Office

The Newest Act In The Modern Circus

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Todd, phone to his ear, rifled through a stack of papers. When he found the one he needed, he glanced at his boss’ open door across the room and decided he could probably land it on his desk as a paper airplane.

As he folded, the hold music on the other line disappeared. The chipper voice was deafening after the tinny music. “Hello! Thank you for waiting. How can I help you today?”

“Hi.” Todd shifted the phone to his other ear. “I’m calling to check on the status of an order that was due last week but hasn’t been marked as shipped yet.”

“Ah, let me transfer you to our shipping department!”

“They just-” The hold music started playing again and Todd sighed as he tossed the folded report through the air onto his boss’ desk. Howard, also on the phone, quirked an eyebrow at Todd who shrugged as he turned his attention back to the email he’d been writing when Howard had asked for the report.

As he wrapped that up, a delivery woman stepped out of the stairwell. Todd flagged her down and pointed toward the meeting room next to Howard’s office. When she hesitated at the door, Todd called out “just go in. It’s just a group project.”

Todd shifted his attention back to his inbox before the woman had even touched the doorknob and started sorting through the messages that were piling up while he was stuck on the phone.

Instead of answering any of them, he took a moment to breathe and switched his attention to a different document. As he reflected on his attempts to punch up his resume in order to avoid getting another job like the one he’d grown to hate, he wrote “professional juggler” down under his Other Skills section. 

Cubicle Fields Forever

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Darryl rose and left his office. He paced past the dark cubicles and down a dim hallway, looking for the one coworker he knew would be around this late. Greta usually visited him but, today, he thought as he counted rows in the next cubicle field, he’d visit her.

After turning down the seventh row, he found an office belonging to “Tim” that he was certain should’ve been Greta’s.

“Weird.” Darryl turned and found himself in the middle of the cubicle field again. The office behind him had vanished. Darryl rubbed his eyes and headed toward a looming office wall he could follow back to the hallways.

When he got there, he peered at the sign on the nearest office. “Regie? Z52BQ?” Darryl reached out to touch the plaque. It was real but, when he pulled his hand away, it said “Reachme.” As the hairs on his neck rose, Darryl spun to find himself in the middle of the lightless cubicle field again.

Darryl took off running and, when he finally reached a wall, sweat pouring off him, he glanced behind him to find nothing back there but endless dark cubicles.

Darryl looked forward again just as something loomed in the shadowy door of “Meatgyre’s” office. He screamed as a blazing light erupted from this figure.

When his vision cleared, he saw the tall, solid form of Greta holding out a hand. “Oh my god, are you okay?” Greta hauled him to his feet. “I was just about to leave and you startled me!”

“What?” Darryl looked behind him and saw the ordinary five-by-five of cubicles with offices on each side. “I was…”

“You shouldn’t wander around here in the dark.” Greta patted him on the shoulder and led him away from her office. “You might get lost. Or worse…”

Mask Time

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Reggie twiddled his thumbs, looking around Georgine’s office. She kept things tidy, so there wasn’t much to look at other than the dark computer, a calendar with nothing written on it, and the small notepad she was usually holding.

Uncertain how long he’d be waiting, Reggie leaned forward to see what Georgine had been looking at before a lab tech had asked her to come look at something downstairs.

Upside down and refusing to do more than lean forward, it took him a while to work it out. It was just a to-do list full of notes about phone calls, meeting times, reminders, and a section of rote daily tasks. Just as he was finishing his scan, Georgine’s office door slid open and Reggie glanced up at his manager as she stepped into her office.

“Glad you find my to-do list so engaging.” Georgine arched an immaculate eyebrow at him.

Reggie’s face heated as Georgine walked around to her chair. “Sorry. I was bored.”

“Thank you for waiting.” Georgine flashed him a small, polite smile. “Any questions before we begin?”

“Yeah, what does ‘mask time’ mean?”

Georgine looked down at her to-do list. “It’s a reminder. A mask you heat up and place over your eyes to keep the ducts clean. I use it every night so my eyes don’t get irritated by the dry air in the lab.”

Reggie nodded and launched into the presentation he was supposed to be making. Georgine, attention fixed on him, picked up her notebook, flipped to a new page to take notes, and used the motion to press on the drawer that held her disguise to make sure it hadn’t been disturbed. It would be disastrous if anyone realized that she’d used the company’s prototypes to take down that annoying hero last month.

In Memory of Being Unkown

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Most of my coworkers have been with our employer for over a decade (one has even been here longer than I’ve been alive), many of them starting on other teams and in other roles before making their way to the Research and Development team for which we all currently work. They’re widely known and respected in the company, to the degree that we’ve struggled to get work done over the past year as our smoothly-operating department has been (temporarily) picked apart to assist other teams who were struggling (mostly for external reasons–2022 was a wild year to work in technology and electronics). A frequent complaint at our watercooler (which looks more like a cozy sitting/dining room tucked away in a corner of our lab than a bland water dispenser) is the number of emails they’re included on and how frequently they’re asked to split their attention to help others within the company.

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The Days of Not Complaining About My Job Are Over

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Once I’ve bottomed out on spoons during a week, I’ll start most days after that in a state of quiet determination. I kind of enjoy this state of being because it is easy to push myself to work on small projects. When I’m that tired and worn out, I don’t waste any time or energy procrastinating or getting in my own way. It can be a great way to have a calm, productive day if I’m left alone. After all, being out of spoons doesn’t mean I can’t still accomplish stuff, it just means that my ability to handle stress is greatly reduce. For instance, heavy bass in music bothers me all the time. If I’m not out of spoons, I can handle it (by spending spoons to ignore it). If I’m out of spoons, I am almost entirely incapable of ignoring it and will get more frustrated the longer it goes on. Worse yet, my ability to calmly and rationally do something about is dimished because that ALSO takes spoons, so I usually wind up needing to endure it longer than I might on a day that I’ve got the spoons to ask whoever is making that noise to lower their volume or even just turn the bass down.

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