any such act would result in immediate dismissal of the colleague involved, and an investigation into the direct supervisor and the department itself for letting such an act occur. And then, since there was almost no way a mailgirl could actually be fired, that mailgirl (and her peers) would be punished severely.

There were flaws in that system, of course, as Twenty-One had exposed a few weeks prior. Namely, follow-up required a mailgirl, the lowliest of lowliest within the company, to come forward and report the incident. Thankfully, none of the girls – Thirteen included – had yet been the victim of such an act; even in Twenty-One's case, it had been Twenty-One herself who'd initiated the "relationship." A pinch or a pat on the ass here or there, a tweaked nipple from a particularly bold executive, an intentional-but-made-to-look-inadvertent brushing up against a naked girl's body? Sure. Of course. But, certainly nothing that rose to the level of the horror stories Thirteen had read about elsewhere; USF's program was a nunnery, comparatively speaking.

But Thirteen knew just how slippery that particular slope was. And the reality of the situation was that at least half of the girls – again, Thirteen included – might have accepted complete and total sexual slavery if it were to be asked of them. Not because they'd been so humiliated and beaten down, because they had. Not because they increasingly thought of themselves as full and unconditional property belonging to USF, because they did. But, rather, because they all confessed to just how turned on they got as mailgirls.

For Thirteen, it was no different. If Hoblitzel had called her to him, bent her over the desk, and began laying into her, Thirteen would have accepted happily. She couldn't deny just how sexually excited she was at that moment, kneeling naked and submissive in a powerful executive's office. The fact that he was pretending to ignore her only made it hotter, somehow. She was wet – not unusual for her, granted – so wet that she could detect her own scent. She wondered if Hoblitzel could, too.

It was a bit of a status symbol among executive management just how long they could hold onto a girl. The mailgirls were expected to deliver the regular mail and interoffice to anyone and everyone, but it cost a certain amounts of credits (or, "chits," as they were called here at USF) to send memos via mailgirl. Executives were granted significantly more chits than the masses, and they could up their spend in the system for a "rush" delivery – ensuring that a mailgirl was forced into a full-on sprint to hit her deadline, and almost guaranteeing she'd receive a demerit or two. They could also utilize their chits to hold a girl in their presence for longer than might have otherwise been required. The concept had been to keep a girl in place until an employee finished a last-minute memo, but in practice it had become a bit of a pissing contest among certain department heads.

It had been just past eight when Thirteen entered Hoblitzel's office. Though she didn't dare look up at the clock on the wall now, she guessed she'd been here the better part of half an hour.

In Hoblitzel's case, Thirteen believed it was less about proving his status, and more about Thirteen herself. At least, that's what she liked to believe. He'd summon her (always Thirteen, specifically) to his office each morning, and have her wait while he flipped through the news and composed a memo to his senior staff about trends and things to look out for that day. And then he'd send her on her way, to make her rounds through Asset Management and his direct reports. Nothing he sent couldn't have been delivered via email, but Hoblitzel felt – as the program intended – that his team would pay more focused attention if the message were delivered by a naked mailgirl.

And, as attracted as Thirteen was to Hoblitzel, she told herself it was mutual. He used to task Three with the same job, dashing from desk to desk to desk and delivering Hoblitzel's musings on the market to her former peers. But whether he'd felt some pang of empathy for the girl and freed her from the routine, or whether he'd just happened to notice Thirteen on an unrelated mail run and decided to upgrade, he had never kept Three in his office as long as he regularly did Thirteen.

Thirteen felt his eyes on her. He glanced up at her every now and then, as if looking for inspiration, before returning to his work.

In another life, Thirteen could have dominated him and wrapped him around her finger. She was young, she was blonde, she was pretty, and she knew that she had something he wanted. He'd buy her presents. Treat her to a dinner date. Take her out dancing. Beg, beg, beg for a night with her, for the honor of going down on her, for a sniff of her pussy. Thirteen, of course, had never been that girl; but still, she fantasized about holding someone like Hoblitzel in the palm of her hand.

But, if Thirteeen was being honest with herself – and being stripped of everything, from her clothes, to her identity, to her very personality, forced a liberating sort of honesty – dominating Hoblitzel didn't turn her on half as much as being dominated by him now. It was an uncomfortable thing she'd learned about herself over the summer, an uncomfortable realization that most of the other girls shared with her. Nothing, it seemed, got her quite as turned on as being entirely under someone else's thumb.

Hoblitzel cleared his throat. He looked down at his smartphone, and then up, confusedly, at Thirteen.

"This says it's your last day here at the Plaza?"

