‘Psst,’ a hushed whisper came from the cubicle behind me. I sighed and squeezed my eyes shut, hoping he’d give up if I pretended I couldn’t hear him.
‘Psssst,’ it came again, more insistent.
You can do this, Steve, I thought to myself. You have so much work to do.
A pencil bounced off the back of my head.
‘What?!’ I whisper-roared, swivelling around to face Gary and fully prepared to hit him with a stapler.
‘How’s your morning been?’ he asked me with a naïve smile.
‘Unproductive,’ I hissed through gritted teeth. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Oh, nothing really,’ he sighed, adjusting his glasses. ‘Just bored.’
‘It’s not even ten o’clock,’ I said. ‘Have you tried doing your work?’
‘That’s what’s making me bored,’ he groaned, spinning himself around on his office chair, legs scraping the sides of the cubicle. ‘Let’s do something fun – how many pencils do you think I can stick in the office ceiling?’
I glanced up at the suspended ceiling that I shared with him and immediately realised I’d be under suspicion too if my manager walked past and saw a handful of pencils sticking out of the plaster.
‘Please, don’t,’ I sighed defeatedly. ‘Just… go and make a coffee or something.’
‘A coffee?’ he frowned. ‘At this hour? I’ll never sleep.’
‘It’s not even noon!’
‘Oh, right,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘I have a nap booked in for one o’clock, so if I drink any caffeine now I’ll be awake the whole way through it.’
I physically had to force myself not to look up the question of how much does it cost to install suspended ceilings around Melbourne, as I plotted the exact way I was going to bring our current one down over his head.
Systematically cutting through it with a pencil seemed the most poetically appropriate.
‘Yo, where’d you go?’ Gary asked, clicking his fingers in front of my face and snapping me out of my daydream. ‘We were having a conversation!’
‘I was just thinking about pencils,’ I muttered, swivelling myself around.