Wrung Out

God, I’m so fucking thirsty. I reach for my stainless steel water bottle but find it empty. My chair squeaks as I swivel away from my desk and walk down the hallway to the water cooler.

I really can’t catch a break. Susan from AP is breathing down my neck about getting this check run out, but she doesn’t know that the warehouse guys absolutely need me to enter this order to get the shipment out on time, only for Ted to tell me that they’re ordering pizza because we have to work late tonight and asks if I would like to request any toppings, but, apparently, nobody likes anchovies, and so he asks if I’m okay with supreme, and I say okay, but I’m not, but not because of the anchovies — I’m a pretty easygoing guy about stuff like that — No, I’d be fine with any pizza topping as long as I got to eat it at my own goddamn house on my goddamn couch so I can watch my goddamn TV program. Is that too much to ask? Of course, I need this job, or else I couldn’t afford the goddamn house and goddamn couch and goddamn TV program that I never get to watch. I think I need a break, just some time to think and relax, yeah, just some time to myself without all these people breathing down my —

“Oh, hiya, Jim!” Sherri, the office manager, says as I enter the break room.

She is just starting to fill up her inanely large insulated tumbler, which reads “Cla$$y, Sa$$y, and a Bit Smart A$$y” in vulgar, cursive script and has a little Minion with a smug grin under it. The cooler filter isn’t changed regularly, so I’ll be subjected to Sherri’s babbling for at least another minute while her cup is filled drip by drip with PFA-laden tap water.

“Did ya have a good weekend?” She asks.

“It’s Wednesday,” I say.

“Hump day!!” She cheers and throws up her hands. “Haha did you ever see that commercial with the camels? It’s probably my favorite commercial. Sometimes, my family gets together to watch the commercials at night; they’re so funny nowadays. What’s your favorite?”

“I don’t have one,” I say.

“You really should watch more TV, Jim,” She tells me. Her cup isn’t quite full yet, but she stops and replaces the lid. “Well, got to get going. It was nice talking to you, Jim!”

The machine hums as it dispenses the yellow-tinged water into my bottle. People always complain about the color, but I think it’s merely reflecting the light from everything around it. The whole office is kind of yellow—the walls are a bile-colored beige, pairing well with the piss-yellow carpeting interspersed by splatters of coffee stains that have been trampled over so many times that the milky brown color has curdled into a crusty golden mud.

Sometimes, I worry I’m color blind, but I never get time off to see a doctor. They’d be aimless here without me keeping things together, truly rudderless. The water dribbling into the bottle reminds me that I have to pee, so I walk down to the bathroom.

I wanted to take a bathroom break before my morning meeting, but I got a call from a customer, who was livid that their Fancy Dog Dog Treats smelled like peanuts and demanded to know if we had any peanuts in our facility, to which I told him that we did not. He asked me why it smelled like peanuts then, to which I told him maybe it was something in his house and that perhaps he should check around to see if there were any peanuts there.

That made him angrier because apparently his daughter is allergic to peanuts, and he said I had to be a real fucking prick to suggest he’d keep peanuts in the house when she had a condition like that because it would kill her stone-cold dead. I said I didn’t know it would kill her stone-cold dead. He asked me if I thought he was some kind of jerk-off or something. I said no, so he demanded to speak to my manager, but I was really thirsty and had to go to the bathroom, so I hung up. He probably was old and just wanted to talk. Many people do that; seek me out to talk to me and stuff. I’m an empath, so I guess they’re drawn to my aura.

But then Bob came into my office and asked me if I had seen his email, and of course, I hadn’t. Bob is even lower on the totem pole than me, which means I truly can’t give less of a shit about what he has to say. He smells like eggs, so I told him such, and then he left.

So anyway, that’s why I couldn’t go to the bathroom until now. After washing my hands, I insert them under the air dryer, but the pitiful puffs of lukewarm air always leave them a little damp. I always joke that the air dryer should get its prostate checked on account of its weak flow, but nobody ever laughs.

It’s quiet as I return to my office so I can finally start to get some work done, but then Ted comes in and shuts the door. It’s never good when he does that. He asked if I called a customer a jerk-off and told Bob he smelled like “eggs from a chicken that only ate its own shitty, putrifying eggs like a dirty chicken cannibal.” I deny it, but I don’t think he buys it.

This isn’t the first time this happened, but no matter how many times Ted says he’ll fire me, I know he won’t. Nobody else could suffer through this toxic bullshit — between the customers and the coworkers and all the blah, blah, blah drama from corporate; it’s a miracle that anything gets done around here. He knows I’m holding this place together. I’m practically unfirable.

“Jim, you’re creating a hostile work environment,” Ted says. “I’m only going to tell you so many times: you need to think about your impact on others around you.” Then he leaves.

I sit for a moment and think, God, I’m so fucking thirsty. I reach for my stainless steel water bottle but find it empty.