Just One of Those Days
"Heidi! Heidi?!"
Rebecca's shouts echoed along the bare corridor, its carpets faded with age and its walls coated in the undefined grime of passing years.
"Heidi!"
There was no response from the head of HR. If she was hiding in one of the small meeting rooms that sprouted from either side of the corridor, then she was fully committed to that course of action and showing her expertise. Anyone who hid fully from sight, but then responded eagerly when their name was called, was either trying to be caught or had fundamentally misunderstood the exercise.
"Rats. That's a bother." said Rebecca, placing her balled fists on her hips and letting out a wide-mouthed, inconvenienced sigh. "I wonder where she could have got to."
It was a strange old day that Rebecca was having, and being totally unable to get in contact with her manager all of a sudden was not making it easier to cope with. In fact, Heidi's total absence from eye, ear, nose and hand-shot was making things over twice as difficult to cope with, on account of making Rebecca the only member of HR in the vicinity of the office. Not only did she now have the twice the work to do, which itself was already twice her normal quantity of work thanks to multiple absences, but if she needed a wee or a drink at any point then there would be no-one left to answer the phones. What if there was a desperate need to confirm the company's official position on renaming a colleague to hide evidence of their negligence? Would they be expected to live forever in ignorance because Rebecca had, in her human weakness, succumbed to thirst earlier or later in the day? It didn't seem like the sort of thing which should be allowed to happen. That's why they had rules about always staffing the phones during work hours, and always using a buddy system for loo and kitchen breaks.
Another harrowing thought slapped into Rebecca from the side, casting her already unbalanced mind into a violent spin. What if two phones rang, even now when neither kitchen nor loo was in demand? How would she know which one to answer? And if she did manage to decide then was she supposed to just let the other one ring interminably in the background? What if the one she answered was a wrong number, and a genuine query about the arrangements for the bank holiday staff cricket sabotaging went totally unanswered? The employees at Pesto and Smith were terribly busy all of the time, and would rarely have a chance to call back or make a second attempt at even the most vital of queries. She would have squandered their one chance to make solid plans, all because she was too weak and too unremarkable to be two people.
Rebecca shuddered at the thought. Even if she held her bladder firm and silenced the voice of her dry throat, there would be no way to keep the department afloat alone.
"Heidi!" she roared again, along the barrenness of the corridor, only to be met with the same devastating competence in the self-ensconcing arts. What a conundrum. The company procedures hadn't covered this at all. They'd all assumed that at least three people would be working at any one time, a hypothesis so bold and brazen in its hubris that it now seemed laughable. Or it would have done, if Rebecca hadn't been caught in the miserable mire of the oversight's creation.
Things were not as they were meant to be, lamented the Junior HR Advisor, pacing backwards and forwards at the threshold of the office; a whole host of things, many of which didn't even relate to inadequate staffing.
The computer systems were complaining about all sorts of things, from a lack of network connection to a bundle of overdue updates. Heidi's chair had been torn asunder by forces unknown, its headrest dangling by a thread of upholstery, which Rebecca had only noticed after accidentally thrown her own chair at it while standing up. Even the light in the room was weird, like the colours from the bulb had gone wrong, flickering with reds, yellows and oranges instead of the normal, headache-inducing bright white. There was no provision for improper hue perception in the working policies, and that was just another source of stress.
Stress was something worth avoiding. That's what Rebecca had always been told by her mother, who had done an incredibly effective job of stress-rejection by refusing to work, eating healthily, and being born into vast wealth. Rebecca had been able to benefit from the latter of those key lifestyle choices for a while as well, but circumstances had evolved over the course of her life, and adopting a vocation had become tediously necessary. Regardless, she tried to keep her mother's lessons close to her heart and at the forefront of her mind. The easiest way to avoid stress in her present circumstances was to simply sit back down at her desk, so that at least one phone could be attended, and get on with something that she could control. There were dozens of 'ICP-34: Notification of Intention to Embezzle' forms to work through, originating from all levels in the company hierarchy, and they needed to be progressed promptly. Financial crimes such as those often had to operate on tight timescales and required a quick turnaround from HR. Whatever else was happening, Rebecca had a duty to take swift action, and fulfilling that duty would calm her right down.
The mere act of making such a plan had an immediately remedial effect on Rebecca's racing heart, although it did nothing to mitigate the fabulous amount of sweating in which she'd started to indulge. As she sat in her chair, an ergonomically over-engineered collection of padded surfaces, articulated supports and mismatched wheels, she felt a blanket of calm come to rest over the flaming wreckage of her composure. This was definitely the right thing to do.
