Blind Box Office Prank

My team was the only one in the company that hit its performance targets this year. At the year-end party, the boss waited until everyone else had left, then he pulled out a big red box and had the four of us in my team draw blind boxes. I drew a desktop tower caked in dust, an antique that looked like it belonged in a museum. Haley Lambert, my teammate, drew a monitor covered edge to edge in scratches. Drew Sandler got a keyboard with every letter worn clean off the keys. Gabe Carell ended up with a grease-slicked wired mouse. Our boss, Cyrus Griffin, clapped me on the shoulder, grinning drunkenly. "You young people love a blind box, right? It's all about that thrill of not knowing! "Besides, this is exactly the kind of hardware the tech department needs. Consider it motivation." That night, though, his social media told a different story: a photo of our whole team, captioned [Team snags a hundred-thousand-dollar bonus!] I zoomed in. He hadn't even bothered to crop out the AI watermark in the corner. The whole company liked the post. People started messaging me, asking how much I'd actually pocketed, before or after tax. I looked at that junker of a computer and laughed. Since the boss had gone to the trouble of "fully equipping" our team, our next project was obviously going to make "full use" of every last piece of it.