You have already gone through the arduous process of becoming a surgeon. After calling the hospital over and over every day for three weeks straight and praising Tylenol in the deepest voice you could muster to whoever picked up, being hung up on by countless doctors and nurses, you finally hit the big time.

Yesterday, you managed to get the chief of medicine on the line, who offered you a job after a mere 50 minutes of you bellowing to her about the white-and-red pill. Congratulations!

Okay. Being a surgeon is sweet as hell. You get to wear patients’ clothes around a hospital once the chemicals put them to sleep, you can eat as many tortilla chips as you want, and you can hide all of your favorite DVDs and family heirlooms inside toxic waste bins, the one place thieving pricks are too grossed out by to steal from.

Cool. But the best part of being a surgeon, bar none, is that incredible surgeon paycheck.

It’s no secret that surgeons are paid well, as every single day at 8 p.m., hardworking surgeons all over the world reap the fruits of their labor: a plastic bag filled with $600, given to them by their chief of medicine on their way out the door, in addition to a goodnight kiss on the forehead.

Exactly. So now that you’re a surgeon, you better do everything in your power to make it your $600 payday, because there is one universal stipulation that could jam you up: If a surgeon kills someone, everything completely goes to shit.

1) For starters, once a surgeon kills someone, they are NEVER allowed back in a hospital, ever. Even if you just want to go to hang out or to meet new lovers.

2) Your professional reference completely goes out the window. If a new job calls to ask about you, instead of a recommendation, the HR department hands the phone off to the absolute sickest pervert patient they have, and lets them air out whatever they’ve got kickin’ around up in their minds.

3) Lastly—and this one is the worst of all—you don’t get paid a dime, which would mean all of your efforts to become a surgeon were for NOTHING.

So, if you want to get to that sweet paycheck, you’re going to have to make it through one entire day as a surgeon without killing someone.

The hospital. The place where people come when they are bored to take off their pants and scream. This will be your new surgeon home, and today is your first day of work. As far as anyone inside is concerned, you are now a fully qualified surgeon, so if you want those 600 clams, you’re going to have to hold your own and stay off everyone’s radar.

“Please give me a surgery.”

Ah, shit. A sick kid is waiting for you right inside the lobby, and he looks all kinds of fucked up.

“I need a surgery pronto. I am dying, and it feels like none of my bones are connected to my other bones. I also have a rash that comes and goes. Please do surgery to me with your other doctor friends.”

“If you don’t give me a surgery right now, I will scream. I will scream so loud and for so long, and I will point at you the whole time. It will go on for so long that the rest of the doctors here will have no choice but to send you to jail.”

That was close. You’ve pissed your pants real good, and now you’re in the bathroom splashing your pants with water, the best way to clean pants that you’ve urinated in.

“You sure know your way around cleaning a pair of pissed pants, sport. Not bad at all.”

You look over and see that it’s the hospital’s janitor talking to you. He somehow opened the door in perfect silence while you were inside splashing your pants, and has been watching you for upwards of 90 full seconds.

“I’ve been watching you for upwards of 90 full seconds, and I can tell just by looking at you, you’re no surgeon.”

“Easy, easy. I’m not gonna rat you out. I’m gonna help you.

I take it that you’re in here lying to be a surgeon, hoping to get ‘The $600 Bag Treatment,’ huh? Well, you’ve got a friend in me. I’ve seen it before, and I’ll see it again. All you gotta do is make it until 8 p.m. without killing a soul and you’re in the clear. So whadya say you come lay low with me for the rest of the day, spend some time hanging with a new bud so you don’t end up killin’ no one before you get that money?”

“I, uh, how do you mean?” he says, visibly becoming self-conscious about the entire interaction so far. “I’m just tired today, so if I’m acting weird, that’s what that’s about, probably. Allergies are being weird, too.”

“Follow me!” the janitor says before sprinting down the hallway. You do your best to keep up with him as he weaves in and out of patients and doctors before you finally arrive at a huge metal door. He slides open the rusty door to reveal a set of long, winding stairs that lead to a dark, desolate basement, and turns to you with a half smile.

“It’s not delivery, it’s DiGiorno,” he says before letting out a quick, uncertain laugh, looking over his shoulder at you to kind of check in and see if you’re laughing or anything at what must have been some sort of joke.

