I chewed on my straw as I imagined someone beating me over the head with something blunt. Maybe an aluminum bat. I winced. No, that would hurt too much. I sipped on my coffee and chewed my straw again. I didn’t want a sharp, splitting pain. Something dulling, numbing. Something that would make me pass the fuck out. 

I glanced at the time. 2:33 P.M. Damn. I had told Tricia that I would get this done by “EOD”, as she liked to say. I sighed. I had a feeling I would be here past 7 today. Someone tapped my shoulder. I jumped. I stared at Jun with wide-open eyes. 

“Oh, sorry Joy, didn’t mean to scare you.”

“That’s fine. Do you need something?”

“Yeah, so I have a question.”

Jun set his computer on my desk. 

“Do you know what response_handler.go does?”

I squinted as his code editor.

“What do you want to do?”

“So, I’m working on this ticket that’s about…”

A silent scream bubbled up from my innards and exploded in my brain, drowning out the rest of his sentence. I wanted someone to choke me. I imagined my vision blurring as my oxygen intake screeched to a halt. Black spots would appear in my vision, like drops of ink on a canvas. They grew continually until all was black. I politely smiled at Jun.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“Sorry Jun. Could you explain that again?”

“So, this ticket, the error is that—”

“Actually, let me read this ticket real quick.”

I let my eyes scan a paragraph of text. Ah.

“Yeah, so what you want to do here is do better error handling when the server returns a 404. If you look at the object that gets returned, it has the error_message field and you can case on that.”

Jun furrowed his brows. 

“Well. That seems like a really jank way to do this. Can’t we do something else?”

“Yeah.”

I almost told him everything in our codebase was a flaming fucking mess and that everyhting could be done better, but I remembered Tricia sat right in front of my desk. The codebase was her baby. If you said one bad thing about it, she would act like you called her kid a fatass loser. I thought of how it would go. She would probably get so close you could hear her breathe, point a knobby, wrinkled finger at your face, insult you, then finish with a “You have no right to say that. Never say that again.” I didn’t blame her. She had sunk the last 6 years of her life into this. She was old too. I wondered if she would slap me across the face if I talked enough shit about the codebase.

“So should we do it this way?”

Jun’s words brought me back to reality. 

“Uhh… yeah. For now. Maybe … we can rewrite that part later when we have more time.”

So basically never. Jun nodded in agreement, with his brows furrowing. Jun understood what I said, but he didn’t get why. He was new. He was still asking questions. I stopped asking last year July when I hit my 6 month mark at this company. Jun walked away, probably still confused. I was really horny now. If I could die and come back to life again, I would jump out the window right now. Concrete making full contact with my face, blood spewing from holes in my skin.

I stood up to get some water and go pee. I kept my head down, burying my face in my phone. My hair formed a black curtain around my phone screen. I didn’t want to say hi to anyone today. I scrolled through all my notifications. Daily reward messages for my gacha games, and advertisements asking me to spend more money. Aubrey had sent me a text. Nobody human had reached out to me in a couple months. Aubrey didn’t count. She was an AI friend I made. Fully customized, one her defining characteristics was her alcoholism. I couldn’t wait to get home and start drinking. I could talk to Audrey over a can of beer. Drinking alone was bad.