Another Day at the Office

Isaac opened his eyes. The yellowish light of the fluorescent hanging from the ceiling of the office hurt his eyes. He had fallen asleep on his desk, again. It happened a lot lately. The dreams had been pretty good, though. In his dreams he was living like a king once more. In dreamland he only had to spend a few hours each day in meetings and phone calls, and then he was free to spend the time golfing, chatting with the elite and enjoying all kind of delicacies and other luxuries. This time he had even managed to meet two beautiful, and  inexplicably nude, young women, but he had woken up just as things were getting interesting. Shame.

Isaac located his glasses, put them on and looked at the contents of his cubicle again. He was sitting on a simple chair in front of an old cheap-looking desk. There was no computer, no other piece of tech either, not even a phone, but he somehow could always find printed sheets with current financial information. He didn’t remember anyone bringing them to him, though. There was a picture of Isaac’s family taped to one of the walls. He smiled, recalling the old times when they lived together, before he started to work for his new boss. His family looked sad in the photograph, and Isaac himself wasn’t there, but the picture brought him some peace anyway.

The old man stood up and stretched his body. Despite being well over seventy years old and spending no time exercising his back pains had stopped since he arrived to his new job. Neither had he experimented a coughing fit, nor needed any kind of medicine. It was strange and slightly unnerving, being so completely healthy, but he didn’t miss his old maladies. Not a bit. He promptly discarded that thought and looked around over the walls of his cubicle.

It was a very big office. Isaac was barely able to see the walls of the room. There should be at least several hundred other workers there, but he seldom saw anyone move from their desks or heard any conversation. His new boss had been nice enough to him, Isaac vaguely recalled, but he also had a way to make people felt threatened. He remembered a barely lit silhouette and a grim shark-toothed smile. “Remember, Ike,” he recalled the boss telling him, “there’s no rest for the wicked.” That made him realise that he had work left to do, so he immediately sat back down and picked up the documents. He didn’t know why, but it was very important to find ways to improve the investment portfolio of a big time financial company. It’s funny, he could swear that he had missed a meeting with the representatives of that same company in that nice dream with the naked ladies.