"Yes, sir," Thirteen answered. No eye contact.

Hoblitzel hesitated, and then asked, "I thought you all signed two year contracts?"

Two years was the standard length of a mailgirl's contract worldwide, not just at USF. The length of subsequent contracts, when a girl re-upped, tended to vary a bit more; but, even then, two years tended to be the accepted standard. Thirteen, however, was here at the USF Plaza for just three months.

"Yes, sir," Thirteen replied. "It's just me. I'm was only here for the summer."

Hoblitzel looked confused.

"I'm a graduate student at Yale, sir. Anthropology. I'm studying mailgirl culture for my thesis."

"'Mailgirl culture,'" Hoblitzel repeated, as if he could not understand how Thirteen didn't realize how inane the idea was. He shook his head, stood, and came around to the other side of his desk. "Jesus. You don't even work here."

She did, technically, work here – albeit as a mailgirl, for another ten-plus hours. But she understood what the executive in front of her meant, and she saw no upside in correcting him.

"And I thought Amanda was stupid..." he amended, but allowed the thought to trail off.

"Number Three, sir," Thirteen corrected him this time. She was required to.

Hoblitzel just raised an eyebrow. He paused, looked down at the naked blonde kneeling alluringly on his floor, and then bumped his phone against the device on her arm. "Yes," he conceded, "Three."

"Here," he said, turning back to the desk, and fished another piece of hard candy out of his bowl. "One more, as a thank you." He unwrapped another peppermint, and then – without asking permission, held it up to Thirteen's lips.

Thirteen took the candy graciously, even as Hoblitzel's forefinger ever-so-gently welcomed itself into her mouth – touching her tongue, running absently over her lower lip, and then cupping her chin so that she was finally forced to make eye contact. She wasn't sure, exactly, what he wanted from her, so she met his eyes briefly, offered a submissive, "Thank you, sir," and then averted her gaze.

His dismissed her, this time with more of a pinch of her than a pat. He closed his office door behind her, and the counter on Thirteen's smartphone buzzed to life.

In another world and in another life, Thirteen might have needed a moment to collect herself, to cool herself down. The thought of servicing Hoblitzel with her mouth, or the thought of bending over and servicing him with her pussy, had been all she'd thought about over the last half hour. He was in the position of power. He was in control over her. And she was nothing more than a set of tits and ass. In another world and another life, she likely wouldn't have gotten so turned on in the first place.

But Thirteen now had a delivery to make and a deadline to meet, and so her entire being was making that delivery; she had just thirty seconds to dash – walk swiftly, in this case – down the hallway to Mark Stansbury, the first of six recipients. As she passed Hoblitzel's assistant and the analysts seated in cubicles outside his office, she paid no attention to those who lifted their heads to watch her go by. She paid no attention to the leers, the whispered derision, or the catcalls.

Hoblitzel had referred to the idea of mailgirl culture as "inane," something that could have easily been applied to very concept of mailgirls itself. Thirteen, when she'd first heard of the idea, had thought it was a joke. Companies tapped young, female employees, often in management track positions, to take on delivery duties for the duration of a two-year contract. These were girls with MBAs and JDs and other Masters degrees, girls who otherwise would have been groomed for department heads and strategy leaders. And yet they were approached to apply for positions ostensibly in the mail room. Even excluding Thirteen - who was still a year shy of completing her doctorate - USF's roster included a full PhD; Mailgirl Number Five was technically "Doctor" Five, and had been plucked from Quantitative Investments.

And, of course, all of the girls were expected to deliver the mail naked.

It made no sense. Even leaving pornographic and misogynistic fantasies aside, it made no sense. All of the girls at USF had been making good money even prior to becoming a mailgirl, and most of them had actually received a bump up in annual rate to take on mailgirl duties – albeit in the form of a few big lump sums that could be affected by how many demerits a girl racked up. USF, like other companies, even sweetened the pot for some of girls they selected – paying off student loans, buying out a girl's credit card debt, and so on. They guaranteed career advancement, in some cases, upon completion of the contract; Number Seven, for example, had been promised a fast track to Associate General Counsel. All to run memos from one corner of the USF Plaza to another, to deliver interoffice envelopes, to do something as mind-numbing and thankless as delivering the mail.

But the mailgirls were not mailgirls simply because the company needed someone to deliver the mail. The original program, initiated in Tokyo within only the last ten years, had been a morale-boosting stunt. But it was a morale-boosting stunt that had gained surprising traction – first in Asia. Then in Europe. Then among gaming companies and dot.coms on the West Coast. And now, inconceivably just a few years prior, here in New York, among more conservative financial service firms like US Financial.