Fingers which had spent much of the last ten minutes engaged in dreadful wringing of one another, anxiously trying to find a way of soothing Rebecca and tragically failing, now found their energies more constructively applied to the entry of a password. They clattered noisily across the loose and aged plastic keys of Rebecca's keyboard, drumming down far harder than was necessary and incrementally bruising themselves for the pleasure. Although the keys felt a little warm, as if she'd accidentally left her keyboard in the oven again, seeing the familiar 'incorrect password' notification made the whole situation feel a little more like home again.
By her right hand, just beyond the effective jostling range of her mouse's wire, was what remained of the morning's cup of tea. In all of the bumbling, the confusion and the flustered clucking, Rebecca had totally forgotten to finish it. A mere minute ago this discovery would have sent her spiralling into an eddy current of indecision and fear, but, with the clarity provided by a failed attempt to log in, she was able to rationally consider whether any joy might be found in taking an exploratory sip. It was an hour since she'd made it, which was reasonably damning from the get go, but it had remained full for a good length of time, thus preserving the heat far better than a promptly sipped beverage. A glimmer of hope, therefore, lurked within the porcelain walls of her mug. The finger-dip test was better left at home, lest she find herself forced to lick tea from her hands in the office, and there were no thermometers available at her desk, so the high-risk low-reward method of taking a drink was all that realistically remained.
Not one to waste time once a decision had been reached, Rebecca confidently grabbed her mug, two-handed, and lifted it towards her face. Reassuringly, the mug was still warm to the touch, even those parts of it which stood above the tea-line. In fact, it might have even been warmer than when she'd made the tea in the first place, something which she neither understood nor intended to think about any further; the time for thinking at all was done. It was over. Finished. Complete. Now was the time for sipping.
Porcelain met lip. Tea met tongue. Effect met cause, and together they informed Rebecca that the tea was a bit cooler than she would have liked. It was still drinkable though, so overall she was pleasantly surprised.
"Perfect." she miscategorised, having literally just concluded that the tea could have done with being a little warmer. 'Tolerable' would have been a far more accurate exclamation to make, and deep down Rebecca knew that, but it didn't sound quite right to say it out loud to the room. "I'll be able to get that password right now." she instead added, as a coda to her public beverage assessment, before her fingers unleashed another typographical storm.
Access was once again denied, and now the screen told her that she had only two attempts remaining before her account was locked. It was scarcely a threat, because the folks in IT who handled account resets were always so lovely to her but, nevertheless, the sensible option was to try to get her credentials correct for herself. That way she wouldn't risk the phones ringing while she was occupied with IT, and the associated dilemma of who most deserved her attention.
Still clasping the mug of tea in both hands, Rebecca leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling, the staring direction most strongly associated with accurate recollection. How she was so easily able to forget her password, the very same one she had used mere minutes earlier, was a source of constant wonder, both to herself and Heidi. A much newer, and hopefully less constant, source of wonder was why the ceiling looked so murky and grey. Even in the strange, yellow-orange light that the office had elected to adopt, it was a dreary and somehow dreadful discolouration. There was something about it, the way the thick grey colour swirled and bellowed, growing thicker and thinner in turbulent patterns and slowly drifting across the office, that gave Rebecca the creeps. It had a familiarity that she couldn't quite place, but that filled her with a primal instinct to escape the situation entirely, to run away from it as if her life depended on it. It was the most peculiar feeling.
"Aha!" she exclaimed, with the excited and optimistic force of a several megaton revelation. "It was ToastAndBeans98!"
Fingers like a tropical rainstorm punishing a perspex roof barraged the keyboard until, with a mighty ‘bing’ and a glowing of her Windows desktop, she was back in, with all thoughts of the grey ceiling purged from her mind.
Rebecca risked a smug smile. Normally she found that smugness was immediately punished by unforeseen problems, but making it into her account with a whole one attempt to spare, not having to answer a phone half way, and making it back to her cup of tea in time to tolerate it, rendered the circumstance sufficiently acceptable to feel self-satisfied about it.
"Thanks for working with me there, phones." she said to her silent receiver, resting ever-ready on its cradle. She assumed it would relay the message to its colleagues. "You know, now that I come to think about it, I can't remember you ever being silent for this long." she pondered. It slowly dawned on Rebecca that none of the phones had rung since the start of her existential crisis, which was a very long time indeed. Suspiciously long.
For a moment, Rebecca entertained the possibility that she'd accidentally come to work on a Saturday, but quickly ruled it out. After all, she'd seen Heidi earlier, and she'd crushed next door's wheelie bin on her way off the drive. Bin day was Wednesday, not Saturday, so she was definitely fine on that front. It had to be something else, then. Another reason for unusually low phone traffic.
It was a real mystery. A conundrum for the ages. A confirmed headscratcher, as demonstrated when Rebecca scratched her head. The scratching finger came away wet. Given Rebecca's staunchly held rule that her head should remain dry during office hours, this was a source of not inconsiderable dismay. However, a small parcel of relief was deposited at her door when she discovered that the wetness was neither blood nor spilled coffee, but harmless sweat. Unexpected, certainly, but harmless.
