Making your presence known / Box elder bug

Every morning when you scan your work ID at the front desk of the office building you work in the computer shoots a beam of light across the image of your face and translates it into a series of 1s and 0s that updates the database of the human resources department that keeps track of the days the computer has recognized that same combination of 1s and 0s and uses that information to determine whether or not the company will pay you on the day when you fly home for thanksgiving to visit your grandmother in the nursing home and each day that same combination of 1s and 0s is recognized by the aforementioned database it enters an "X" in an algorithm that tabulates 3.5% of your next maximum pay raise by means of counting all the "X"s you've generated since your last performance review and plotting the sum on a bell curve that represents the statistical average of all the "X"s of all the combinations of 1s and 0s across the country and if a certain predesignated pattern of 1s and 0s and "X"s is maintained over the course of a predesignated period of time a signal is sent to a supercomputer that's kept in a cool cave 3 miles directly below Mount Rushmore that triggers an alarm that notifies the executive director of pattern notification to activate the transponder on a spaceship orbiting mercury that's housing two eccentric and brilliant men who made a bet regarding the feasibility of that particular pattern of 1s, 0s, and "X"s ever arising where the loser agrees to let the winner wear his lucky space pants whenever he chooses where the one man called "Mitchell" said it couldn't be done while the other man who goes by "Smedley" believes it just may one day happen and is fully aware that the future of his beloved space pants ultimately rides on not only your work attendance but whether or not you can manage to remember your work ID when you walk out of your apartment because if you forget your ID and instead notify your employer of your attendance via a manual keypad entry by a member of front desk security or your office manager the computer doesn't get to shoot a beam of light across the image of your face and never sends the series of 1s or 0s and while the "X" is still added to the bell curve by means of an alternate security camera monitoring system all bets are off regarding the space men's space pants so the ship's homing beacon device is activated that initiates the automatic countdown to their vessel's return voyage to whenst they came.