Monday. Another glorious morning condemned to the slow-lane, driving away from the Sun but into its beaming reflection searing off the glassy mirrored office towers of the Business District. Norm cracked open the window, catching a short hiss of cool June air before the noxious fumes of the traffic invaded the cabin and riffed a lil too harshly against the smooth jazz that was begging his stress levels not to spike yet. It was a daily struggle.

  He flipped on the turn signal and drifted a hair to the right, just to test the other driver… HRRRRRRRRMMMPH!!!! The neighboring driver laid obnoxiously into his horn.

  “Fuck you, too, then”, Norm swore as the driver consumed the previously open space, aggressively tailgating the champagne-gold sedan ahead.

  Luckily the music changed. Now it was Erkyah Badu, crooning with warmth and sincerity. The sky behind the office towers was remarkably blue. A rare blue. Most days the sky was one-third gray haze and didn’t start to look any sort of azure until your neck was craned so far back you may as well call it and start doing some yoga-poses.

  Man, what a blue. Norm brought the window down again, but this time he left it, letting his hand catch the breeze as he crept through the lanes, closer, closer to the exit. Maybe something good was gonna happen today. The day had that feeling. Norm gave it another thought. ‘What was that feeling’? He’d first felt it when he was a kid in school. And always this time’a year: May, June, sometimes July. Was it a feeling of freedom? Nah, not quite.. Maybe one of possibility? Getting warmer… He guessed it’s just how Summer felt, or how Summer should feel. Like salt water, white sands, and fresh fruit.

  “Man, I should go to the beach this weekend”, he sighed, already knowing he’d be too tired to go. Or too busy. Both, actually.

  Shouldn’t there be more to life than this? Norm, Norm Dutchman, was twenty-eight. Average height, lean, darkish hair, used to be tan, reasonably good at work, and made a decent wage, at least, compared to some people. Despite his relative success (success at not carrying debt and being at least 4 paychecks away from panic at any given moment) he felt like there had to be some kind of magic out there to really make life work.

  A yellow turned red. He came to a stop. A bronzed and bent man stood under the traffic light carrying a cardboard sign.

  ‘Anything helps. Have a good day.’

  Shaky sharpie letters did the talking.

  Normed pulled out his wallet with his left hand, hoping to find a couple bills in there. Anything.

  However, the empty leather billfold stared back, making Norm question how long it had been since he had any green on him. Most people only paid by card, no need to carry hard currency. Bummer.

  He looked again at the man with the sign, now shuffling over to a bill in a hand outstretched from the silver-blue car behind Norm. At least somebody else cared, cared in a way they acted upon.

  Red turned green.

  —--------------

  Pulling into the office, Norm found his usual spot taken up by the paper-shredder’s van. “Damn, am I that late?”

  Apparently so.

  Fuck.

  He slouched up the stairs the back way, hoping to avoid any elevator traffic. The air in the staircase was always metallic and cold, kinda like being stuck in an empty soda can. Grimy footpaths were ground into the already-outdated-in-1989 carpet that covered the concrete steps.

  Someone had removed the wad of turquoise-blue pineapple splash chewing gum that was stuck to the sign demarcating the floor number where Norm’s office was. Sucker had been up there for 6 months without being scraped away or losing any color.

  —-------------

  “Morning, Norman!” Sheryl-Lee chirped, speed-shuffling from to to fro, wrestling with a stack of files and envelopes.

  “Morning, Sheryl-Lee. How late am I?”

  “You, late? Well, I’m sure you saw that the paper shredder is here?”

  “The jerk took my spot.”

  “I know, I know. Why don’t you do what I do and park in a different place every day? Works wonders for the soul!”

  ‘Not as many wonders as another job might,’ Norm thought.

  “Creature of habit, I guess” Norm shrugged, removing himself from Sheryl-Lee’s frenzied action.

  “What good’s a habit if it only makes ya miserable, Norm?” Sheryl-Lee chided.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  She had a point. With her massive puff of blonde hair doing most of the talking, it softened the impact. Lately Norm had been struggling to increase his chill. He’d spent too much time running himself ragged and was looking now to find something to look forward to in every day. Maybe assigning himself a parking spot wasn’t the way to go about it. Fuck. Back to the drawing board.

  A few greetings and a piss-stop later, Norm was finally starting the day right: time for coffee. Everything had just been restocked on Friday so there was a full bar of generic brand coffee pods, sweeteners of all sorts (including the coconut sugar with monkeys on it), clean mugs, and to top it all off- all the creamers had been restocked, but most importantly, the coconut creamer was untouched.

  Norm glanced at the oat milk, knowing full well that it would be gone by Wednesday. The Vegans in HR hoarded that shit and would steal entire cartons to bring home. Nothing wrong with having a couple sticky fingers around the office, Big Man always wins out in the end anyway, so who cares about some fuckin oat milk?

