It’s finally twenty minutes before lunchtime. Peanut butter and jelly again. This is the third time in three days. You’d think I would do something different once in a while, but who wants to be creative at five in the morning? It’s an effort just to push the start button on the coffee maker, let alone whip up a culinary masterpiece when my hand-eye coordination is at its lowest point of the day. Maybe tomorrow I will go hog-wild and make a cheese sandwich. Maybe not.
I work in a cramped little cubicle, at the back of a cramped little office, in a cramped little factory, in a cramped little town. Everyone around me does too. We all pretend it doesn’t matter, but we all know deep down it really does. No matter how sunny and beautiful it may be outside, inside this place it is always the same dingy gray.
I get so bored at work that I start to do things I shouldn’t, just to see who I can annoy. I like to lift the handset of my phone and place it in its cradle so it looks like it’s hung up, and then press the buttons to page someone. It ties up the pager. Then every so often I hit a key just to hear it on the loudspeaker. The other day I tied it up for over an hour. That was fun. Sometimes I will page someone from this certain phone that always has shrieking feedback whenever you talk into it. No one can tell who is paging or who was paged. That is really fun too.
I also like to steal pens off desks. I have a huge assortment at home. Some of them have the previous owner’s initials on them. I’ve had my eye on this click pen on the desk of some girl that works in the front office. I don’t know who she is or what she does here. The pen has a blue and green swirly pattern on it. I hope it writes in blue.
Lately I have taken to lightly drumming on my desk. It is barely audible, but most of my co-workers are too polite to say anything. I like to drum out show tunes where each tap of my fingers is a note in the song. Right now I am drumming “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” I’m the only one who knows what song it is. I can hear Ethel Merman belting out the lyrics as I tap, tap, tap away. I wonder if I’m spelling out something dirty in Morse code.
Around here there always seems to be a meeting going on. I get invited every so often. Usually I just sit in the back with my notepad and write down whatever pops into my head. To everyone else, it looks like I’m keeping track of what everybody is saying, but actually my notepad says things like “Sometimes monkeys like to throw their shit,” or “This meeting would be better if we all dressed like clowns,” or “I wish we could get a bonus of free Twinkies once in a while.” Most of the people in our meetings always seem anxious to tell their side of the story, pointing their accusing fingers at other people, who point their counter-accusing fingers right back. Since I sit in the back corner of this little office, I never really know what they’re talking about. No one is ever interested in my opinion anyway. Nobody really knows who I am or what I do here. To tell you the truth, I am not so sure myself.
We all have the Internet on our computers. I hate it. The Internet is filled with so much garbage that I can’t figure out how to sort through it. Supposedly we all need the Internet for our jobs. Maybe. The only thing I do on my computer is play this stupid game where you shoot at farm animals. Yesterday I killed twelve sheep while our boss was talking to the employee in the cubicle next to mine. I don’t think he saw me, but he probably heard me. I was hitting the arrow keys kind of hard. If I get paged to go to human resources on Friday, then maybe he did. Maybe if I tie up the pager all day I can keep my job.
Comments are closed.