Quit

Quit

Have you ever turned on a television just for background noise?
That's all I did.
I had gone to the office on a Saturday.
My own time.
I charge for it, yeah.
But it's still my Saturday I interrupted to go into the office.

Do paperwork.
Or sort paperwork.
Or something work related.
And paper related.

I was working downstairs in the cramped storage room next to my boss'
office.
My boss has a TV.
I figured no one would mind if I turned it on.
Keep the air from being so quiet.
Of course, that means it had to be pretty loud.
But since I was the only one drenched in smoldering midnight oil, that
shouldn't have been a problem.

Seriously, that's all I did.

I turned on the TV to help me work.
An awful lot of work to do after all.
All this work on my Saturday.
It doesn't get done during the weekday, on account of the office's
high-speed internet access and my Doonesbury obsession.
The work piles up to drag me in on weekends.
And all I ask is to leave the TV on.

And not to be hungry.
It was five o'clock at night and I hadn't eaten all day.
I'll come in on a Saturday but I'm not going to wake up early for
it.
There's food in the breakroom.
Snacks.
Nothing that particularly interests me.
Entices me.
Those gross individual foods that kids used to bring to lunch that left
dirty spoons to walk around with.
A lot of yogurt.
For all the women who want to lose weight but can't stop eating.
I spend about an hour going through the midget refrigerator.
Getting hungrier and hungrier.
Eyeballing all the disgusting fruitcups and snak-paks and wishing they
were good.
Before I decided that I didn't want anything.

Not from the breakroom.
Not from the women.
I wanted to order out.

And what's wrong with that?

Some delicious lo mein noodles with Mongolian beef and stir-fried
vegetables.
I could eat around the vegetables.
I figure I deserve it.
I'm working on a Saturday.

The phone book is useless.
Four-one-one is only up to a couple bucks.
The office can afford it.

At the last second, I changed my mind to pizza with artichokes and
sun-dried tomatoes.
Forty-five minutes, they told me.
Can you believe delivery these days?
When I was a child, forty-five minutes would have been free.
Before I had jobs that made me work on Saturdays for the money to buy
my pizza.

Work is impossible.
Especially my work.
And especially on an empty stomach.
I watched some of the TV instead.
News.
News wasn't going to help me work when the time came.
News was going to make me think.
Be depressed.
Sodomy law review?
Okay, that was interesting.
But Iraq was not.
Flipped the channels until I came upon The Negotiator.
Has to be my least favorite Kevin Spacey movie of all time.
And I've seen Dad.
But I just want noise for idiocy while I work.
So it works.

As the pizza wait wore on, boring a tumultuous ulcer into my work
ethic, I realized I would like a smoke.
I still allowed myself that privilege on the weekends.
And this was a weekend.

I had forgotten my lighter.
My boss had a convenient pack of matches.
On a shelf.
In an engraved glass display box.
Presented as an award by the Orange County Fire Fighters.
Luckily it has never been used so the striking surface was still clean
and fresh.
I hate having to strike matches twice.

The display box was not terribly difficult to get into.

However, in addition to forgetting my lighter, I had also forgotten my
smokes.
I hadn't really bought any, on account of I had quit smoking.
But for all intents and purposes I had simply forgotten my own tobacco
and it was a Saturday and my boss permits smoking in his office so I
might as well have taken advantage.
Well, not in his office.
Generally only outside.
But it was Saturday.

Has a friend ever left you alone with his cigarettes?
If he has more than a couple and you don't have any because you don't
smoke, you'd take one, right?
Of course you would.
You'd take one and you wouldn't think twice about it.

That's all I did.

Only my boss doesn't smoke cigarettes.
He smokes hundred and fifty dollar a piece Cuban cigars called
Havanjeos or Haven Joe's or something like that.
Anyway, as a fellow smoker, I was sure that my boss would understand
that when nicotine calls, it will just keeping leaving messages until
you talk to it.
Who can get work done like that?
Besides, these were comparable to Black &; Milds.
I'd just pick him up a pack on Monday.
It isn't like this was my first choice of smokes.
I practically choked to death trying to inhale it.