As the timer to her account re-locking ticked steadily down, Rebecca made credible efforts to reconcile why on earth she should be sweating so much, and those efforts were rewarded when she acknowledge how unusually warm the office felt. Combined with the Herculean efforts she'd made to type her password and test her tea, it was no surprise at all that she should be indulging in a touch of the perspiring arts.
By now, the strange grey miasma that had engulfed the ceiling was starting to drift down towards her. Or maybe it was growing thicker. It was fairly hard to tell, even with the office's bright white lights attempting to burn their way through it. Rebecca worried that the grey would stop her from seeing her screen very well, so she snapped her mind back onto the task and frowned hard at her email inbox, which was doing nothing deserving of a frown at all. There were dozens of unread messages in need of her attention, and it was difficult to pick one from which to start, especially with the invasive smoky smell that had reached her nostrils. It was like someone had burned their toast, except instead of the bread burning it was everything else. There had to be a word for that.
"Rebecca! What are doing?!" screamed Heidi, crouching with a cloth over her face at the end of the corridor.
A feeling of guilt swept over Rebecca, a reflex from being confronted with the possibility that she might be doing something wrong.
"Sorry, Heidi." she replied, just in case there was something for which to apologise. "I was just having a sip of tea before I cracked on with er... Frank Galway's holiday request."
"What? Why?! Get out!" shouted Heidi. She seemed very animated. "Can't you hear the fire alarm?"
"Now that you mention it, it is quite loud in here." conceded Rebecca, shouting over the deafening and piercing trills of several independent and overlapping alarms. She took another sip of her tea. "I wondered if there was a delivery lorry reversing or something."
"Hurry up! We have to evacuate! Remember the fire drills?"
"Oh! It's a fire drill? I didn't realise we were having one today." Rebecca said, feeling a real buffoon. She wheeled her chair back, pushed to standing and grabbed her jacket in case it was raining outside.
"No, it's not a drill, its fire!"
Rebecca stopped. She'd not encountered this situation before and wanted time to be sure of herself.
"If it's not a drill then do I need to sit down again, or still go the meeting point, or...?"
Overhead came the groaning and cracking sounds of a ceiling that wished not to be separated from the ground any longer.
"You need to get out! Come on!" roared the head of HR. Despite her normally patient and collected demeanour, it appeared to Rebecca that Heidi was exhibiting signs of stress in the workplace. Not only was it clearly giving Heidi herself a bad time, but it had made her attitude towards other employees, namely Rebecca herself, rather less than courteous and professional. Rebecca had never heard Heidi raise her voice before, so something must have been wrong. Clearly, they would need to have a productive discussion about this behaviour once Heidi had been given an opportunity to calm down, as per the company guidelines.
"I hear you, and I hear your frustrations, and they are valid." said Rebecca, calmly. She walked gently towards Heidi. "I'm ready to exit the building with you and to listen."
"Come on!" Heidi commanded, grabbing Rebecca's hand and yanking her down the corridor. It was a real shame that she'd progressed past shouting and into inappropriate touching, but Rebecca wasn't going to hold that against her in her heightened state of emotion.
"So all the orange light and the smoke and whatnot; that's a fire? Here in HR?" she asked, demonstrating that she’d been paying attention to Heidi’s concerns. Active listening was something on which Rebecca prided herself.
"Yes! Of course it is! You know what fire is, Rebecca, please!"
"Huh. The things you can miss when you're in the zone." she chuckled, allowing herself to be guided at a jog through the building. Around her, more of the ceilings and walls were voicing long-held protests regarding their prohibition from collapsing. Heidi winced every time.
"So this was an unplanned fire, I presume?"
"Shockingly enough, yes. We never plan to burn down our premises." replied the head of HR, disappointed but not necessarily surprised that the question had been asked.
"Maybe if we had planned this in, rather than having an unplanned fire, I could have prepared and not been confused." suggested Rebecca, feeling that constructive feedback should always be welcomed. "Not that it's a problem," she hastily added, aware of Heidi's existing stress and not wishing to exacerbate it. An eruption of ceiling joists through plaster board above showered them in white dust, intermingled with black soot. "I just think maybe we could plan the next one and make everyone aware. Probably a lot safer that way, and maybe you’d find it less stressful."
Heidi was going to snap at Rebecca, demanding that she explain what she thought fire drills were for, and why anyone would plan to have a fire. She was going to give her a severe dressing down for failing to adhere to any of the fire safety policies, and chastise her for putting herself in such danger. Most of all, she was going to give Rebecca a real earful about making her trudge back into a burning building to pull her out.
