A Day Like Any Other

It was a typical day for him.
Okay, it wasn’t a typical day. But it was typical in the sense that a day is typical for anyone, really. Everything was wrong.
He had forgotten to clean the lint out of the trap in the dryer; his clothes were now thoroughly wet, and more than just a little wrinkled. He hit the snooze button one times too many, and so was forced to take a hurried shower and brush his teeth while dressing in the moist clothing. Needless to say, he shaved in the car on the way to work.
The drive to work on any day that he didn’t have to be at work was fifteen minutes. On days that he had to be there, it elongated to an hour long drive, followed by a round of chicken in the parking lot to get the good spaces. A healthy dose of road rage in the morning seemed to nullify the mood for the rest of the day, making life nearly tolerable. Nearly.
Upon reaching his desk, his supervisor poked her bird faced head into his cramped cubicle. It seemed to take her beak nose five minutes to enter before the rest of her face followed suit.
“Late again, are we?”
Looking at the clock that loomed over the sea of felt lined cubes like the men who beat the drums for rowers on a boat to heave their oars back and forth in unison proved that he was in fact a minute late. She marked it on her clipboard and took note of his disheveled appearance.
“Is anything about you acceptable for work?”
He wanted to say, “Is anything about you acceptable in public?” but miraculously refrained from doing so. The word “bills” for any person causes uncontrollable silence. And so he thought about bills.
“We’ll talk about this later, then. Back to work.” And she was off without so much as a sprinkling of feathers in her wake.
He sighed.
For two hours he worked on the stack of files on his desk. Crunching numbers and entering new information into the system. Updating profiles and deleting profiles. Nothing hard in and of itself, but tedium can become overwhelming. At ten o’clock he took his first break. He sat in the break room for ten minutes of his fifteen minute break, staring at the patterns in the hanging ceiling. His supervisor probably wouldn’t notice the five minutes he didn’t take. Or if she did, she would probably make a negative note of it. O.S.H.A. ruins the smallest things sometimes.
The next two hours need no explanation as they have already been explained. Tedium is just that. Tedium.
He went to lunch at twelve o’clock. Although he worked a nine hour shift, he was only allotted a thirty minute lunch break. He wasn’t surprised when he realized he hadn’t brought his lunch. Thirty minutes isn’t nearly enough time to go into a restaurant and sit down to order. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t enough time to go to a drive through either.
Luckily, a co-worker he had always had a crush on but never took initiative to act on it (strict rules about inter-office dating) shared her lunch with him.
“You’re all wrinkledy. Want my apple?”
He accepted with a boyish smile and a thank you.
“You’re always such a gentleman, opening the door for me.” She winked at him over her should as she walked away from him. He turned his head so she wouldn’t see him blush.
Another two hours of sorting papers and tapping keys. The monotonous chorus of keyboards firing out key stroke after key stroke, mingled with the soft waves of processed trees being shuffled about, and a brief interspersing of a copy machine or laser printer, filled the office with the orchestra of Your Life at Entry Level. He found a certain silence that accompanied the co-workers throughout the day and spread like in infectious disease that should be quarantined by the CDC. It was the kind of silence that comes with accepting your death. He would often wonder at what point in his life he became used to this idea, and today, to his surprise, he found himself ashamed at it.
His second fifteen minute break finally eased itself around the corner. In a literal sense, because the clock that hung over the office was square shaped. He swiveled around in his chair to leave his cubicle holding-cell only to be startled by his supervisor peering down her beak at him.
“Sorry,” he apologized while picking up the papers and files that his flailing arm had knocked askew. “I didn’t hear you approach.”
She quirked the corner of her mouth in what he assumed was supposed to pass for a smirk. He knew better, though. He knew she was cleaning her razor sharp teeth of fresh meat from the rending she had most likely just finished with another employee in the office. She stood there like that for what must have been a full minute before he asked her.
“Do you need something?”
