Processing a client at the Department of Death
From the pneumatic tube to the signed travel package.
The case
Manny Calavera’s job at the Department of Death is, on paper, straightforward. A client arrives. You assess their life record. You assign them a travel package proportional to how they lived. You process the paperwork. You do it again.
The job is supposed to be a kind of cosmic justice made administrative — a good life gets an express ticket, a complicated life gets a longer road. The system is not arbitrary. It is meant to be fair.
What Manny eventually discovers is that the routine is being corrupted at the source. Premium clients — the ones who earned the Number Nine — are being diverted before they reach his tube. He gets the leftovers. His numbers look bad. His commission suffers. And somewhere upstream, someone is selling what should have been given freely.
The routine itself is not the problem. A repeatable work workflow functions correctly until it doesn’t, and when it stops functioning correctly, the workflow is the first place to look — not because the workflow is broken, but because the workflow is the thing that makes the anomaly visible. If you run the same process the same way every time and one day the output stops making sense, something outside the process has changed. That is useful information.
Manny’s mistake, for a while, is assuming the process is the problem. It isn’t. The process is fine. It is being sabotaged by someone who understood it well enough to interfere with it invisibly. You cannot detect that kind of interference without first knowing exactly what the process is supposed to look like.
Run the routine. Learn what normal is. Then you will know when something isn’t.
Grim Fandango: Client Intake
- Check the pneumatic tube for new client assignments. The tube delivers your next case automatically. If nothing arrives, your file is being skimmed upstream. That is a separate problem.
- Review the client file. Name, manner of death, life record. The life record determines what package they qualify for. Read it before they sit down, not during.
- Punch your deck of cards and prepare the hole card. Standard procedure. The card interfaces with the message tube system. Do this before going to collect the client.
- Collect the client from the waiting area. They are confused. They are always confused. Keep moving.
- Seat the client and explain where they are. Land of the Dead. End of their natural life. Beginning of their journey to the Ninth Underworld. Keep it brief. They will have questions. Answer the relevant ones.
- Run the travel assessment. The system matches the client's life record to available packages. A good life earns express travel. A complicated life earns a longer route. If the system returns no package, check the life record again. Something is wrong upstream.
- Present the appropriate package. Number Nine train for premium souls. Everything else gets the walking route with varying degrees of assistance. Do not editorialize. Present the package the system assigned.
- Complete the paperwork. Sign-off from the client. File the copy. Pass the original to Eva.
- Escort the client to their departure point. They will want to linger. Keep moving.
- Return to your office and wait for the next assignment. If no new assignment arrives within a reasonable window, your client pipeline has been interfered with. See @6 — the problem is not the system, it is someone manipulating the system.
Make it yours
Step two is the one that determines everything downstream. A client whose life record has been tampered with will be assessed incorrectly and assigned the wrong package. You will not know this has happened. The system will behave normally. The error is invisible from inside the process.
This is also why step six matters more than it appears to. If the system consistently returns no package for clients who should qualify, the issue is not technical. Someone is intercepting the good cases before they reach your tube. Note it. Build a pattern. The pattern is evidence.
The intake routine itself is not complicated. It is the same sequence every time, for every client, regardless of who they were in life. The complications arrive when the routine is being interfered with from outside — which, in this building, is more common than the management would like you to know.
Once the routine is automatic, you will notice when something is off. A client who should qualify but doesn't. A file that has been too recently updated. An assignment that arrives without a life record attached. The routine is also a detection instrument. Run it the same way every time and the anomalies become visible.