Luckily for Rebecca's mood, which at this point was still positively buoyant despite the miscommunication around fire planning, Heidi did not have a chance to say any of those things. She was given the gift of silence and artificially applied restraint when a large piece of wood, which had until very recently been part of the roof, crashed through the ceiling and bumped her on the head. She hit the floor in perfect unison with her newly descended friend.
"Oh. Oh dear. That's definitely one for the accident book." assessed Rebecca, making a mental list of all the forms and tables that would need updating. She looked up at where the wooden beam had fallen through, and shook her head. It was full of broken plasterboard, splintered beams and a lot of fire. A real headache for health and safety.
"Well, all that's got to be dealt with, for sure." she tutted, hands on hips. "But it's more important to deal with an injured party first." she recited to herself from the first aid training manual.
Pausing only to take a photograph of the ceiling hole, so that the hazard could be correctly logged and resolved later, Rebecca knelt down beside Heidi. There was more blood than normal in her hair, so no sigh of relief would be forthcoming for the Head of HR when she found her head to be wet, but she was breathing and much calmer than she had been moments before.
"The nap will probably do her good." said Rebecca, always one to find the silver lining. Another cracking, tearing and generally deconstructive sound shook the ceiling above her, sending a spray of glowing embers and another room-choking gout of smoke into the corridor. "But perhaps this isn't the time or place for restful slumber. Well, I'd best get Heidi moved to a more appropriate dormitory."
As an employee of good discipline, Rebecca was one of very few members of the HR team to have completed their manual handling training. Many considered their duties not to include the physical manipulation of large or heavy objects, and therefore excused themselves from needing to learn about it. Not so for Rebecca, who had always suspected that having to lift the photocopier above her head was not a case of 'if' but 'when'. Following similar trains of logic she had completed courses on working at height, working with low powered lasers, working with medium powered lasers, working with high powered lasers, and working with lasers of any power at height. If anyone could do anything safely within the business, it was Rebecca.
Thanks to her wealth of training, she knew that it was vitally important to lift from the knees. Regrettably, she wasn't entirely sure whose knees that really meant. For optimal safety and maximised chances of success she opted for both, pushing up from a straight-backed squat with Heidi's calves hooked over her shoulders like the straps of a flared-trousered backpack. Rebecca's significant height advantage over Heidi was the only reason that the latter avoided having their head dragged and bumped over the increasingly rubble-strewn floor, as the two HR representatives progressed through the blazing building.
Despite her petite frame, carrying Heidi was making Rebecca very tired. It wouldn't have been so bad if they could have taken the most direct route out to the assembly point, but they instead had to go all the way past the main door, along another burning corridor and round the back of the store cupboard to reach the fire exit. That kind of convoluted route was the last thing someone needed to do in the event of a conflagration, and Rebecca had flagged it many times, but no-one ever seemed to take the complaint seriously. At the very least, someone else had already broken the glass, so she was able to make her way out, unhindered, with no further delays.
The assembly point was stunningly well named and intriguingly ephemeral. Most of the time, no-one at all spent their work day hanging around in the car park, but every time there was a fire drill, and coincidentally now that there was a fire, the whole workforce spontaneously assembled there. It was a marvel to behold every time, and one of Rebecca's favourite mysteries about the workplace.
"There they are!" cried Terrence Blimp, day-to-day server in the canteen and occasional fire marshal.
Upon seeing Rebecca, and probably awed by how safely and capably she was carrying her manager, a gaggle of employees rushed over to help Heidi down from her position of shoulder-mounted safety.
"Are you alright, Rebecca? Is Heidi?" asked Terrence, clipboard in hand and high-visibility tabard flapping open around him.
“Yeah, I'm very well thank you! And Heidi is OK, she just took a bit of a bump on the head and was a little stressed. I think more than anything she needs the rest." reassured Rebecca.
"And a paramedic to see to her head wound." added one of the crowd surrounding the Head of HR's hurt head.
"She hasn't complained about it at all since it happened." shrugged Rebecca, but it wasn't her place to contradict people's opinions so she pushed it no further.
"Well, thank you for getting her out. It makes my job of counting everyone up a lot easier." Terrence said, keying another tally mark into the side of someone's car. By Rebecca's count, the gouged totals under 'present' and 'known absent' was very close to the total workforce, so they could probably afford to cope with any remaining losses. "It's very disappointing that Heidi went back into the building, you know? I have to organise a whole load more fire safety training every time someone breaks the rules about fire conduct, but at least I have you as a shining example of doing the right thing!" said Terrence, giving Rebecca a smile.
Hair blackened with soot and smoke, shoulders aching from the legs of her manager, and hands lightly burned from a red hot keyboard, Rebecca smiled back. If nothing else, her decisive actions, adherence to the rules and unwavering dedication to policy had left another job well done.
