Intrusive Thoughts

A workplace horror story.

Image by kirill_makes_pics from Pixabay

Goddamnit, I thought. How many slides are there in this stupid PowerPoint? I sat at my desk, proofreading slide after slide, clicking every tiny text box to see if Grammarly flagged anything I could’ve missed. I felt like my eyes would shrivel up into raisins and fall out of my skull. After an hour of fixing missing periods and deleting erroneous apostrophes, I sent it back to the project manager and pushed myself away from my desk.

I slid down in my rolling chair and stared at the walls of my cubicle until the artwork I’d tacked to them blurred and the edges darkened. Slowly, I stood up and went down the hall to the small alcove where there was no light save for the glowing front of the vending machine. I bought a Diet Coke, opened it, took a sip, and leaned against the wall with my eyes shut. The soda crackled on my tongue and the wall was cool against my spine. One more hour, and I could punch out and go home.

When I got back to my desk, a Teams message from the project manager flashed on my screen:

Hey! Did you mean to do this?

The message was full of laugh emojis and a screenshot of the PowerPoint. At the end of a bulleted list extolling the virtues of multi-year guaranteed annuities, the last item read, “Goddamnit, how many slides are there in this stupid PowerPoint?”

A chill ran over my body like a fast-spreading frost. That was just a passing thought. I hadn’t typed it…had I? I searched my mind, desperate to unspool the two hours I’d spent proofing and find the few frames in which I’d made this bizarre error, but the more I tried to replay it, the blanker my mind became.

I sent a message back to the PM:

So sorry! I’ll fix it now.

Her reply flashed immediately:

No worries. I fixed it for you.

A moment later, she added:

At least tomorrow’s Friday!

Two hours later, I’d returned home, walked my dog, opened up the Uber Eats app to order some birria pupusas, and settled in front of the TV. After five minutes of scrolling through various streaming apps, I gave up on choosing anything new and put on some old episodes of Garfield and Friends. While half-watching Garfield and Odie run from an angry bulldog, I scrolled through Instagram with one hand and scratched my dog’s ear with the other.

What the hell is taking this delivery so long? I wondered. Moments later, my phone buzzed. The Uber Eats driver had sent a message.

I’m waiting at the restaurant for your order. Chill.

“What the fuck?” I muttered to myself. “Why is he telling me to chill?” Then, I scrolled up and saw the message I had sent:

What the hell is taking this delivery so long?

I sat up straight. The phone slipped from my hand and clattered onto the floor. I knew I hadn’t typed that message into the Uber Eats app. I’d been looking at a still life that an artist had posted to Instagram — sunlight streaming through a translucent cup of green tea — when that thought rolled through my mind.

When the Uber Eats driver knocked on my door, I took the plastic bag from him and said, “I’m so sorry about that message. I didn’t mean to send that.”

All he said was, “Whatever,” and dashed back to his car.

Friday morning chugged along quickly, with the weekend drawing nearer with each hour that passed. Then, at three o’clock, the department head sent out an email to the whole team. The subject line read, MANDATORY MEETING MONDAY 8 AM.

Fuck every molecule of oxygen that’s keeping your brain from turning into a rock, I thought. Seconds later, my heart raced as I went into my outbox and clicked un-send on my invective-filled one-line email.

Saturday night, I met a friend at a brew pub where we sat between a row of steel tanks and a group of flannel-wearing twenty-something men throwing small axes at old wooden stumps. I pounded an Irish red ale and ordered another.

“Rough week?” My friend asked.

“I’m so sick of that fucking place,” I said. “We have to act like the guy at the top is a genius, but all he did was gamble with family money and get lucky. He’s such a moron, he’s lucky the state lets him keep his driver’s license. He trash-talks the clients as soon as they leave the room, going on about what suckers they are, and the thing is, he’s right! If they knew the truth about how he runs the place, they’d head for the hills. It’s a house of cards and it’s going to collapse one of these days.”

“Wow,” she said. “Tell me how you really feel.”

“Oh, there’s more I could say,” I said, chugging half of my second red ale. “Believe me.”

“Go on,” she said.

“Well, he bought this sprawling mansion out by the lake — and not a nice one either, but one of those McMansions with a weird roofline and a bunch of wrong-sized windows. He only thinks it’s not ugly because he has no taste. Anyway, the cost overruns were so high, that he decided to make up for it by changing the fee structure and raising prices at every level. He told the clients they were getting more services, but they weren’t. He just changed the names of some of the things we already provided and re-packaged them as something new. He’s a complete fraud.”

“Christ,” she said, sipping her raspberry cider. She was still on her first one and I was signaling a waiter to bring me number three. “Why don’t you quit that place?”

“Have you looked at the job market? It’s dogshit.”

A thwack of an axe blade slicing into a stump cut through my thoughts. A small roar erupted from the men in flannel as they slapped each other’s hands. The waiter brought me another red ale, and some sloshed over the edge of the glass, a sudsy white trail steadily moving toward the table.

An hour later, I handed my car keys to my friend and she drove me home.

Monday’s early-morning meeting was a two-hour lecture about attitudes, negativity, and how all our complaints about unrealistic workloads, lowball pay and canceled PTO were ruining company culture. When it was over, I staggered into the hallway, bleary-eyed, trying to remember where the coffee urn was. Before I could get away from the conference room, I felt a tap on my shoulder. My department head, in a navy blue blazer and fake pearls, asked me to follow her to an empty meeting room.

She smiled icily as I sat across from her. Through the window behind her, yellow birch leaves shimmied in the breeze. A cardinal perched on a branch, his blood-red feathers bright against the white tree trunk.

The department head turned a laptop around and pushed it toward me.

“Care to explain this?”

It was a LinkedIn post with my profile picture in the corner. I scanned the text and felt my heart slip as I realized it was everything I’d said to my friend at the pub over the weekend.

“I — I didn’t post that.”

She threw her head back and laughed, showing off the expensive caps on her teeth. “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s your profile. You can’t lie about this. I don’t know what you were thinking, but I don’t think I have to tell you how badly you screwed yourself. You’re so fired.”

She grinned for a second before it turned into a sneer. “Enjoy the dogshit,” she said.

Back at my desk, my Teams was full of messages from the project manager. I responded:

You’ll have to get someone else to do it. I’m out of here.