Thursday, August 19, 2010

A Day In The Life - 8/19: A Mystery Solved

As mentioned earlier, I take walks at work to break up my day. Sometimes I walk the neighborhood but often I just do a lap around the complex where I work.
Back on the far side of my work complex I would see this truck parked behind the offices. At first I paid little attention. The sign on the door of the truck read, "Research Recovery Institute". Sounded quite boring, actually. Probably recovered crashed hard drives or something like that. Then I began to notice that there was a subscript below the main title - "Memorializing Your Loved Ones."
What? How does "Research Recovery" and "Memorialize Your Loved Ones" go together? I chewed on how those go together for days like a dog with a bone but could come to no satisfactory conclusion to the matter. I puzzled and puzzled until my puzzler was sore. I thought that, perhaps, it was genealogical / family tree research for deceased family members, perhaps. But things still did not quite add up for me.
When I could stand it no longer, I put the puzzle to some of my co-workers. They suggested that such a non-descriptive name just had to be one of those places where CIA or Mafia people use as job fronts and below this one-story building was a thirteen story basement with massive computers and research labs for new exotic equipment. We had some good laughs but still no good answers to the puzzle.
Finally, today as I was taking a stroll down at that end of the complex I just walked into the front door of the office and asked the receptionist what their company did. I was really concerned, though. The layout could have come right out of James Bond. The reception area was paneled in wood with a single receptionist desk and no way to see beyond to gather a clue as to what sort of business was being done, nor were there any plaques or pictures on the walls. It could be a CIA dummy office.
The fun thing was that the answer was just as intriguing as if it had been a spy front. She said that she wondered how long it would be before someone asked what her company did. She told me that the company provided cadavers to medical and research schools and facilities. Now THAT answer would have been scraping the bottom of my guess list. Well I wasn't hanging around there just in case they were short a body that day!

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