Here are ten things they won’t tell you about on your first day…
1. Getting trapped for a week in the supply room with Andrew from Marketing. He’s a tool, but he’s also bigger than you, and you don’t like the way he stares at your legs and belly even before the paper and ink supplies run out.
2. The stress of an upcoming deadline makes you drink more and more of the awful cheap coffee from the office’s machine, which makes you more stressed, which in turn sends you more frequently back to the coffee machine, until your heart hurts so much that you are sure you are suffering a massive coronary and die from psychosomatic heart failure.
3. You stay late after work to meet a client, not realising your boss has also stayed back to keep an eye on you. When you close thea deal with the client, your boss congratulates you as you wait for the lift. Not knowing he was there, you get a fright, stumble and fall, catching your skull on the corner of a hideous flower pot with a fake plant. Your boss is forced to make an emergency late night call to Andrew to “swallow the evidence.”
4. You take the office elevator to a meeting on the top floor: you aren’t wearing your sports tracker, so it would be a “waste” to take the stairs. The lift gets stuck between floors. After 24 hours of being assured that help is on its way, you climb through the lift’s emergency hatch in the ceiling. From there you can easily reach the floor above you. The doors aren’t even fully closed! As you move towards them, you hear movement behind you: Andrew’s face, his lips still blue from the pen ink he drank, grins at you.
5. You buy a cake to share with your colleagues as it’s your birthday. The cake looks nice, and really big, covered in a thick layer of creamy gunk. A bee fell into the gunk while the baker was making it, and has been struggling to swim out of the hideously sweet “creme” for hours. She makes it to the surface just as you bite into a slice and you die of anaphylactic shock.
6. As a practical joke, Andrew (he’s a tool, remember?) has piled up all the photocopy machines into an “office Jenga” tower. When Marie from Health and Safety bends over to check they are unplugged, she bumps into you, knockig you into the tower. The tower falls on you, crushing your skull.
7. Poor customer service sends a man who was already desperate for some attention to go on a shooting spree at your office.
8. The barman where you are celebrating the office Christmas party has been eating nuts. When you order a beer, he pours it, without having washed his hands, holding the glass by the rim. Your body goes into anaphylactic shock because of your nut allergy.
9. A brief, violent gust of wind sends paper flying everywhere as you pass the stationery cupboard. You die of blood loss caused by a ridiculous number of paper cuts.
10. Andrew always reads your diary when you go on lunch break. Having read this list, he decides that – like him – you never recovered from being rescued from the supply room. He calls aournd after work with a bottle of wine, an axe, and a large appetite.
This week I finished the second book in the Withes of Woodville series by Mark Stay, Babes in the Wood. If you’re jonesing for some feel-good fantasy (while I finish off the next Alumière Sisters adventure, for example…), then check it out here!