She shifted her weight to one bone-thin leg, drawing attention to the talons on her feet and played nervously with her hair bun. “I was just wondering.” She started.
Some of the most tragic events start with I was just wondering, he thought to himself.
She continued. “I was just wondering if, and I don’t want you to feel obligated mind you, but…” She tilted her head to one side. Like a hawk watching a field mouse scamper across the ground for safety. “Would you like to go out to diner with me sometime? It doesn’t have to be tonight.”
There are moments in everyone’s life where words are at a loss. Then there are moments when there is only one word you want to use, and can’t, so it feels as though words are at a loss. This was the latter of the two. He was thinking no, but knew he couldn’t just say no.
He improvised.
“Aren’t you married?” he asked, paying special attention to looking at the engagement ring on her finger.
She twitched her head in a nervous fashion and quirked the other side of her mouth so that it was a full smile. It looked utterly forced, as if the corners of her mouth were pinned up with thumb tacks. “Divorced, actually.”
No surprise there, he thought. Which was a cruel thought, but not half as cruel as saying it aloud, which he very nearly did.
“Doesn’t the company have strict rules about things like that?” He tried to sound disappointed, but it came out more hopeful than anything else.
She half hunched her shoulders, moving the clipboard that was covering her abdomen to hide it behind her back. “I understand,” she stated, her eyes twitching restlessly back and forth.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I just don’t want us to get in any trouble, is all.”
“Like I said.” He could swear her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “I understand.” And with that she turned on her heels and prowled away from his desk.
He got out of his chair and peered cautiously outside of his cubicle, just in case she decided to swoop down and snatch him up. Fortunately she had disappeared around a corner and was lost in the maze of not-so-office offices.
He walked to the break room.
The girl he had a crush on was washing an apple in the sink as he entered. “Heya,” she said as he came in to the room.
“Hi.”
“Working hard or hardly working?” she asked him.
“Somewhere in the middle.”
“Good choice.” She smiled at him. “I happen to be a middle child myself.” She bit the apple and held it in her mouth. She grabbed her mug off the counter and tucked some folders under her arm as she waved goodbye.
He was too shy to do much else than watch her go. Although he thought of a million things he would have said to her after she left. Hindsight, it sucks.
After his break he returned to his desk.
He paused.
The stack of work which was barely thicker than his wrist when he had left mysteriously multiplied to the length of his forearm.
“I hope you don’t mind working overtime,” his supervisor said over his shoulder, a hint of satisfaction in her voice.
If you were to ask him later, he couldn’t say why he reacted the way he did. Maybe it was his complete lack of interest in his work. Maybe it was his total dissatisfaction with the management. Or maybe it was just because it had been one of those days where days like these have piled up one on top of the other and this particular day happened to be the one that tipped the scale into a landslide. Any one of these explanations and probably many more would all be the correct answer behind his motivation.
“Actually,” he said. Very calmly. Very smoothly. “I think I quit.”
“What?”
“Actually,” he repeated, this time with more conviction. “I know I quit.”
“But you can’t quit,” she told him. And the way she said it almost made him believe it.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because you’re fired,” she smiled at him. A big, toothy, beaky smile.
“Good,” he agreed. “I can draw unemployment.”
She wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Thanks a bundle.” He walked away from her.
He got to the elevator and stopped. It was now or never, he told himself. He walked back out to the sea of cubicles and directly towards hers.
“Heya,” she greeted him.
“Hi.”
“What can I do ya for?” she asked.
“Well, I just quit. No, they told me I couldn’t quit and fired me, actually. But would you like to go out with me sometime?”
“Love to,” She bit into her apple with a show of teeth and a dazzling smile. “I’m buying, though.”
He blushed.
“You’re too cute,” she said between chews. She reached into her hand bag and produced another apple and her business card. She handed him both. “Call me tonight.”
“I will. Thanks.”
Then he walked out of the office for good, eating his apple.