My mood is jubilant. I sit down at my desk again, unable to force the smile from my face and unable to think of anything other than what I've just witnessed. I think of the comedic value of it and have to laugh; I think of the power it has granted me and feel great. What a change! Just a few minutes ago I felt as though I couldn't bear this job any more, as though I wasn't built to withstand such pressure, as though it was a depressing waste of my short life.
***
Earlier that morning, on my way into the office, carrying my jacket under my arm, I noticed the thousands of tiny little bright-green leaves that had just appeared on the trees on the campus. Spring had come suddenly, pulling the temperature up from freezing to pleasant.
Every co-worker I met in the long corridor to my office radiantly greeted me and immediately said something positive about the weather. Strangely, most of the women seemed to have changed their hair since I'd last seen them: brunettes were now blondes, blondes were red-heads, cuts were short and sharply styled. But I knew, having finally arrived in my office and closed the door behind me with a sigh, that the season hadn't renewed or refreshed me. On the contrary, I had come back from my trip feeling stale. And every thought about my tasks at work caused my chest to tighten and my head to throb.
Among painful thoughts of work, the most searing was Mark, the project manager. When things had gone bad on the trip the previous week, Mark had put in his best effort to make them worse. He had, in a conference call with the client, managed to put all of the blame for the various failures very firmly on me, simultaneously clearing himself. I imagined Mark now, smugly reclining in front of his desk with a stupid grin stuck to his broad, frog-like face, secure in the knowledge that he had exactly what it took to succeed in harsh reality.
How did Mark reconcile his selfish cunning at work with his family life? I knew Mark's wife. She seemed an surprisingly pleasant woman. She didn't work, but rather concerned herself with their two little boys, obsessed with maintaining a perfect little world for them to grow up in. I pictured Mark sprawled out on his lounge floor playing and laughing with his boys, savouring the wholesome goodness of family life after a hard day of psychopathic slaughter at work.
My blood boiled. I knew I shouldn't confront him in such an angry state, but I couldn't stop myself. I opened the door and charged back out into the passage. "Knock first!" read the sign pasted on Mark's door. It was one of the lessons in proper behaviour he liked to give his subordinates to demonstrate his position of authority over them. I pushed down on the door handle to find the door locked, but heard something move in there--Mark had obviously locked himself in to avoid being disturbed, another one of his little ways of making people he worked with despise him. Since the keys to the offices were all the same, and I was happy to annoy him, I pulled my key from my pocket, unlocked the door, opened it without knocking and barged in.
"Mark!" I called firmly, almost shouting, but I instantly lost all that firmness in the split second it took me to register the scene before me: the winded shock on Mark's face, the flapping of four hands, the blur of long, blonde hair retracting from his lap to under the desk. I couldn't help taking a look at Mark's erection in the flash before it was covered. Its unimpressiveness pleased me. The next thing I couldn't help looking at was the scared face of Martina, the intern, trying unsuccessfully to hide. When it became clear to her that there was nowhere under the desk where she wouldn't be seen, she put her hand over her eyes like the child she was.
"I'll come back later," I said, and walked out with closing the door behind me, leaving Mark to stare in open-mouthed horror.