“That was dumb, never mind,” the janitor says, shaking his head as his shoulders slump, trying to explain his joke before slowly progressing into full-blown self-deprecation. “I was thinking, like, how in the old commercials, I’d be the delivery guy and you’re the pizza—I don’t know, forget it. It was dumb. Sorry.”

You follow the janitor down the stairs and into the basement of the hospital, and lo and behold, it’s a full-blown bachelor’s pad! The janitor has stocked the place with some of the best things: a ping-pong table, a “Forever 27” poster, an old-timey popcorn machine, and a bunch of orange pill bottles filled with Frosted Cheerios.

“This is my chill zone. I’m down here almost all the time, which is why the hospital is filthy and patients always seem to get sick immediately after they get better.”

“We got all day, brother, so we could either sit down and talk about that important-looking guitar I have mounted on the wall over there, or we could stand near the stairs and wonder if Slash has ever signed a guitar and sold it for $20,000 online before, or maybe we could lay down on the ground and trade stories about the most expensive thing we’ve ever mounted on a wall. Your call.”

“I can’t lift my arms above my waist because of a power-washer accident.”

“You got a good eye, kid,” he says as though you brought it up completely unprompted, proudly looking up at the guitar he somehow mounted unnecessarily high on his wall.

“Believe it or not, Slash signed that guitar, and I was lucky enough to spend all of the money I have on it. I usually don’t do this for anyone, but for you, I’ll climb all the way up there and get it if you want to hold it.”

“I’d climb anywhere for one of my boys.”

“I’ll put a very wet towel over them. I’m sure that will be fine.”

As you go back up the stairs and start heading toward the lobby, you can hear that he starts to follow you, but then locks himself in the bathroom you were in earlier and begins screaming at himself in the mirror for messing up what could’ve been a nice day. His screaming gets louder and louder before it comes to a halt after you hear the sound of him snapping his mop over his knee in fury.

“I need you to give me a surgery right now.”

Ah, damn. It’s the sick kid from earlier.

“I feel like I’m on a boat at all hours of the day, and my elbows are dry. I need you to cut me open and drain me out, if that’s what it takes, and to please get me home by later today.”

You pick the kid up, throw him over your shoulder, and walk through the hospital looking for a good room to cut him open in. After 20 minutes, you finally find the room with all of the surgeons in it, and you slam the kid down on the empty table they’re all staring at.

Now all eyes are on you. You’re going to have to step up and say something pretty incredible to get all of these surgeons on your side.

Everyone starts nodding and smiling and patting each other on the back. Good shit.

“Ha, nice,” a woman says, whose voice you recognize from the phone as the chief of medicine at the hospital. She quickly anesthetizes the patient to finally stop him from grabbing and clawing at everyone’s surgical masks, and within seconds the little spaz is sleeping.

At that moment, the tallest doctor you’ve ever seen walks into the door wearing a backwards hat and confidently drinking Barq’s Root Beer out of a 2-liter bottle.

“I’ve never seen you around here,” he says after putting the root beer down firmly into the lap of the unconscious kid and eyeing you up and down suspiciously. “Enlighten us, fresh meat. Now, what surgery are we performing on this little man, exactly?”

Ah, this guy is onto you. Need something big here to throw everyone off your tracks.

“Doctors, you two can be mean to each other in the parking lot all day long if you want to, but that’ll be enough fighting in my hospital,” says the chief of medicine after banging her fist down onto the kid’s chest like a gavel to get everyone’s attention.

“This little boy is in dire need of a heart transplant. We need to start immediately.”

“Doctors, that’ll be enough talk about whether or not there are actually types of surgeries or not, because there simply is not a correct answer,” says the chief of medicine after banging her fist down onto the kid’s chest like a gavel to get everyone’s attention.

“This little boy is in dire need of a heart transplant. We need to start immediately.”

“Doctors, please stop winking at each other,” says the chief of medicine after banging her fist down onto the kid’s chest like a gavel to get everyone’s attention.

“This little boy is in dire need of a heart transplant. We need to start immediately.”

After noticing that no one is reacting to you pissing yourself, you look around and realize that every surgeon in the room has also already pissed themselves. Then you remember that surgeons are constantly pissing themselves during surgery, like bicyclists during races, for reasons completely unknown.

