Kaluga

Kaluga is a monster. He lives on used toilet paper. He only has one foot. The other was lost during a horrific baking accident.

Kaluga has extremely oily skin and hair. Coupled with his bland personality and love of paperwork, these features have led him to choose a career in an office, or "Cubicle Farm" as they are more commonly known. The office houses 800 employees, and is built inside an 'office park' near the rural outskirts of the city.

During the working day, Kaluga is made to sit inside a 3-walled styrofoam cubicle, approximately 3 feet by 3 feet. He is given menial tasks, such as report writing, or database maintenance. However, the work is often meaningless, and the data given to Kaluga, is often useless, consisting of random letters and numbers, which must be populated into a spreadsheet by hand. The spreadsheet is then looked over by a manager, and promptly deleted, and he is asked to do the same thing all over again. None of the work performed by Kaluga is of any consequence. He had once followed the results of his work through the paper trail and found that everything he performs is either deleted when finished, or put into a paper shredder, nullifying his efforts completely.

The highlight of Kaluga's working day (and indeed his life) is taking his daily 10 minute toilet break. This is the most exciting part of his day, and allows him to violently shart out his incontinence, waking him from his dreary desk job monotony. Since there are no restaraunts or food venues near his office, he lives on prepackaged and non-perishable foods, kept inside his desk drawer. Consisting of Ramen noodles and biscuits, Kaluga eats the same prepackaged preservative based foods each day, and buys more each weekend, to restock for the following week. This has stunted his growth during his time working at the company, and has resulted in him becoming fat and soft and gives him horrific frothy aerated, semi-solid, mousse-like diarrea. He often wonders if this daily torture is worth the meagre salary, but since he has a mortgage, he has no choice but to continue working until the day he dies. Each year, Kaluga has a performance review with his manager, however he never receives any salary increases, because his manager simply states that "The company cant afford to pay anyone any more. Its out of my hands." However the managers all get upwards of $150,000 dollars per year, whilst Kaluga merely gets $62,000 before tax. The largest salary increase Kaluga ever got, was $10.00 per week, which his manager forced him to crawl over broken glass for. Barely able to meet his rent, afford fuel or electricity, or pay off his credit card, Kaluga curses his home country of Australia for forcing him into debt at the age of just 25, as a means to simply survive from one week to the next. He hopes for a zombie apocalypse or public rioting, as a way to upset the balance of power, and maybe tip things in his favor. Despite being with the company for 6 years, and having studied and completed a diploma in mechanical engineering, this is the best job and salary available to an engineer. Sometimes Kaluga daydreams about quitting his job, and packing up his belongings and heading to the street, to live as a bum, amongst the city, or living in the wilderness and not having to struggle with being so poor and having so few prospects in life. Alas, every day he shows up to work. And works 8 hours per day. It is slowly killing him, but he has no other option.