The office was filled with the click clacking of employee’s keyboards seemingly in competition with each other to be the loudest, and most conspicuously busy. One noise cut through all the rest, however. A worker, a man just past his prime but dressed like he didn’t know it, sat at a desk with a name plate whose well polished brass shouted, “Garfield!”. His typing was so fast that one ceased to be able to pick out the individual click-clack of this or that key. It became a low droning buzz, appropriate in its resemblance to the wings of a worker bee.
Garfield was the quickest, there was no disputing that, but his peers, his fellow kiss-ups, hoped they could at least outlast him and beat him in a contest of endurance. However, seemingly oblivious to the gauntlet he’d thrown down and the resentment he’d attracted Garfield continued to type at that blistering pace even as the shaft of sunlight that shone through the window, mocking those stuck inside with its gentle warmth, crawled across the room and up its walls, signifying the passage of hours upon hours. As time crept on he even typed through his lunch break, like a true freak of nature, even more unshakeable in his commitment to the grind than his colleagues had ever imagined.
He didn’t even break his concentration as his boss, Robbie, swaggered across the floor into his office with his latest girlfriend flung over his shoulder to engage in some aerobic exercise. He did briefly glance up, but only just long enough to dismiss the boss’s latest squeeze as a makeup plastered velociraptor.
What Garfield missed in that brief inattentive instant could fill one of those mind-numbing doorstoppers he liked to pretend to read during his lunchbreak. The inexpert way the makeup, picked out for her based-on Robbie’s tastes, had been applied as if for the first time. The subtle shake of her pupils as her limpid eyes reflected everyone staring at and judging her. And the slight cringes whenever Robbie jostled her, as if she wanted to say something but thought better of it so quickly it caused a nervous twitch. She was named Mary, and Robbie’d picked her out from among the new hires.
Garfield’s ambivalence would have been impressive enough in and of itself had he only had to ignore the boss’s cocky strut, distressed woman in hand, but it was not a peaceful walk. An employee, some fool named Benny, made a comment about the pair, something Garfield couldn’t hear over the sound of his own typing, that ended with Mr. Farelli, or Robbie as he insisted he be called, pulling out the hand cannon he usually had stuffed down the back of his pants and blowing the fool’s head off with a nearly fumbled flourish. It wasn’t particularly bloody, afterall Benny had availed himself of the desiccators’ services, but the confetti of dried flesh was nearly as messy. Though briefly shocked, Mary realized quickly what was expected of her, at least if her apparently gleeful discomfiting tittering meant anything. She was a talented actress if nothing else, though her wild wide-eyed look was an irrepressible sign of her, at the risk of putting it mildly, discomfort.
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That Garfield failed to notice any of this might boggle the mind, but he was a competitive, petty sort of man. The type of man who glories in how much faster he can type than the rest of the office, even if he tries not to show it and even if his dried-up jerky-skinned competitors aren’t very impressive competition for someone like Garfield, with fully hydrated hands. He missed it because he didn’t even bother put the carnage that had stopped everyone’s typing besides his own in his eyes until the giggling pair closed the office door behind them.
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The typing started up again after that, though not to its former level. It was quieter, quiet enough that Garfield could hear Robbie tripping over quite a bit of the tacky Viking memorabilia he’d coated his office with on his quest for an indecently public tryst. Eventually, hours later, everyone else trickled out, mussed “lovers” and Benny’s harrowed desk mate included. Finally Garfield was left typing away on his own with the sole exception, of course, of the yet untidied mess that had been Benny. Until he wasn’t. Until he stopped. The silence then was deafening.
As if to fill it Garfield began speaking, saying, “Finally. Time to get to work.” It was all-together entirely too melodramatic the way he said it, but he seemed too chuffed with himself to be conscious of it. He wanted to spout off one-liners, and he wasn’t going to let sounding ridiculous stop him. Having said his piece he made good on his assertion and finally got down to business. He plodded down the plush carpeted halls of the building to where he knew the Farelli Patriarch kept his office. To where he kept his safe. As he went he hummed a song to himself from the movie Robin Hood, brazenly making eye contact with and giving a jaunty wave to every guard he saw along the way, betting everything on their inability to understand his pop culture references. Luckily for him his assessment of the Farelli men’s Disney-literacy was spot on. “Uncultured swine, the lot of them,” he chuckled to himself.
At this point he’d made it to the patriarch’s office. It was a richly appointed space, and it made the tacky decorations of his direct superior Robbie even more ridiculous in comparison. “Really, what is that man’s obsession with Vikings?” Garfield muttered to himself as he opened the vault with a quick beep-beep-beep, code memorized from his work as Robbie Farelli’s personal accountant. The vault was absolutely stuffed with cash, stacks piled atop dollys for convenient transport.
Grabbing his prize, he began wheeling it back to Robbie’s office, whistling that same tune as he went. He even did a little waltz as he sashayed through the office halls, though his insouciance was quickly punished when a particularly energetic jig ended with his ankle turned at an unpleasant ninety degrees. He limped the rest of the way back, though even then he kept up his whistling, pig-headededly defiant even when no one else was watching. And then there he was, back in Robbie’s office. Back, wheeling the dolly through the mess of toppled Norse-kitsch. Back pushing the treasure through Robbie’s personal vault door in amongst half-a-dozen identical carts. Back to work, cooking the books so Robbie wouldn’t notice the appearance of the extra money and wouldn’t notice when it was gone.