The chief of medicine takes out a toolbox from underneath the surgery-room sink and hands each surgeon a tool. She takes each tool out one by one and starts passing them down the line. One doctor gets a small shovel, one gets a large knife, another gets a pickax, and on and on it goes, until you finally end up with the flashlight!

“Um, yeah, that’s my flashlight, pal. I’m always the flashlight man around here,” says the root-beer doctor.

“No,” interjects the chief. “New guy can hold the flashlight today. I have a good feeling about this.”

Your new rival is stunned. He shoots you a dirty look, threateningly crosses his thumb over his neck, and then does it again with his other thumb, but slower. Then he quietly mouths something that you didn’t really get a good read on, but from what you did see, your best guess is that he was saying something like “Fracking mountains,” or “Simply delicious.” Then he is handed the worst tool: the blood napkin, the tool that wipes up all the loose goo and pus.

“Ah, c’mon, man. Quit it. What the hell.”

The surgery is now well under way. The chief is slicing and dicing and moving parts around left and right. It’s pretty much a one-woman show.

Most of the other doctors are using their tools just to kind of scrape some bones and stuff when they feel like they should get in the mix, usually after not doing anything for a couple minutes straight and getting nervous that someone will notice how they’re not really that crucial to the operation.

You’re getting bored by the whole thing at this point, but at least you’re holding your own with these docs and, most importantly, haven’t killed anyone yet.

Surgery still going. Getting kind of repetitive. A couple doctors shuffled out for a minute and came back with crackers, but the crackers are all gone now. You didn’t even notice they had crackers until there were only, like, four left in the sleeve, so at that point, asking for some really wouldn’t have been cool.

Surgery is getting boring.

Surgery is boring as hell.Your arms got tired from holding the flashlight up, so you put it down for a minute and no one seemed to notice. You’re back up now.

Kid woke up and started screaming LOUD, but now he’s sleeping again.

“You were scared!” “No, you were scared!” “I wasn’t scared, you were scared!” The surgeons are all ragging on each other and having fun again. Finally got some juice in the room. Whole crew got a good laugh out of that one.

Woah, wait a minute. Oh, man. You see something inside the kid’s body. Wedged deep in between his rib cage and his liver, there looks to be something shining and throbbing, and you’re pretty sure you’re the only one who sees it.

Two doctors broke away from the surgery about 15 minutes ago to arm wrestle on a nearby stool, and the rest of the surgeons have all one-by-one walked over to form a circle around them so they can gamble. Meanwhile, the chief is still hacking away at this kid’s organs with all of her might, and seems way too dialed-in to notice the game changer you’ve found.

“Those are veins. They are not ‘evil copper and metals sticking out of this poor bastard’s guts.’ Do not call them that.”

Damn. Misread that one. The chief is totally onto you now.

“But I appreciate you speaking your mind when you think something is amiss,” she continues, looking up and making eye contact with you for the first time. “That takes a commitment to the job that some of my other doctors lack at times,” she says, motioning to the doctors across the room who are now attempting to disguise their arm-wrestling gambling ring by draping a hospital gown over the two meaty, dueling arms.

The chief reciprocates your unblinking eye contact and begins nodding in perfect unison with your nodding. This goes on for a good 20 seconds or so, the grunts of the two arm wrestlers and the slaps of cold, hard cash hitting the tile becoming the only sounds in the room.

At that moment, you and the chief simultaneously feel a romantic charge between you, and it feels beautiful and right. But that romantic feeling is immediately followed by a simultaneous paternal feeling, but it’s unclear who is the parent and who is the child. Then the two feelings of physical attraction and familial protectiveness fuse together into one singular emotion, and it feels disgusting to both of you.

“Yeah, yeah, go catch up with them. I’ll hold it down over here, cool,” the chief kind of half-mutters to herself and to you while shaking her head and getting back to surgery.

You walk over to the gambling circle and see the two exhausted surgeons pulling and pushing as hard as they can to win. The two doctors are so evenly matched that their arms aren’t moving or shaking in the slightest. If it weren’t for the veins about to explode out of their temples and the tears streaming down their faces, you’d have no idea how intense the duel was.

