tab assumptions

Mr. Gillan, the manager of the phone sales company, works three shifts in that position at the same place. He abuses middling-classy uppers such as coke in order to get more day in his day. He has bennies because he's employed enough hours at that job that it's required, but he's the only one who works that many hours at that location and thus the only one with health insurance and other such assistances at the entire facility. He strongly believes this is because he has put in the effort and earned that, and that any worthy person could. If he's not a eugenics believer, he's primed for it and could come to believe it in the wrong company.
Apollonia has read Anne of Green Gables. The room-length mirror makes her think of Katie Maurice, from Anne of Green Gables.
Tabex was originally supposed to be a new pharmaceutical for inducing labor. As such, pregnant woman should not take Tabex. But that's okay, nobody can afford to take time off work to have kids anyway; too much time, too expensive, so the additional need to not use other bodies is sort of moot.
Abusing large amounts of Tabex does result in having more bodies, but results in nausea, vomiting, cramping, etc. in the body which takes it.

[4:55 PM] macksting: Looks like I'm putting Katie Maurice into a novella.
[4:56 PM] macksting: See, Frank's apartment has a long mirror. Those used to be expensive as heck, but something something space folding involving time-diamonds makes moving them cheap, he doesn't pretend to understand, so now it's a feature of his low rent apartment which he's able to afford because he works three jobs.
[4:57 PM] macksting: For his part, he thinks of a Ballard story called Billenium when he sees it, and about cramped quarters; the opposite of its intended effect. But Apollonia, his girlfriend, finally gets to visit his apartment, and it makes her think of Katie Maurice, Anne's imaginary friend when she lived with the Thomas family.
[4:59 PM] macksting: So here he is on the bus. He alt-tabs to this body, heading to its job, when he sees Laurie, a coworker who he gets along with really well, looking really sad, even like she's grieving. She's staring at her phone, which isn't abnormal, but what's weird is that she's present in this body, on the bus, instead of using another body to go shopping or work another job. She laughs a little and he realizes she's reading on her phone. On the bus.
Nobody does that.
So he asks what she's reading, and she's really embarrassed, because the fact that she's reading on the bus actually means she has an invisible disability.
[5:00 PM] macksting: But he comes to find out she's reading Anne of Green Gables, and she's at the part with Katie Maurice.

The bodies individually need sleep. Many of the autonomic functions of the brain fail to operate properly without sleep. If a brain's ability to create memories is disrupted, such as by a concussion, that brain won't be able to access the memories; the only way to keep an internal log is to tab out and think about it.
The condition of an alt has an ontological inertia. An exhausted alt is exhausted, while the mind that occupied it only experiences that exhaustion when tabbed into that alt. It's easy and not uncommon for all three alts to be at differing levels of exhaustion, and the mind itself is not really designed to handle a complete lack of rest; rest, time to oneself, is squirrelled away from other tasks. Sitting at a desk on the job dicking around becomes, in many ways, a matter of life or death; not getting caught skiving off is crucial to the simple matter of getting by, and the effort is both necessary and admirable. It's also absolutely at odds with the employers.