Eventually, just as Kevin Spacey was cutting off Samuel L. Jackson's
electricity, my pizza finally arrived.
The delivery boy was Asian so I felt my original wish had been
honored.
The delivery boy also wanted fifteen bucks.
I didn't have fifteen bucks.
Fortunately for the delivery boy, I found about five hundred dollars in
an envelope in my boss' desk drawer.
I gave the delivery boy a twenty and told him to keep the change.
I wouldn't want the office to get a reputation as a refuge for bad
tippers.

I was about to put the rest of the money back when&;#8230;
You know how sometimes you just need twenty bucks?

That's all I needed.

Only I took fifty.

Anyway, I put the rest of the money back and started in on my
pizza.
Naturally, I had forgotten to order something to drink.
And between the hot burning grease of the pizza and the thick draw of
the Cuban see-gar, I soon found myself parched.
In need of refreshment.
Dry.

In my boss' cabinet, just below the pack of matches, my boss keeps a
bottle of Johnny Walker Blue.
Aged sixty years.
This is victory scotch.
Designated for a triumphant outcome in the case in which I was
currently enveloped.
The one that brought me in on my Saturday.
I had been pouring over the documents from this case for months.
I still didn't understand what they meant, but they sure were a hell of
a lot of them.
Numerous stacks and plentiful at that.
Certainly we had enough evidence to win.
I would simply trade in my glass of celebratory scotch at the
celebration after the trial, which was nearly a year away, for a
work-enhancing glass now.

The seal was tough to break.

A tumbler glass of sixty year-old scotch.
An illegal cigar.
Bad TV.
Pretentious pizza.
These were appropriate work conditions.
Only the movie started getting worse, and my tummy got ever so
queasy.
I did some channel flipping to settle my digestion.

Well, of all the fuck-all bad luck, the remote got stuck on the Playboy
Channel.
Actually, the Playboy Channel got bad reception and no audio, so it
really got stuck on the Spice Network.
If you know anything about porn channels, and I'm not saying I do, the
Spice Network is far superior squiggle vision.
A noticeable difference.
Playboy is generally strippers and models doing photo-shoots.
Spice has hardcore movies and penetration.
This was a call-in show with two women who basically ran a sex hotline
and told guys to jack off while they fucked each other in the ass with
dildos.
That's what it sounded like, anyway.
The picture was more like surfing nipples on ram's horns.
Either way, I eventually noticed myself getting a little stiff.
No way I could get any work done with my giant tentpole poking into my
stomach.
So I opened my fly and took care of it.
Not one to ruin my pants, I carefully aimed my spooge into the spare
pair of dress shoes my boss kept under his desk.
I'm sure he wouldn't have wanted it on the floor.

And that's it.
That's all I did.

Except, honestly, that glass of scotch I had with my pizza wasn't my
first.
Maybe my third.
Or sixth.
Opening the bottle was really one of the first things I did when I came
in.
I knew I'd be having the pizza eventually.
I knew I wouldn't want the sodas in the fridge.
Did I forget to mention the sodas?
I didn't want them.

Scotch and greasy pizza and inhaled cigar smoke and ejaculation are
apparently a dangerous combination.
Culmination is an intense need to vomit.

You know how sometimes you can't make it to a toilet?

That's what happened to me.

All I managed to do was use a seventy-five dollar pen to pry open the
locked drawer of my boss' desk.
Just union case files.
Nothing valuable.
At least I managed to get it all in the drawer.
Not too shabby.

Then&;#8230;
I don't know.

You know how sometimes you just lose time when you're drunk?

That's all I did.

Only when I got it back somehow a corner of the office was on
fire.
I swear I never even went near that corner.
And I fucked around with the fire extinguisher for a while before
giving up and chucking the fire fighters' matches at the blaze.
C'mon.
Gimme a fuckin' break.
I was drunk.

Anyway, I couldn't get it out.
I wrote a billing sheet for six hours of my time and left on the office
manager's desk.
That was giving myself an extra fifteen minutes, but I deserved
it.
I was working on a Saturday, for God's sake.

The car was hard to handle getting home.
I said to myself, I'm working on Saturdays and I'm still driving this
piece of shit?
So I called the office when I got home and left them a message that I
wouldn't be in on Monday.

Just wanted to work with the TV on.

That's all I did.