Office Space

Mindy was a hard-ass and everyone at the office would overwhelmingly agree that this was true. She had a sense of entitlement, as she was the boss's daughter and she was notoriously stingy.  Mindy was blissfully unaware of what her employees thought of her. She would take her lunch breaks at precisely noon, pulling her brown-bagged lunch from her purse and eating her usual soggy homemade salad and a mushy tuna sandwich while her co-workers ventured downstairs where a fully stocked cafeteria served hot soups and fresh salads. She would pull out whatever paperback harlequin novel she bought at the checkout at the drugstore and lean back into her plush office chair, settling in for the hour. 

Mindy never left her office, preferring to spend her time alone answering phones, filling out paperwork or playing some new game on her fancy corporate cellphone. Her desk was sparse, a few papers in a pile next to her computer and in the communal pen holder were pens that stopped writing a few words into a letter. Everyone knew that she kept the best ones hidden in a yellow cardboard box in the top left drawer, under a multitude of yellow duo-tang folders that she never actually used even though they were always in high demand around the office.

Amy sat at her desk, directly adjacent to Mindy’s sealed door, rolling and unrolling a supply request form. She often caught herself daydreaming, imagining the office bursting into flames and Mindy, too busy playing games on her phone, forgoes noticing the blaring alarm, leaving her to perish amongst charred file folders and broken pens. She huffed. She knew that Mindy would take one look at the form and immediately scour the supply closet to see if there really was an urgent need for more paper clips, yellow highlighters and red pens. She would accuse them of pocketing stationary and then survey their desks for any lingering items. She would call them wasteful and then stride back to her fortress of cheapness, clipping away in the designer shoes her daddy must have bought her.

Amy eyed the clock on the wall, almost time to go. This was the best time to get Mindy to sign off on anything. Mindy never liked staying any later than she needed to and would wait for the second hand on her clock to pass the twelve before packing up and leaving for the day. Amy hoped that she would sign off on the forms without even looking them over. But the key was timing. She waited until two minutes before five o’clock before getting up and rapping quietly at Mindy’s door.

“It’s open!”

Mindy was eying the time on her phone intently as she piled some papers on the corner of the desk, moving the pen to the yellow box in her drawer.

Amy moved swiftly, trying not to prolong their engagement any more than necessary. She placed the forms on Mindy’s desk. “Hey, I need you to authorize these order forms.”

Mindy looked up from her phone, “What do you need?”

“Some pens, some paper, we’ve been working on a lot of presentations this week”

“The shipment just came in last week.”

“But, last week was last week. We need this stuff for this week.”

Mindy packed the last of her things as she noted the time on the clock, the second hand on its way to the twelve.

“Start printing double-sided documents and check your desks for paper-clips and pens. Lord knows you people use them once and they end up in your filing cabinets ‘til the end of time.”

And with that, she breezed past Amy and opened the door.

Amy’s eyes burned holes in her back as she walked away until she noticed that the seams of Mindy’s black dress-pants had worn thin, a gaping hole revealing the pink floral granny panties that had been concealed all day by her chair. She watched as Mindy strutted out into the lobby, the hole following the sway of her hips with each step she took.

Amy placed the forms on her desk, smiling as she reached over and took three pens from the cardboard box and a stack of duo-tangs. She closed the door behind her as she walked back to her desk.