Just Another Day At The Office

Jim's boring day at work just got interesting....

Just Another Day At The Office.

By Paul Irvine.

Jim was bored. This is not unusual Jim was mostly always bored. He had the type of job where the eternal struggle of getting out of bed every morning was always constant, and if he could think of any legitimate reason to get out of going to work he would use it.

This morning however was not one of those days and he now found himself, fingers automatically moving across his keyboard, completely bored. It amazed him that his mind could be so numb while his body was in such activity.

He looked over at Amy who was typing furiously on her keyboard, earphones in and head bobbing. She caught his eye and smiled. Jim smiled back at her, sighed and went back to his data entry.

After a minute he felt someone walk up behind him. He didn’t need to turn to know who it was. Every office had someone like Bob. Middle management, not enough actual work to do, spends his day walking around the office with a coffee cup in hand starting a conversation with anyone who was willing. Normally Jim didn’t mind these breaks in his day and he wanted to keep Bob on side just in case any promotions or raise opportunities happened to come up.

But today he didn’t have the patience. Jim tried a quick half smile towards Bob then turned back to his work in hope. No such luck.

“Jimmy!” Bob exclaimed loudly, using that ridiculous nickname. No-one had called him Jimmy since High School, but Bob seemed to liked it. He thought it was ingenious! “How was your weekend mate?”

Jim sighed under his breath. It was Wednesday. People that asked Jim about his weekend when it was a far distant memory annoyed him. But he tried to be polite.

“Fine Bob, and yours?”

Bob barked an overly loud laugh and slapped Jim on the back, “You would not believe the weekend I had!”

Jesus here we go, thought Jim.

Bob went on to tell him of the wild adventures that he had on his weekend. Jim surmised that maybe 5% of it was true. When Bob seemed to be finished Jim gave the polite but dismissive, “Wow, crazy weekend.”

Bob beamed proudly “Yep, good times!”

Then there was an awkward silence before Jim said a little more dismissively, “Well, you know I better get back to it…”

Bob nodded and slapped Jim again on the back, then thankfully walked on to his next poor victim.

                      #

Jim looked at his clock, 8:45am.

“Ugh” He sighed and placed his forehead onto his desk. Then his mind started the usual bored at work recording.

Is this really the point of existence? Go to work, do your time, collect your paycheque. He thought to himself, trying to remain sane. It was all so pointless!

Suddenly he realized out of the corner of his eye that Amy was looking at him. He lifted his head off the desk and forced an awkward smile at her. She smiled back at him, looking slightly concerned. He gestured his head towards Bob and rolled his eyes. She smiled again, a little more brightly in understanding. Jim went back to his data entry.

That's when Jim’s day got a bit more interesting.

He first noticed things were odd when he heard Bob stop talking. Like someone turned off all the white noise in the background. Then he heard Bob's coffee cup fall and smash on the thinly carpeted floor. Jim turned his head, as if in slow motion, towards the noise. He saw Amy was still nodding away oblivious to any noise outside her earphones, while behind her work colleagues were either staring stunned or diving for cover.

To Jim the scene looked like the beginnings of a thunderstorm, but it was inside of the building. Blue tendrils of lightning sprawling out of a brilliant sphere of bright blue light. Jim shielded his eyes from the intense light and through the gap in his fingers could just barely see a figure kneeling in the centre of the sphere.

Bob was standing too close to the sphere and one of those tendrils of lightning hit him and he flew across the room to slam into the wall next to Jim's cubicle. This finally got Amy’s attention. With a loud “What the!” she jumped to her feet and looked at Jim pulling her earphones out and expecting answers. Jim could only manage a shrug of ignorance as the noise slowly receded. Suddenly the sphere of light was gone and all that remained was a young man with a muscled build kneeling naked on the floor.

Amy slowly walked around her desk to stand next to Jim, then Jim, feeling like he should be brave, started walking towards the naked fellow.

“Uh...Can I help you sir?” Jim asked with false bravery, Half offering his hand to the naked stranger.

The stranger stood and Jim could now see that he was quite tall. He looked down at him with a menacing look on his face. The stranger slowly looked Jim up and down which Jim found quite disturbing and then pointed towards him.

“Clothes, now.” The stranger said with a rough unplaceable accent and a tone that wanted no argument.

Jim stared up at the large man and thought for exactly 3 seconds. Then he nodded and started taking off his shirt and then his pants, and gave them to the stranger. Jim stood there awkwardly in his boxer shorts while the stranger attempted to dress himself. Jim's clothes were clearly too small for him but the large man was pretending not to notice. Afterward he stood there looking like a schoolboy that had long outgrown his school uniform.

The stranger, never changing expression, nodded to Jim. He gave a quick glance towards the open mouthed Amy, then ran towards the nearest window and jumped through it.

Jim was left standing in his underwear, in the middle of his office, staring at the hole that used to be a window. He wondered who the hell that strange man was. How the hell that man had created some sort of lightning storm in the middle of the office. Why he had so easily just donated the large man his clothes. But most importantly, he wondered why he didn't just call in sick today. Well, Jim thought to himself with a wry smile, at least I’m not bored anymore.

End

Reviews

[Nigel Newman]

Hi Paul. I'm wondering if you have a Python-esque sense of the incongruous bombshell amongst mundane-ness. This is just a boring normal day when something truly extraordinary happens, then it's almost back to as you were. I half expected Bob to get up and say to Jim 'The other great thing, Jimmy, about last weekend was ....' It's almost like an H-Bomb has gone off outside but they're still serving tea on china cups. The WW1 episodes of Blackadder often went this way, especially the famous over-the-top final episode.

There are a few places where I could comment on 'poor' punctuation; the usual victims being lack of commas or using commas when a full stop and new sentence is needed - however without proper before and after punctuation is another frequent thing to see. But I'll sideline those thoughts for now. So I'm left with primarily this overwhelming sense of 'what the **** was that all about'.

If you are truly after the incongruous event amid normality then I think I'd heighten the after event satire if you will, e.g. with things like whose turn is it to get the coffees, someone get the cleaners and building maintenance up here to clean up the mess so we can get on with our work, etc. I find your current closing para insufficient. For me it might be a good start but it needs more. As I say, for me this would be something like the forced discipline to overtly ignore the shocking event and behave in an overtly normal way even if your insides are churning. As it stands, Jim just smiling to himself and saying something about not the usual boring day seems lame (given the really weird shocking things that did happen), and that being the end, just seems too lame. If you want to end with his reaction, you would imagine a much stronger reaction, lots of talk in the office, paramedics, etc etc and then only when Jim meets his mate at lunchtime, for example, might the mate be used as the device to say 'Boring morning as per, Jim?'

Hope these thoughts help. Obviously feel free to disregard!

Cheers
Nigel