As much of a stunt as the early mailgirl programs had been, it was the impact upon the bottom-line that titillated senior management even more. What companies found, time and again, was that mailgirls justified their lavish salaries and sign-ons dozens of times over. Sure, attrition overall spiked when a program was announced, especially among women; USF had been no different. But then, once things had normalized, attrition plummeted to levels unseen of before the mailgirl programs were rolled out. Among women, the decline was even more defined – it was one of those weird, unexpected, and paradoxical results that Thirteen was digging into from a research perspective.

Similar impacts could be seen in a company's actual business. When a program was announced, there were clients who no longer wished to work with a company who'd treat any of their employees as the mailgirls were treated. Some of this came from a place of upright moral rectitude, but more often than not it was little more than PR. But as mailgirl programs became more and more common, they were less and less of a PR risk for a client. And, even in those cases where a client was truly and permanently lost, companies like USF more than made up for the lost revenue with new clients; client meetings had tripled at the Plaza over the last five months, as eager, prospective customers made excuses to see a mailgirl in action with their own eyes.

Productivity gains, when quantified, were remarkable. Usage of vacation time and sick days was reduced. Leaves-of-absence were down, as was Short Term Disability, Long Term Disability, and FMLA. And all of that was ancillary, less important than the true driver: confidence and superiority.

It was a working theory that Thirteen still needed to better define and elaborate upon. But it held that the rank-and-file inside a company with mailgirls performed better, simply because they felt superior. By just about any quantifiable measure, the data proved her right – even USF had seen noticeable gains since just April, when the mailgirls program came online. Men performed better across the spectrum. Women, too, performed significantly better, with younger women – perhaps fearful of potentially being drafted into the mailgirl program itself – seeing exponential gains in quantitative performance. The qualitative data, though, suggested that young, attractive women were performing worse – but Thirteen discounted that finding as misleading, as it was often management's way to coerce a girl into taking a mailgirl position.

And so, the fact that Thirteen was stark naked here in a place of business – save for a lycra armband and a dog collar – was secondary. It wasn't her nudity that helped make the program successful, but the humiliation she felt from that nudity. It was in her debasement and her suffering that she brought value. As she worked her way down the hall with her naked breasts ever-so-slightly bouncing through Asset Management, her very presence brought about a feeling of superiority in all she passed.

Mark Stansbury's door was closed when Thirteen arrived. And, after risking a glance down at her armband to confirm she still had a few seconds to spare, Thirteen knocked gently.

She was beckoned in, and any pretense of respect that Stansbury had for her as another human being was completely absent. He grunted an acknowledgement of her presence, and then raked her up and down with his eyes, taking in the full picture of the naked girl in front of him. Decent-sized C-cup breasts, nipples hard and at attention. Shaved pubic area, with her slit fully exposed. Long blonde hair, done up in childish pigtails. Slave collar. Armband. A touch of make-up and lipstick, but nothing more. And a number "13," prominently displayed on her hip in black marker.

Thirteen had taken a step into Stansbury's office, but no further. Instead, she stood in "Feet" position – feet flat on the ground, legs parted, arms behind her back, chest pressed forward, and a vacant, submissive gaze directed at the floor. She waited for Stansbury's order to come closer, so that he could retrieve Hoblitzel's memo from her smartphone, and endured his examination patiently. She was little more than a piece of tits and ass to him; but then, it was her job to be little more than a piece of tits and ass to him.

Thirteen was nowhere near as attracted to Stansbury as she was to Hoblitzel, but she suspected that was partly due to the power that Hoblitzel wielded. Stansbury was not unattractive; he was in his early forties, maybe even late thirties, well-dressed and well-groomed, just another one of a dime-a-dozen Wall Street types that worked here at USF. But, unlike Hoblitzel holding her for the better part of a half hour, this interaction with Stansbury was more routine.

He called her closer. He tapped his smartphone against hers, waited for the memo to transfer, and then sent her on her way. No pat-on-the-ass, no derogatory comment, no hoops to jump through. Thirteen could only hope that all of her deliveries that day went so smoothly.

From Stansbury, it was off to George Strunk. Then Mitch Miller. Debbie Truesdale. And so on. After Asset Management, it was an interoffice envelope from the 26th Floor to the 28th via the stairs. And then another, from the 28th to the 24th, again via the stairs. A standard mail delivery. Another interoffice. A series of memos back and forth between 23rd and 21st Floors. And so went the morning, dashing from one mail stop to the next, one associate to the next. It was routine, and in that routine, Thirteen allowed herself to operate on auto-pilot.