by Chris Welsh
Chapter Three. 09:15am
MORNING CHORES.
I refused to let my office chair win. Over time it contorted from a mere chair into a chiropractor's nightmare – the enemy of my spine. The padding wore down to less than a slice of bread and the blue covering was threadbare enough to see the orangey sponge underneath. Snapped sections of it jabbed at my body in uncomfortable ways. The backrest, the main scourge, felt like a crumbling stone wall and not something designed to provide comfort. I requested a replacement some time ago and came in the next day to a thirty-five page form they expected me to fill out to order it, which I never found the will to complete. I decided to simply put up with the chair, determined to best it in battle, waiting for the day the opportunity arose to switch it with some other poor bugger nearby. My co-workers sensed this, somehow, and became incredibly diligent about their furnishings.
After sitting peacefully for as long as I could stomach, I stretched and something popped, feeling both refreshing and agonising at the same time. I made a noise like 'hnnggnnahhhh.'
A beige envelope in the corner of my screen popped up let me know of fresh internal email to devour, offering a few minutes of respite to the office-based obscurity, though such a thing also brought with it the chance of some extra work, or a slight change to protocol that would ruin my day. The worst I ever received was an instruction to greet every caller with a cheery "Good morning slash afternoon, my name is NAME, how may I improve your day?"
I never once uttered those words.
Often it was dreaded All Users emails that fuelled gossip and caused unnecessary outrage/panic amongst the workforce. Occasionally it'd be spam that filtered through the dam set up by the people in charge of such things, sent by malicious entities that somehow had access to our private, segregated internal email addresses.
Three new emails sat in my inbox, begging for clicks, the first indeed an example of the junk. It wanted to know if I wished to enlarge my manhood.
A picture of a small blue pill popped up next to an endorsement from a well endowed man named Ivan, whose grasp of the English language struck eerily close to that of the email itself. Deleted.
The second email was a mass internal message from a guy whom I'd never met nor heard of, named 'Quinton B. Celeste'. His email address ended with a different 'X.com' than the usual all-office guff. It simply said "ABORT!" and signed off automatically with 'QBC, Site B', along with confirmation of his email address and an extension number.
I thought this a tad peculiar and possibly grounds for panic, but we had no Site B and I had no knowledge of a man named Quinton. Even if I did, there's a good chance I wouldn't admit it. I tapped the numbers into my desk-phone but it went nowhere at all. I decided to ignore it and tossed it daintily at my spam folder, where emails go to die. I'm assuming this is what everyone else did as not a single soul visibly ABORTed anything at all.
If anything the level of panic in the air was less noticeable than usual, definitely less noise. A few people shambled around like troublesome drunks but they were at the far end of the office, way beyond the distance where my vision registered details, near where the IT people sat. I didn't care about the IT people...they appeared, smelled and generally acted funny. They never had the right type of hair; always too much or not enough, or some odd style ill-suited to their faces. It wasn't out of the realms of possibility for them to shamble or even enjoy a few large glasses of cheap whiskey early in the morning. They were men and women to ignore until something broke.
The third and final new email came from Susan, addressed to 'Wes Jetter'.
'My actual name!' I though, 'She must have found it out! No longer shall I be known as Joe!'
My brain buzzed.
"Hi Joe," it read.
Oh.
"I wondered if you fancied a chat on first break? I've got some things to show you...it seems pretty important and, well, I'm not sure who else to show. Even you're probably a bad choice. Can you make it up the tenth floor? It's empty and quiet. I'll meet you at 10:00. I'll wait for you in one of the open rooms up there, by the lifts. RSVP ASAP.'
Her automatic signature read:
'Susan Gillan, Main Reception. (Note: Today is not my birthday)'
I assumed the only thing she could possibly wish to show me on an abandoned floor was something usually covered up in polite society, so I RSVP'd 'Yes please!' and included a smiley face icon. I almost unleashed a winking face, but it felt too risqué in the moment. I aimed to avoid reeking of desperation.
My watch read 9:45am, so I only had ten minutes or so to murder before setting off. Not a single call bleeped its way to my ear-holes in all the time I sat there which must have broken a record. A quick scan of my team-mates and surrounding area showed only bored faces (some perilously close to tears), reclined bodies, and two men tossing a stressball over a cubicle wall in a terrible game of make-shift tennis.
No calls came in at all. No one in our customer base had anything to complain about.
"Is something wrong?" I asked the large lady next to me, genuinely unable to recall her name.
"Not that I know of, ducky," she croaked.
"The phones working okay?"
She showered me with disdain, borne of either hatred or apathy. Perhaps both. She shrugged her heavy shoulders ended our conversation by closing her eyes and leaning back. My only other option was a man to my left, who appeared either hibernating or dead.
"I'm taking my break..."