Rebecca's shouts echoed along the bare corridor, its carpets faded with age and its walls coated in the undefined grime of passing years.
"Heidi!"
There was no response from the head of HR. If she was hiding in one of the small meeting rooms that sprouted from either side of the corridor, then she was fully committed to that course of action and showing her expertise. Anyone who hid fully from sight, but then responded eagerly when their name was called, was either trying to be caught or had fundamentally misunderstood the exercise.
"Rats. That's a bother." said Rebecca, placing her balled fists on her hips and letting out a wide-mouthed, inconvenienced sigh. "I wonder where she could have got to."
It was a strange old day that Rebecca was having, and being totally unable to get in contact with her manager all of a sudden was not making it easier to cope with. In fact, Heidi's total absence from eye, ear, nose and hand-shot was making things over twice as difficult to cope with, on account of making Rebecca the only member of HR in the vicinity of the office. Not only did she now have the twice the work to do, which itself was already twice her normal quantity of work thanks to multiple absences, but if she needed a wee or a drink at any point then there would be no-one left to answer the phones. What if there was a desperate need to confirm the company's official position on renaming a colleague to hide evidence of their negligence? Would they be expected to live forever in ignorance because Rebecca had, in her human weakness, succumbed to thirst earlier or later in the day? It didn't seem like the sort of thing which should be allowed to happen. That's why they had rules about always staffing the phones during work hours, and always using a buddy system for loo and kitchen breaks.
Another harrowing thought slapped into Rebecca from the side, casting her already unbalanced mind into a violent spin. What if two phones rang, even now when neither kitchen nor loo was in demand? How would she know which one to answer? And if she did manage to decide then was she supposed to just let the other one ring interminably in the background? What if the one she answered was a wrong number, and a genuine query about the arrangements for the bank holiday staff cricket sabotaging went totally unanswered? The employees at Pesto and Smith were terribly busy all of the time, and would rarely have a chance to call back or make a second attempt at even the most vital of queries. She would have squandered their one chance to make solid plans, all because she was too weak and too unremarkable to be two people.
Rebecca shuddered at the thought. Even if she held her bladder firm and silenced the voice of her dry throat, there would be no way to keep the department afloat alone.
"Heidi!" she roared again, along the barrenness of the corridor, only to be met with the same devastating competence in the self-ensconcing arts. What a conundrum. The company procedures hadn't covered this at all. They'd all assumed that at least three people would be working at any one time, a hypothesis so bold and brazen in its hubris that it now seemed laughable. Or it would have done, if Rebecca hadn't been caught in the miserable mire of the oversight's creation.
Things were not as they were meant to be, lamented the Junior HR Advisor, pacing backwards and forwards at the threshold of the office; a whole host of things, many of which didn't even relate to inadequate staffing.
The computer systems were complaining about all sorts of things, from a lack of network connection to a bundle of overdue updates. Heidi's chair had been torn asunder by forces unknown, its headrest dangling by a thread of upholstery, which Rebecca had only noticed after accidentally thrown her own chair at it while standing up. Even the light in the room was weird, like the colours from the bulb had gone wrong, flickering with reds, yellows and oranges instead of the normal, headache-inducing bright white. There was no provision for improper hue perception in the working policies, and that was just another source of stress.
Stress was something worth avoiding. That's what Rebecca had always been told by her mother, who had done an incredibly effective job of stress-rejection by refusing to work, eating healthily, and being born into vast wealth. Rebecca had been able to benefit from the latter of those key lifestyle choices for a while as well, but circumstances had evolved over the course of her life, and adopting a vocation had become tediously necessary. Regardless, she tried to keep her mother's lessons close to her heart and at the forefront of her mind. The easiest way to avoid stress in her present circumstances was to simply sit back down at her desk, so that at least one phone could be attended, and get on with something that she could control. There were dozens of 'ICP-34: Notification of Intention to Embezzle' forms to work through, originating from all levels in the company hierarchy, and they needed to be progressed promptly. Financial crimes such as those often had to operate on tight timescales and required a quick turnaround from HR. Whatever else was happening, Rebecca had a duty to take swift action, and fulfilling that duty would calm her right down.
The mere act of making such a plan had an immediately remedial effect on Rebecca's racing heart, although it did nothing to mitigate the fabulous amount of sweating in which she'd started to indulge. As she sat in her chair, an ergonomically over-engineered collection of padded surfaces, articulated supports and mismatched wheels, she felt a blanket of calm come to rest over the flaming wreckage of her composure. This was definitely the right thing to do.