All of the other surgeons are quietly going apeshit. Almost all of them are either gently pounding their chests, gingerly slapping the ground, or shaking their fists in the air, all the while whispering bad arm-wrestling advice like “Win the skin!” or “Make him smooth!”

It’s definitely a pretty sweet scene, and you decide that you want to get in the mix.

As you go to ask the doctor next to you, your rival doctor steps in front and interrupts:

“Looking to get in on the action but lacking the funds, newbie? Don’t worry, fresh meat. I got you covered. Also, we’re rival doctors, just in case that wasn’t clear.”

Whoa, pretty cool to get a rival doctor on your first day on the job. That probably usually takes years.

“That’s my coat over there,” he says, pointing to a white lab coat being worn by one of the arm-wrestling surgeons. “Go ahead and take my wallet out of the pocket and take out as much money as you want.”

He then lets out a weird little laugh and looks around to see if anyone else is laughing. One other doctor did laugh, but he’s in the middle of a conversation with another surgeon, so you’re pretty sure the laugh had nothing to do with your rival.

“I have coats all over this hospital that you wouldn’t know a thing about,” he says, raising his fist up to your chin real quick, trying to get you to flinch. You stand your ground and don’t flinch at all, though, and he sheepishly brings his fist back down to his side.

“I, uh, good then,” he stutters as he blushes and looks at the ground. It seems like he didn’t anticipate you saying no, and definitely didn’t prepare a casual way out of his offer.

“I, ah, I’m glad you don’t want my money because now, um, I can use it to buy you some real surgeon clothes. Because you don’t even look like you belong here, in this hospital.”

Feels like your rival doesn’t realize he just offered to buy you new clothes in a roundabout attempt at insulting you.

“Yeah, I know, bro. You would look great, wouldn’t you?”

The confidence has returned to his voice, and he’s standing up really straight again, which pretty much cements your hunch that he thinks his insults are landing perfectly.

At that moment the hospital bell rings. Everyone in the surgery room immediately puts down whatever they’re doing and starts heading toward the door. You look at the clock on the wall, and it reads 5:30 p.m., the time of day surgeons eat a meal, and only two and a half hours before you get your paws on that paycheck.

“We’ll pick this one up tomorrow,” the chief barks as she tosses her blood-soaked toolbox into the sink and beelines out the door toward the cafeteria. Everyone nods and follows her out of the room.

Right as you start violently shaking the heavily sedated kid to see if he wants a bite, you hear a familiar voice coming from the doorway of the surgery room.

“You were right not to take money out of that coat.” You turn around to see that it’s the janitor.

He’s leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and one foot planted behind him on the doorframe. He would actually look pretty cool, but he’s taking up the whole doorway, and is unknowingly blocking out one of the surgeons who was just in here and is trying to get back in to grab the backpack he forgot. The janitor starts to say something to you, but before he can get too much out, the surgeon behind him taps him on the shoulder and tells him he’s in the way, and the janitor is pretty apologetic.

It’s completely silent while the surgeon looks around for his backpack, and you and the janitor each quietly look at your feet for a while. After a good couple of minutes, the surgeon finally finds his bag and leaves without saying anything. Then the janitor starts his speech again, but is definitely less energetic than before.

“Anyway, I, uh. What was I…um, yeah, that coat from before. That belonged to one of the arm-wrestling docs. I watched the whole surgery, and I saw him take it off. If I had to guess, I’d say your rival was sabotaging you. Trying to make you give the doc a heart attack while his blood pressure was so high, completely killing your chances at that paycheck.”

You start looking for some sweet latex gloves in the cabinets above the sink, and then you hear a familiar voice coming from the doorway of the surgery room.

“You were right not to take money out of that coat.” You turn around to see that it’s the janitor.

He’s leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and one foot planted behind him on the doorframe. He would actually look pretty cool, but he’s taking up the whole doorway, and is unknowingly blocking out one of the surgeons who was just in here and is trying to get back in to grab the backpack he forgot. The janitor starts to say something to you, but before he can get too much out, the surgeon behind him taps him on the shoulder and tells him he’s in the way, and the janitor is pretty apologetic.