  Norm had his own little con going on. The coconut milk. He’d always write the names of people from other departments on it to create the illusion that other people actually drank it. In actuality, none of these people ever even stopped on this floor at all, so Norm was given free reign.

  He swirled a spoon around turning the bitter blackness into a beatified brown elixir of life. Time to put his nose to the grindstone.

  —--------

  The first leg of the morning flew by. Coffee in hand, Norm was on the ball, crunching numbers, updating databases, and doing office shit he swore to his teenage self he wouldn’t be caught dead doing. His least favorite question was being asked what his job was cuz he honestly didn’t even know. He didn’t know what his title was, maybe desk jockey? He checked his W2 every year to remind himself what his job was, but it never stuck, so as far as he knew he could have been an accountant, a copywriter, or a statistician. Some bullshit job.

  Luckily, he never had to deal with the clients and was relatively autonomous in his work, unless until he was inevitably rerouted by Mr Garris. Usually he just wanted Norm to read the fine print on his junk mail.

  “Yer a smart kid, Norm!” Garris would boom, clapping a massive hand down on Norm’s shoulder, “Dunno what I’d do without yer help! These computers, this small print… ‘betcha wonder how I ever ended up in management, eh?” Booming laughter.

  Norm knew; ‘It’s cuz your brother in law is the company president, ya motherfuckin blockhead’. Still, it meant he had a simple job and a secure job for as long as Mr. Garris perceived Norm as more intelligent and tech savvy than he was.

  11:21. Mr. Garris would poke his head in any moment now. Norman consolidated some of the shit he had laying around his desk. Most of it was “problem papers” he’d been putting in a “deal with later” pile for a few weeks until enough had accumulated for him to get up and spend a good chunk of time running around the office getting the scoop on each and every issue. Sometimes nobody had the answers and the paper was silently condemned by all parties involved to the black plastic void of nonbeing.

  Thus they “fixed the glitch”.

  One time Sheryl-Lee tried pushing back, “But shouldn’t we call the database people? I’m sure our account rep can help-!”

  Then Norm, Mr. Garris or one of the other guys in the office would shush-shush-shush as the paper was somberly shredded and deaded.

  “We fixed the glitch”.

  It was a cold and cruel practice. Mafioso. It kept people in the office close. Close enough to solve the issue? Nah, one of the younger kids would always use a word like “Kafkaesque” or “liminality”. But close enough for the policy of silently “disappearing” papers to continue? Certainly. It would work until it didn’t anymore. Such is the glory of modern business.

  —------------

  11:23, Mr. Garris burst into the office, face red, collar out of whack.

  “Dutchman!” He gasped, “Gonna need you for this one. Got a big problem we gotta get sorted, stat.”

  “What’s the problem?” Norm mumbled, clicking the next dialogue option to get Garris to speak his mind.

  “Well.. you know how we always send certifications to the clients so we have traceability and transparency on every job? And this is generally reserved in case of emergency, so everyone down the chain of production has accountability, yeah? Right.”

  Norm nodded. In truth, this was the core of his job: proving the paper trail.

  Garris continued, “Well today’s the fucking day, kid One of our guys, Angelson Mineral Corp, they’re ship capsized and lost all its cargo en route to Long Beach, no chance of recovery. Oh and the damn tankard burst, so the thing is leaking oil from here to Baja! So we gotta pull EVERY goddamn scrap of paper giving us a trace on Angelson Mineral to give to the guys in inspection, and CC the insurance fucks. Got it?”

  Maybe it was shock, but Norm had frozen.

  Maybe it was the sheer absurdity of a one in a million disaster happening.

  No… it was shock. His hands were stuck in the air in front of him; the left, not-twisting the cap off the water bottle held (unmoving) in his right.

  Mr. Garris fished a silver sheet of pills out of his breast pocket. He popped one out, popped it in his mouth, dry swallowing.

  “One’a those days, ‘eh, Dutchman?”

  Norm shook his head. What happened to that feeling he had earlier? Was that wistful something already gone?

  He met Garris in the eye, “I’m on it, gonna get it handled.”

  In a cross-generational gesture of goodwill, Mr. Garris extended his fist. Norm gave it a good bump.

  “Appreciate it. And just so you’re aware, this is a hot priority- as you can see I’m sixes and sevens, can’t find my brain to save my ass- I’m going around the office letting everyone know right now, but we’ll have a team meeting-”

  Garris checked his watch. The screen stayed black. Garris flicked his wrist again, summoning the hour, minute, and second. The time glowed apologetically.

  “-A team meeting after lunch, so around noon. Sheryl-Lee is helping me bring in some extra help to handle communication and mediation. They’ll be here, possibly later today, definitely first thing tomorrow, k?”

  “Got it.”

  “Thanks Norm.”

  Garris smiled, sighing a full gale force. “I guess our job is good for something, right? Who’d have thought we’d walk into this this morning?”

  “Just one’a those days, I guess.”