Fingers which had spent much of the last ten minutes engaged in dreadful wringing of one another, anxiously trying to find a way of soothing Rebecca and tragically failing, now found their energies more constructively applied to the entry of a password. They clattered noisily across the loose and aged plastic keys of Rebecca's keyboard, drumming down far harder than was necessary and incrementally bruising themselves for the pleasure. Although the keys felt a little warm, as if she'd accidentally left her keyboard in the oven again, seeing the familiar 'incorrect password' notification made the whole situation feel a little more like home again.
By her right hand, just beyond the effective jostling range of her mouse's wire, was what remained of the morning's cup of tea. In all of the bumbling, the confusion and the flustered clucking, Rebecca had totally forgotten to finish it. A mere minute ago this discovery would have sent her spiralling into an eddy current of indecision and fear, but, with the clarity provided by a failed attempt to log in, she was able to rationally consider whether any joy might be found in taking an exploratory sip. It was an hour since she'd made it, which was reasonably damning from the get go, but it had remained full for a good length of time, thus preserving the heat far better than a promptly sipped beverage. A glimmer of hope, therefore, lurked within the porcelain walls of her mug. The finger-dip test was better left at home, lest she find herself forced to lick tea from her hands in the office, and there were no thermometers available at her desk, so the high-risk low-reward method of taking a drink was all that realistically remained.
Not one to waste time once a decision had been reached, Rebecca confidently grabbed her mug, two-handed, and lifted it towards her face. Reassuringly, the mug was still warm to the touch, even those parts of it which stood above the tea-line. In fact, it might have even been warmer than when she'd made the tea in the first place, something which she neither understood nor intended to think about any further; the time for thinking at all was done. It was over. Finished. Complete. Now was the time for sipping.
Porcelain met lip. Tea met tongue. Effect met cause, and together they informed Rebecca that the tea was a bit cooler than she would have liked. It was still drinkable though, so overall she was pleasantly surprised.
"Perfect." she miscategorised, having literally just concluded that the tea could have done with being a little warmer. 'Tolerable' would have been a far more accurate exclamation to make, and deep down Rebecca knew that, but it didn't sound quite right to say it out loud to the room. "I'll be able to get that password right now." she instead added, as a coda to her public beverage assessment, before her fingers unleashed another typographical storm.
Access was once again denied, and now the screen told her that she had only two attempts remaining before her account was locked. It was scarcely a threat, because the folks in IT who handled account resets were always so lovely to her but, nevertheless, the sensible option was to try to get her credentials correct for herself. That way she wouldn't risk the phones ringing while she was occupied with IT, and the associated dilemma of who most deserved her attention.
Still clasping the mug of tea in both hands, Rebecca leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling, the staring direction most strongly associated with accurate recollection. How she was so easily able to forget her password, the very same one she had used mere minutes earlier, was a source of constant wonder, both to herself and Heidi. A much newer, and hopefully less constant, source of wonder was why the ceiling looked so murky and grey. Even in the strange, yellow-orange light that the office had elected to adopt, it was a dreary and somehow dreadful discolouration. There was something about it, the way the thick grey colour swirled and bellowed, growing thicker and thinner in turbulent patterns and slowly drifting across the office, that gave Rebecca the creeps. It had a familiarity that she couldn't quite place, but that filled her with a primal instinct to escape the situation entirely, to run away from it as if her life depended on it. It was the most peculiar feeling.
"Aha!" she exclaimed, with the excited and optimistic force of a several megaton revelation. "It was ToastAndBeans98!"
Fingers like a tropical rainstorm punishing a perspex roof barraged the keyboard until, with a mighty ‘bing’ and a glowing of her Windows desktop, she was back in, with all thoughts of the grey ceiling purged from her mind.
Rebecca risked a smug smile. Normally she found that smugness was immediately punished by unforeseen problems, but making it into her account with a whole one attempt to spare, not having to answer a phone half way, and making it back to her cup of tea in time to tolerate it, rendered the circumstance sufficiently acceptable to feel self-satisfied about it.
"Thanks for working with me there, phones." she said to her silent receiver, resting ever-ready on its cradle. She assumed it would relay the message to its colleagues. "You know, now that I come to think about it, I can't remember you ever being silent for this long." she pondered. It slowly dawned on Rebecca that none of the phones had rung since the start of her existential crisis, which was a very long time indeed. Suspiciously long.
For a moment, Rebecca entertained the possibility that she'd accidentally come to work on a Saturday, but quickly ruled it out. After all, she'd seen Heidi earlier, and she'd crushed next door's wheelie bin on her way off the drive. Bin day was Wednesday, not Saturday, so she was definitely fine on that front. It had to be something else, then. Another reason for unusually low phone traffic.
It was a real mystery. A conundrum for the ages. A confirmed headscratcher, as demonstrated when Rebecca scratched her head. The scratching finger came away wet. Given Rebecca's staunchly held rule that her head should remain dry during office hours, this was a source of not inconsiderable dismay. However, a small parcel of relief was deposited at her door when she discovered that the wetness was neither blood nor spilled coffee, but harmless sweat. Unexpected, certainly, but harmless.
