When TWO of my job managers said, proudly, “The State Department called and asked us to give information about you — and we REFUSED to do it,” I thought I was about to be celebrated like HERO.
Elliot puffed out his chest like he’d single-handedly saved the world.
Mara slapped the table like she’d foiled an international heist.
“We protect our people,” they said.
I smiled nervously. “Cool… I guess?”
Little did I know, that heroic refusal would turn me into a ghost, haunting every company I ever worked for, every country I had lived in, and eventually, Patrick and his entire network of crazy professional detectives.
Chapter 1 — The Ghost Emerges
See, I come from a country where the government’s idea of record-keeping is:
- Scribble it down somewhere
- Forget where
- Hope someone remembers
So when the U.S. State Department asked for my background, they got:
- a fax machine that didn’t work
- a coffee stain
- and a note that said, “Try again next year”
Two days after my managers “intelligent” refused to cooperate, my badge at work stopped working.
The badge is unrecognizable.
It looked like it was silently messing around:
“VETTING FAILED. PLEASE REBOOT EMPLOYEE.”
And just like that, I was out of my dream job.
No scandal. No accusations.
Just… ghosted by the system.
Chapter 2 — Enter Patrick and the Network of Whisperers
I landed at “Whoknows”, a company that hires people the world forgot existed.
And that’s where I met Patrick — a coworker with a flair for drama, a love for conspiracy, and a network of colleagues who treated him like a human rumor mill.
Patrick’s network included:
- Trish, who sees secrets behind every stapler
- Gavin, who Googles until he convinces himself he’s in a spy movie
- Lily, who nods like everything is a classified plot twist
When Patrick heard about my “mysterious exit” from my previous job, he declared me off the grid.
Not a spy. Not a villain.
Just… a walking, talking, unverified file.
Patrick leaned in, eyes wide:
“Were you… agent-adjacent?”
“No,” I said. “I’m potato-adjacent.”
Trish gasped.
Gavin wrote notes.
Lily gave a slow, approving nod.
And that was the moment I realized: paranoia is contagious.
Chapter 3 — The Impossible Vetting
The truth? Vetting me was impossible.
Why? Because my jobs and countries of origin are all spectacularly unhelpful when it comes to bureaucracy:
- Some governments treat archives like piñatas: destroy one, confuse the next.
- Some countries collapse periodically (politically, economically, morally).
- Some still run on Windows 95 and have servers that die if you blink at them wrong.
- Some literally cannot send you a criminal background check without someone finding a chicken on the server.
Good people don’t deserve suspicion, but the system punishes them anyway.
Missing information = assumed danger.
No records = conspiracy.
Uncooperative governments = personal fault.
Meanwhile, Patrick’s network treated my paperwork absence like a blockbuster plot twist.
Chapter 4 — Patrick’s Network at Work
Patrick and crew dissected me like a Netflix mystery series, including tape recordings
- My coffee-sipping habits? “Secret code.”
- My accent? “International espionage confirmed.”
- My laptop? “Could be a portal for classified files.”
Every silence, every shrug, every blink was catalogued, cross-referenced, and theorized about.
I was a ghost.
A human question mark.
And Patrick? He was the lead detective in the trial that never existed.
Chapter 5 — The Comedy of Ethics
Here’s the line:
Immigration systems demand perfection from a world that is chaotic, messy, absurd, and prone to coffee-stained paperwork.
Good people like me get haunted not for what we did, but because governments .
Patrick and his network? They only magnified the absurdity.
And the system? It doesn’t even realize it’s punishing “the horror” people that doesn’t exist.
Refusal to share information isn’t loyalty.
It’s turning people into ghosts.
And ghosts are hard to explain to networks of crazy detectives.
Chapter 6 — Moral of the Comedy
So now I walk the fine line between laughter and despair:
- I am a ghost in all my countries
- Ghost in my former jobs
- Ghost in Patrick’s network’s imagination
And every day, I remind myself:
Vetting is impossible.
Good people are not guilty.
Missing information is not a crime.
And bureaucracy… will always be funnier than reality.
Someday, maybe the system will change.
Someday, Patrick will discover I’m not a spy.
Someday, my badge will be a happy living instead of surviving .
Until then, I remain:
A ghost to all my countries and jobs,
haunting the halls of bureaucracy,
dodging conspiracy,
and sipping my coffee like a perfectly mundane human being.