It’s completely silent while the surgeon looks around for his backpack, and you and the janitor each quietly look at your feet for a while. After a good couple of minutes, the surgeon finally finds his bag and leaves without saying anything. Then the janitor starts his speech again, but is definitely less energetic than before.

“Anyway, I, uh. What was I…um, yeah, that coat from before. That belonged to one of the arm-wrestling docs. I watched the whole surgery, and I saw him take it off. If I had to guess, I’d say your rival was sabotaging you. Trying to make you give the doc a heart attack while his blood pressure was so high, completely killing your chances at that paycheck.”

You go to rinse the blood and gunk off your hands before you eat, and then you hear a familiar voice coming from the doorway of the surgery room.

“You were right not to take money out of that coat.” You turn around to see that it’s the janitor.

He’s leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and one foot planted behind him on the doorframe. He would actually look pretty cool, but he’s taking up the whole doorway, and is unknowingly blocking out one of the surgeons who was just in here and is trying to get back in to grab the backpack he forgot. The janitor starts to say something to you, but before he can get too much out, the surgeon behind him taps him on the shoulder and tells him he’s in the way, and the janitor is pretty apologetic.

It’s completely silent while the surgeon looks around for his backpack, and you and the janitor each quietly look at your feet for a while. After a good couple of minutes, the surgeon finally finds his bag and leaves without saying anything. Then the janitor starts his speech again, but is definitely less energetic than before.

“Anyway, I, uh. What was I…um, yeah, that coat from before. That belonged to one of the arm-wrestling docs. I watched the whole surgery, and I saw him take it off. If I had to guess, I’d say your rival was sabotaging you. Trying to make you give the doc a heart attack while his blood pressure was so high, completely killing your chances at that paycheck.”

“I was gonna ask if you wanted to watch The Transporter in a sleeping patient’s room, but you looked busy.”

It looks like the janitor has more to say, because he’s excitedly smiling and looking right at you, but he doesn’t say anything and it’s weird as hell. It starts to piss you off, so you take out your phone and just scroll through some old texts.

“So listen, now that you’re free,” the janitor finally says after a few minutes, “what do you say we take another crack at this hangout and see if we can illuminate this friendship?”

“To make bright.”

Interesting. Janitor doesn’t know how to use the word “illuminate.”

“Oh, hell yeah!” the janitor screams before jumping up in the air and trying unsuccessfully to kick his heels together. Then he touches them while standing on the ground.

“I know just the place to take you this time. Follow me!”

You follow the janitor as he sprints down the hallway, weaving in and out of patients and doctors, and then out of an emergency exit that for some reason doesn’t sound an alarm.

“None of the fire alarms here work because I took all of their batteries home to study them!” he screams at you after stopping and turning to face you once you’re both outside. You tell him how that is probably a bad idea and he immediately apologizes, and then you tell him he doesn’t have to apologize to you for that.

He nods and starts sprinting away again, now along the side of the hospital toward the back parking lot.

You keep running along the building, and then the janitor suddenly opens a backdoor to the hospital and bolts through it. You follow him inside, down another long stretch of hallway, and then right past the cafeteria. Your rival surgeon and his crew of his surgeon cronies stand up at their table and boo you when they see you running by.

Nice. You keep running, and after going in that big circle along the same route four full times, the janitor finally comes to a stop outside of the gift shop and points at it.

“This is my spot,” he says, his arm still fully extended toward the gift-shop sign overhead. “It’s practically like a second home to me.”

“They let me sit on a folding chair in the middle of the circular shirt rack if I promise to be quiet.”

You walk inside the gift shop with the janitor, and it actually turns out to have some pretty awesome stuff: a fridge with neon green light around the edges stocked with Rockstar energy drink, snow globes with empty hospital beds inside them, and hats that just say “FLUIDS” in huge yellow letters. Not to mention organ-themed playing cards, premade sandwiches for sale in a big bin near the window, and shirts that say “THIS IS WHY I CAME TO THE HOSPITAL” with an arrow pointing at the crotch.

“Take a load off, brother,” the janitor says, struggling to set up a folding chair he keeps under the fridge and is carrying over toward you.

“By the way, allow me to introduce you to my boy, Brian,” the janitor continues, gesturing to a very small man behind the counter you didn’t notice when you first walked in. The little man is flashing you an insincere smile and is wearing a big, ill-fitting suit. He has his arms smugly crossed, his just-a-little-too-long fingernails clearly visible on the fingers creeping out from under his armpits.