As the timer to her account re-locking ticked steadily down, Rebecca made credible efforts to reconcile why on earth she should be sweating so much, and those efforts were rewarded when she acknowledge how unusually warm the office felt. Combined with the Herculean efforts she'd made to type her password and test her tea, it was no surprise at all that she should be indulging in a touch of the perspiring arts.
By now, the strange grey miasma that had engulfed the ceiling was starting to drift down towards her. Or maybe it was growing thicker. It was fairly hard to tell, even with the office's bright white lights attempting to burn their way through it. Rebecca worried that the grey would stop her from seeing her screen very well, so she snapped her mind back onto the task and frowned hard at her email inbox, which was doing nothing deserving of a frown at all. There were dozens of unread messages in need of her attention, and it was difficult to pick one from which to start, especially with the invasive smoky smell that had reached her nostrils. It was like someone had burned their toast, except instead of the bread burning it was everything else. There had to be a word for that.
"Rebecca! What are doing?!" screamed Heidi, crouching with a cloth over her face at the end of the corridor.
A feeling of guilt swept over Rebecca, a reflex from being confronted with the possibility that she might be doing something wrong.
"Sorry, Heidi." she replied, just in case there was something for which to apologise. "I was just having a sip of tea before I cracked on with er... Frank Galway's holiday request."
"What? Why?! Get out!" shouted Heidi. She seemed very animated. "Can't you hear the fire alarm?"
"Now that you mention it, it is quite loud in here." conceded Rebecca, shouting over the deafening and piercing trills of several independent and overlapping alarms. She took another sip of her tea. "I wondered if there was a delivery lorry reversing or something."
"Hurry up! We have to evacuate! Remember the fire drills?"
"Oh! It's a fire drill? I didn't realise we were having one today." Rebecca said, feeling a real buffoon. She wheeled her chair back, pushed to standing and grabbed her jacket in case it was raining outside.
"No, it's not a drill, its fire!"
Rebecca stopped. She'd not encountered this situation before and wanted time to be sure of herself.
"If it's not a drill then do I need to sit down again, or still go the meeting point, or...?"
Overhead came the groaning and cracking sounds of a ceiling that wished not to be separated from the ground any longer.
"You need to get out! Come on!" roared the head of HR. Despite her normally patient and collected demeanour, it appeared to Rebecca that Heidi was exhibiting signs of stress in the workplace. Not only was it clearly giving Heidi herself a bad time, but it had made her attitude towards other employees, namely Rebecca herself, rather less than courteous and professional. Rebecca had never heard Heidi raise her voice before, so something must have been wrong. Clearly, they would need to have a productive discussion about this behaviour once Heidi had been given an opportunity to calm down, as per the company guidelines.
"I hear you, and I hear your frustrations, and they are valid." said Rebecca, calmly. She walked gently towards Heidi. "I'm ready to exit the building with you and to listen."
"Come on!" Heidi commanded, grabbing Rebecca's hand and yanking her down the corridor. It was a real shame that she'd progressed past shouting and into inappropriate touching, but Rebecca wasn't going to hold that against her in her heightened state of emotion.
"So all the orange light and the smoke and whatnot; that's a fire? Here in HR?" she asked, demonstrating that she’d been paying attention to Heidi’s concerns. Active listening was something on which Rebecca prided herself.
"Yes! Of course it is! You know what fire is, Rebecca, please!"
"Huh. The things you can miss when you're in the zone." she chuckled, allowing herself to be guided at a jog through the building. Around her, more of the ceilings and walls were voicing long-held protests regarding their prohibition from collapsing. Heidi winced every time.
"So this was an unplanned fire, I presume?"
"Shockingly enough, yes. We never plan to burn down our premises." replied the head of HR, disappointed but not necessarily surprised that the question had been asked.
"Maybe if we had planned this in, rather than having an unplanned fire, I could have prepared and not been confused." suggested Rebecca, feeling that constructive feedback should always be welcomed. "Not that it's a problem," she hastily added, aware of Heidi's existing stress and not wishing to exacerbate it. An eruption of ceiling joists through plaster board above showered them in white dust, intermingled with black soot. "I just think maybe we could plan the next one and make everyone aware. Probably a lot safer that way, and maybe you’d find it less stressful."
Heidi was going to snap at Rebecca, demanding that she explain what she thought fire drills were for, and why anyone would plan to have a fire. She was going to give her a severe dressing down for failing to adhere to any of the fire safety policies, and chastise her for putting herself in such danger. Most of all, she was going to give Rebecca a real earful about making her trudge back into a burning building to pull her out.
