Tell Me It's Real(20)

“No, ma’am. We can’t give you something you haven’t paid for.”

“You mother is a whore!” she screamed at me before she hung up.

“Yeesh,” I muttered, hanging up the phone and taking off my headset.

“What’d she threaten you with this time?” Sandy asked, looking over at me from his jail cell… er, cubicle, across the way.

“She’s going to cut me,” I sighed.

He grinned. “How wonderfully ghetto. You’re the only person I know of who works here that gets people to threaten you with physical violence.”

I rolled my eyes. “What can I say? The melodious sound of my voice obviously brings out the best in people. When are we going to quit and open up our surf shop?”

Sandy laughed. “Well, first we have to move to a place that has water. Then we have to learn how to surf. Then we need to learn how to operate a small business. Then we need to find the capital to open such a business. And then we can open our surf shop.”

“So… tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” he agreed. “But, on the bright side, it’s now 8:32 in the morning, and we only have eight hours until we get to leave.”

“So much time,” I moaned, banging my head on my desk. “This place is sucking out my soul. I should have been a romance novelist by now. Or, at the very least, had my own reality TV show where cameras follow me around as I get into all kinds of shenanigans.”

“What would your reality show be called?” Sandy asked.

“Paul’s Hour of Power.”

He grimaced. “That sounds like you’d spend your whole time getting fisted.”

I threw a paper clip at his head. It didn’t even make it halfway across the aisle. It was a good thing I never wanted to play baseball, because I threw like a girl. Who didn’t have arms.

“What time’s the new guy getting here?” Sandy asked, not even bothering to make fun of me for the paper clip.

“Nine. I don’t know why I have to be the one to show him how to do crap. He’s coming from the Phoenix office. It’s not like they do things differently up there in Hell.”

“Maybe he’ll be way hot,” Sandy said, waggling his eyebrows.

“Have you seen where we work? Knowing my luck, he’ll be straight, won’t have any teeth, and will spend the entire day telling me how pretty and perky he thinks his stepdaughter is.”

“Oh, Paul,” Sandy said sympathetically. “You are brain-damaged.”

“I love you too.”

I didn’t even notice the next twenty minutes going by. Time supposedly flies when you are having fun, but time also jumps around weirdly when you’re trapped in the limbo that is an office job. Some days, I’d look at the clock and be surprised about how quickly the time had passed. Other days, time slowed down so much that it moved backward and I could feel myself breaking piece by piece until I was nothing but a pile of corporate American sadness.

Paul’s Hour of Power: speaking the truth, doing it fabulously.

So I wasn’t really paying attention when I heard my boss call my name. I said, “Yeah,” but I didn’t look up from my computer while I tried to pretend the new system that they’d made us start using weeks before made sense and wasn’t a train wreck like the rest of us knew it was (“This will make your jobs so much easier” turned out to be code for “We may not have known exactly what we were doing, but we put too much money into it, so you’ll kind of have to suck it up and work with it, even though it’s so broken that it makes your jobs ten times harder.” I thought about writing to the ACLU to complain and have them intervene, but then Sandy reminded me that it wasn’t civil rights related. We tried to think of a way to spin it that the new computer program was homophobic, but then we got distracted by the UPS guy, who happened to have a different kind of package we wanted to sign for, and the ACLU was forgotten. Cock tends to make things bearable).

So I was distracted. I kept getting a stupid error message on my screen, and I was about to chuck the keyboard across the room when I heard Sandy begin to choke. I looked over at him, ignoring the two people standing in front of me. Sandy’s eyes were bulging from his head as he stared up at our boss and the other dude. I frowned at him. “Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded as he started coughing, his face turning read. I didn’t know what the hell his problem was, but he didn’t seem to be dying, so I figured he was okay. I swiveled in my chair to face my boss and my nine o’clock distraction.

My boss, Chris, smiled at me. “All right. This is—”