You know immediately that you don’t like this dude and he doesn’t like you.

“He doesn’t talk much, but me and him go way back,” adds the janitor. “We saw Petty together last summer, and we once shaved each other’s heads.”

“He’s never hungry, so don’t even bother feeding him,” the janitor quickly responds. Brian looks a little bummed by the janitor’s intervention for a second, but then goes back to giving you the stink eye.

“Anyway, bro, what do you want to do? We got this whole place to ourselves, and it’s pretty decked out. Pick your poison.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I can’t lift my hands above my waist because of a power-washer accident.”

“You read my mind, cuzzo. I have one jar of peanut butter back in the basement we can dual-finger from, let me go grab it. And after this, it looks like you’ve pretty much sealed the deal for your $600, my man. I’ll be right back.”

Wow, the janitor’s right. It’s already 7:50 p.m., and you’ve managed to not kill anyone all day. Just 10 more minutes and you’ve made it.

After the janitor takes off to grab his peanut butter, you walk over to Brian, who’s still giving you a bad vibe.

You ask him what’s up and he doesn’t answer, so you do it four more times after that, each time louder and closer to his face than the last. After all that, he still doesn’t move or talk, and it’s starting to piss you off.

Now you’re determined to do whatever it takes to get this guy to talk.

Brian shakes his head, takes his shirt off, and hands it to you. Then he starts banging his fist on the counter until you give it back. You hand it back, he puts it back on, and continues to stare at you. Got nothing.

Brian sneezes three times straight without covering his mouth and frowns. Still nothing.

“Now we’re on the same page,” Brian excitedly declares in a booming voice much lower than you anticipated, finally breaking his mysterious silence. He uncrosses his arms and shakes your hand.

“Maybe I was wrong about you, doc,” he says. “You seem all right to me.”

Good shit. Brian likes you now.

The moment you pour the trail mix into Brian’s hand, he pops it all back in one motion and immediately starts choking. It honestly looks like he’s never chewed before, the way he just tossed the food all haphazardly right into his esophagus. It looked so dumb. Now he’s stumbling around while grabbing at his throat and pounding on his chest. At that moment, the janitor walks back in, sees what’s happening, and drops his jar of peanut butter in shock.

“You fed him! Why would you feed him! He mostly likes juice and very thin pastes because of how bad he chews! Shit!” the janitor screams. “Do something!”

You look at the clock on the wall, and it reads 7:57 p.m. Ah, damn. If this guy croaks, that paycheck is gone.

Brian is choking so bad his shoes have somehow fallen off. Now he’s shuffling side to side like a basketball player warming up, and the janitor is trying to get him to sit down in his folding chair.

“Do something!” the janitor keeps yelling. “C’mon!”

You decide to check your phone for help, and while you’re looking through Google searches for “trail mix choke how stop” and the janitor is trying to get the trail mix out of Brian’s throat by stuffing more trail mix down to try to push it all through, you hear a voice come from the doorway.

“There you are, doctor. I’ve been looking all over for you, and it’s time for y—what the hell is happening here??”

Oh no. It’s the chief, and she’s holding a BIG plastic bag filled with $600 with your name written on it in huge green marker.

Once she realizes what’s going on, she crosses her arms with your plastic bag in hand, sternly waiting for you to fix this before handing over your money.

Okay. Game time.

The shoe hits Brian pretty hard, clean on his shin and he looks pissed-off about it. Both he and the janitor stop panicking for a second and look at you like you’re being a dick.

“What the hell, man,” the janitor mutters to himself.

Damn. No luck.

Yes! You hit Brian directly in the stomach on that one! Bullseye! He falls over and grabs his belly, but he’s definitely continuing to choke, so it looks like you didn’t really knock the trail mix loose or anything. Also, after this second shoe throw, Brian looks more sad than mad, and the janitor is kind of disappointingly shaking his head.

A few seconds go by, and even after Brian’s stomach feels better, he continues to lie down on the floor because he’s losing so much blood flow to his brain. He’s choking real good now, and it looks like Brian is going to die at any moment.

You get one last crack at this.