Luckily for Rebecca's mood, which at this point was still positively buoyant despite the miscommunication around fire planning, Heidi did not have a chance to say any of those things. She was given the gift of silence and artificially applied restraint when a large piece of wood, which had until very recently been part of the roof, crashed through the ceiling and bumped her on the head. She hit the floor in perfect unison with her newly descended friend.
"Oh. Oh dear. That's definitely one for the accident book." assessed Rebecca, making a mental list of all the forms and tables that would need updating. She looked up at where the wooden beam had fallen through, and shook her head. It was full of broken plasterboard, splintered beams and a lot of fire. A real headache for health and safety.
"Well, all that's got to be dealt with, for sure." she tutted, hands on hips. "But it's more important to deal with an injured party first." she recited to herself from the first aid training manual.
Pausing only to take a photograph of the ceiling hole, so that the hazard could be correctly logged and resolved later, Rebecca knelt down beside Heidi. There was more blood than normal in her hair, so no sigh of relief would be forthcoming for the Head of HR when she found her head to be wet, but she was breathing and much calmer than she had been moments before.
"The nap will probably do her good." said Rebecca, always one to find the silver lining. Another cracking, tearing and generally deconstructive sound shook the ceiling above her, sending a spray of glowing embers and another room-choking gout of smoke into the corridor. "But perhaps this isn't the time or place for restful slumber. Well, I'd best get Heidi moved to a more appropriate dormitory."
As an employee of good discipline, Rebecca was one of very few members of the HR team to have completed their manual handling training. Many considered their duties not to include the physical manipulation of large or heavy objects, and therefore excused themselves from needing to learn about it. Not so for Rebecca, who had always suspected that having to lift the photocopier above her head was not a case of 'if' but 'when'. Following similar trains of logic she had completed courses on working at height, working with low powered lasers, working with medium powered lasers, working with high powered lasers, and working with lasers of any power at height. If anyone could do anything safely within the business, it was Rebecca.
Thanks to her wealth of training, she knew that it was vitally important to lift from the knees. Regrettably, she wasn't entirely sure whose knees that really meant. For optimal safety and maximised chances of success she opted for both, pushing up from a straight-backed squat with Heidi's calves hooked over her shoulders like the straps of a flared-trousered backpack. Rebecca's significant height advantage over Heidi was the only reason that the latter avoided having their head dragged and bumped over the increasingly rubble-strewn floor, as the two HR representatives progressed through the blazing building.
Despite her petite frame, carrying Heidi was making Rebecca very tired. It wouldn't have been so bad if they could have taken the most direct route out to the assembly point, but they instead had to go all the way past the main door, along another burning corridor and round the back of the store cupboard to reach the fire exit. That kind of convoluted route was the last thing someone needed to do in the event of a conflagration, and Rebecca had flagged it many times, but no-one ever seemed to take the complaint seriously. At the very least, someone else had already broken the glass, so she was able to make her way out, unhindered, with no further delays.
The assembly point was stunningly well named and intriguingly ephemeral. Most of the time, no-one at all spent their work day hanging around in the car park, but every time there was a fire drill, and coincidentally now that there was a fire, the whole workforce spontaneously assembled there. It was a marvel to behold every time, and one of Rebecca's favourite mysteries about the workplace.
"There they are!" cried Terrence Blimp, day-to-day server in the canteen and occasional fire marshal.
Upon seeing Rebecca, and probably awed by how safely and capably she was carrying her manager, a gaggle of employees rushed over to help Heidi down from her position of shoulder-mounted safety.
"Are you alright, Rebecca? Is Heidi?" asked Terrence, clipboard in hand and high-visibility tabard flapping open around him.
“Yeah, I'm very well thank you! And Heidi is OK, she just took a bit of a bump on the head and was a little stressed. I think more than anything she needs the rest." reassured Rebecca.
"And a paramedic to see to her head wound." added one of the crowd surrounding the Head of HR's hurt head.
"She hasn't complained about it at all since it happened." shrugged Rebecca, but it wasn't her place to contradict people's opinions so she pushed it no further.
"Well, thank you for getting her out. It makes my job of counting everyone up a lot easier." Terrence said, keying another tally mark into the side of someone's car. By Rebecca's count, the gouged totals under 'present' and 'known absent' was very close to the total workforce, so they could probably afford to cope with any remaining losses. "It's very disappointing that Heidi went back into the building, you know? I have to organise a whole load more fire safety training every time someone breaks the rules about fire conduct, but at least I have you as a shining example of doing the right thing!" said Terrence, giving Rebecca a smile.
Hair blackened with soot and smoke, shoulders aching from the legs of her manager, and hands lightly burned from a red hot keyboard, Rebecca smiled back. If nothing else, her decisive actions, adherence to the rules and unwavering dedication to policy had left another job well done.