Surveys say that this is a complicated concept for your spit glob of a brain, so we have designed a metaphor for your consumption. Imagine the entirety of existence is inside a post office. Earth as you know it is a wall of PO boxes, and Hell is everything outside of that. For you, inside your PO boxes, time passes. But for us, on the outside, time doesn’t exist. There’s no aging, no ticking pressure of mortality. No pressure to survive or procreate. Some Fifth Floor employees find it easier to hold on to the loose framework established on the surface, using words like “millennia” to describe the passage of time. This can help some people keep the insanity at bay, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. We are here, doing this, forever. But there is no second death, so we don’t have a choice!

You are all inside time, and we are outside. Got it?

When we get a request on our tablet, the place and time of the request will flash on the screen. When we accept, it is like opening a particular PO box. We are able to go into that time, secure the deal, and then return to our side of the wall. It doesn’t matter what the time is; I rarely pay attention anymore. But it allows for making deals across centuries, granting full and unlimited access to humanity’s gaping pit of need. The only time period we can’t access is the time we were alive. That’s so that we can’t go back and inform ourselves about our inevitable fate, which would cut down on the Hell workforce significantly. But I don’t notice this because I can’t remember when I was alive, and neither can the rest of us. Probably for the best.

So, this girl was upset about maybe not getting into college at some point in time, during which I, as a human, apparently never existed. After about a trillion of these deals, you stop caring about the rest of the details. There are a couple of other points they put in our orientation binder that you should probably know if you want to keep up. I’ll summarize them for you, but just this once.

Deals Department employees are allotted only a certain amount of time per deal. Whenever we select a new deal, the timer will reset, but if we spend too long in one place without signing a deal, our heartbeats (manufactured by the travel device for display only) will slow until the timer stops, and our unconscious sacks will be shipped back down to Hell, where we will be reassigned to the Downstairs immediately. That’s why I watch for symptoms such as weakness, inability to freeze time consistently, and physical pain. If I were to pass out, I’d know it was too late.