Paula went to her friends university to find out more about that thing being prepared for the eighteenth of June. She went through reception. From then on, she had to pretend she was a student. There were some men on high visibility suits building something next to the entrance. She realised they were workers installing barriers and she guessed it would not be long before she could not come here again without some magnetic and valid pass. She now knew her way to the computer room.

She sat on one of the terminals. She input her friend’s user name and password. She was getting faster with the keyboards. She typed the address. A long one. No-one cool had a short internet address those days. When the page loaded completely, she only found vague directions. Nothing useful. Long texts on why capitalism is bad for you. She already knew that. She wanted to find out where she could meet the people who were planning on “doing something” on that day. She wanted to have the kind of conversations she had been having in the basement shop while volunteering, with Salva, with Jose, with Luna. She wanted to make sense of the world again.

But there was nothing there other than a meeting point on the day. It was the 18th of June. A weekday. Right in the middle of the period where, she was told, it was not allowed to have a holiday because the office was so busy. So she was not going to be able to attend. So she needed more information, where could she find those people that was not on that precise day.

The address was long. Some times, it worked to take off bits of the address, get other associated pages. She took off bits. Blank pages; no one had placed any page on those addresses. Finally, when she got to the “root” of it, she got the hosting company. They accepted volunteers. Great. She found a contact address. With her brand new email address, got with the help of the same people who had granted her access to those computers, she wrote to them. She would volunteer for these people who were assisting those anticapitalists.

She wrote them an email.

The answer arrive a few days later, although Paula could only read it the following week, the next time she could get hold of a computer with an internet connection.

Dear Paula,
You are most to come visit us for an interview, and to volunteer with us should you decide to. Our working hours are 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. Please let us know when would suit you within those hours.

Monday to Friday 9 to 5. Those were Paula’s working hours too. For the first and last time ever, after leaving the types of work she had done in pubs and restaurants, Paula wished she was still in one of them. How could they expect lots of people to volunteer, Paula wondered, if they only accepted volunteers “during office hours”?

No mention of the eighteenth of June, either. That seemed like a dead end. And the website itself continued to give any more information than a meeting point in the city, at a time when Paula did not feel she could be anywhere else than at her own job. She could not afford to loose that job, however alienated she felt in the office every day.