The corporate breakroom of Gentayangan.co smelled faintly of stale ozone and the lingering existential despair of twenty overworked poltergeists. At the center of it all stood Tama, holding a whiteboard marker like a tactical weapon, glaring at a crudely drawn diagram of a staircase.
"Look at this bottleneck, team. Look at it!" Tama jabbed the marker against the board, drawing a furious red circle around the phrase Vertical Transit Deficiency. "For three centuries, our Pocong workforce has relied on the traditional hop. One, two, hop. One, two, hop. Do you know what that does to conversion rates? It’s inefficient. It’s archaic. It’s absolute suicide for our quarterly logistics KPI."
Senior Pocong, tightly bound from head to toe in yellowing, ancient burial linen, let out a deep, chest-rattling groan that vibrated the cheap folding chairs. "It’s tradition, Tama. We hop because our ancestors hopped. It’s in our unwritten job description, right beneath 'groan mournfully in damp hallways.'"
"Tradition doesn't scale, Big P," Tama retorted, pacing back and forth with the frenetic energy of a caffeinated tech bro who had just discovered cryptocurrency in two thousand seventeen. "Tradition is why we’re currently missing our Series A growth targets by twelve percent. If we want to capture the millennial suburban haunting market, we need speed. We need agility. We need the Senior Pocong Mobility Initiative."
Kuntilanak, who was busy reapplying her black lipstick while checking her reflection in a polished smartphone screen, didn't even look up as she chimed in. "Honestly, boss, he does look a bit sluggish on camera. Yesterday I tried to do a synchronized jump-scare collab with him in an abandoned condominium, and he missed his cue because his linen was caught on a protruding rusty nail."
"That nail was structural!" Senior Pocong snapped, his hollow eye sockets flashing with indignant indigo light. "I have sciatica in my spectral vertebrae, Kuni! You try sliding down a fire escape tied up like a oversized corpse-susage!"
"Nobody is sliding anywhere blindly," Tama cut in smoothly, clapping his translucent hands together to regain control of the room. He clicked a button on his remote, and a holographic projector flickered to life above the whiteboard, displaying a sleek, heavily modified office rolling chair strapped with industrial-grade duct tape. "Behold. The Ecto-Roller Three Thousand. Fully ergonomic, outfitted with four-way directional caster wheels, and optimized for maximum hallway velocity."
Pak Joko, lingering near the water cooler in his tattered civil servant uniform, squinted at the floating hologram through a hole in his chest. "Is that an office chair from the ninety-eight economic crisis? Where did you even find that, Mas Tama?"
"Resourcefulness, Pak Joko. That’s what separates a unicorn startup from a failed entity," Tama grinned proudly, tapping the side of his nose. "I requisitioned it from an empty co-working space downtown right after a sudden corporate eviction. Now, Big P, I want you to strap in and test the prototype."
Senior Pocong slowly backed away toward the exit, his bound feet rustling against the linoleum. "Absolutely not. I am an operations lead, not a stunt double for a bad commercial."
"Big P, think about the scalability!" Tama pleaded, stepping forward with outstretched, translucent hands. "Imagine dropping into a high-end corporate office building at midnight, not with an awkward, clunky hop that alerts the security guards, but gliding silently across the polished marble floor at twenty miles per hour on ergonomic caster wheels. It's seamless. It's disruptive."
"It's undignified," Senior Pocong muttered, crossing his tightly wrapped arms across his chest. "My ancestors fought in regional haunt wars without wheels. We used sheer atmospheric dread."
"And look where atmospheric dread got us—bootstrapped and begging the King of Tuyul for pocket change," Tama countered, his tone dropping into sharp, executive seriousness. "The audit is coming up on Friday, Big P. If our fright-to-delivery speed doesn't increase by forty percent, the King’s accountants are going to repossess our cloud servers, and we’ll all be demoted to haunting public restrooms at highway rest stops."
The room went dead silent. Even Kuntilanak lowered her phone, her pale face tightening at the mere mention of highway rest stops. Those places were a wasteland of flickering fluorescent lights and zero Wi-Fi signal.
Senior Pocong let out a long, shuddering sigh that blew a small cloud of ancient graveyard dust across the floorboards. "Highway rest stops... gods above, not the ones on the toll road. The truck drivers there don't even blink when you manifest."
"Exactly. So cooperation isn't optional," Tama said, gesturing toward the rolling chair with a welcoming, corporate-pitch smile. "Now, please. Get in the chair, test the wheels, and let's revolutionize astral mobility together."
Reluctantly, with the crushing weight of a three-hundred-year-old entity forced to embrace corporate agile methodologies, Senior Pocong shuffled forward. He awkwardly lowered his bound, linen-wrapped bulk onto the swivel seat, his stiff shroud bunching up uncomfortably against the plastic backrest.
"My lumbar support is non-existent," Senior Pocong grumbled, adjusting his posture.
"That's just the initial adjustment period," Tama encouraged, grabbing the back of the chair with both hands. "Ready? Three, two, one—disrupt the status quo!"
With a sudden, aggressive shove, Tama sent the chair flying across the breakroom floor.
"Waaah! Wait, too fast! Too fast!" Senior Pocong shrieked, his muffled voice echoing off the concrete walls as the office chair drifted sideways, slammed directly into the vending machine, and bounced off Pak Joko’s desk, sending a tower of unpaid soul-tax notices flying into the air.
"Pivot! Pivot, Big P! Watch out for the water cooler!" Tama yelled, laughing maniacally as he chased after the careening chair with his holographic tablet out to record the telemetry data.
"I'm going to haunt your browser history for a thousand years, Tama!" the Senior Pocong roared, spinning wildly across the room in a blur of rotting linen and plastic caster wheels.
Kuntilanak calmly stepped out of the chair's trajectory, sipping a cup of cold spectral coffee while watching the chaos unfold with an amused smirk. "Honestly, boss? The velocity is giving major main-character energy. Just slap a company logo on the backrest and we can totally make this viral."
Tama watched the speed metrics spike into the green on his screen, a triumphant grin spreading across his translucent face. "See? I told you. Innovation always looks a little chaotic at first. Now, somebody grab the fire extinguisher and reset him for round two. We have a logistics presentation to prep for the Tuyul board by noon."