The Office

It’s 23:58 and Ronda is finishing off one last email before she can call it quits. If only she could take leave for tomorrow. There’s nothing for it, it will have to be five hours of sleep and be back at work by 08:00. Done, Ronda sends the email and pushes her chair back from the desk, stretching her legs, wiggling her shoeless toes and ankles in mid-air. Ronda clasps her hands at the back of her head and whistles. She swivels her chair from left to right then spins herself around to face the large windows behind her. The company she works for bought two floors in this high-rise building, and from the bright clean windows she can see the city below. It’s twinkling lights are barely visible through all the falling snow. She feels grateful for the warmth contained within. The few cars that are still on the streets appear sporadically. Ronda wonders, as she’s done before, where those cars go at this time of night. Are they late-night workers like her? Is someone rushing to some late night emergency, perhaps? 

The timer on her phone goes off. That means it’s 00:15. She confirms with her wrist watch. Time to go home. Ronda wheels back to her desk. The slight moist odour from her red stilettos hits her face as she rummages under the desk for them. She must remember to put powder in them. Ronda decides to walk to her car barefoot. With her coat on and handbag in hand, Ronda heads for the elevators. 

The glass door is jammed. Ronda can see the piled-up snow from within the building. She pushes with her shoulder, but can only get the door to open a crack. The cold air sputters in before the door closes again. With the height of the snow, she knew she was taking a chance, but only because the thought of staying cooped up in the office for the night sucked.

The security guard desk is empty. He must have clocked off at 23:00. Ronda looks around unsure of what to do. She walks over to the security desk and looks under the enclosed desk for anything that could help her move the door. There’s nothing except the computer CPU. Ronda moves the mouse and the screen blinks on showing various rooms in the building, but no one else in them. She’s alone. 

Ronda is back on the tenth floor, her company’s office space. She looks out over the cubicles. For the first time she notices how crowded the space is. Thirty people all crammed in a cubicle each, sharing one floor space. The Manager’s office is on the left. The glass doors display the semi-dark space within. Ronda rummages for spare keys to the managers office in the receptionist’s drawers near the elevators and finds one. She’s not sure what she’s expecting to find in the office but anything that could spark a bright idea is welcome. 

Unlike the cubicles that have been somewhat cleaned and organised by the night janitor, the untidy desk in the dimly lit office makes the room feel disorganised. Janet Perry, the office manager who looks over them, the finance minions, is effective at her job. Her steely demeanour keeps hidden her sense of humour and love for adventure. That side you only get see at end of year office parties. For most of the year they get an awkward woman who wants you to seem approachable but behaves stand-offish. In a ruthless corporate world no-one can blame her for wanting to keep her armour on. 

Ronda looks around the office floor and along the carpet scaffolding. Touching anything may need too much explaining later. Janet is not exactly the most trusting manager. Nothing. Ronda takes the chance to open the only wardrobe in the room, standing mahogany tall in the corner. Men’s shoes? Ronda’s interest is piqued a little. Janet has always made a show of being single. Ronda remembers a time she came into the office and wouldn’t shut up about the woman in the UK who had married herself. “How crazy is that?” she kept asking. “You know, I think she’s onto something there. People just aren’t reliable. I might just do it myself,” was how she ended the conversation in the tearoom. The shoes look like a size nine. A tie is neatly folded in one of them. The rest of the closet is empty except for a folded piece of paper in the corner of the wardrobe. The temptation to take a look is rising so, Ronda shuts the wardrobe doors quickly. 

“Ronda come-on,” she says to herself. 

She returns the keys where she found them. Feeling defeated, Ronda wanders around the cubicles. What could she use? She is noticing her colleagues’ desks for the time. All the bins are empty and the chairs are neatly tucked under the desks. The little things that no one will notice, and that everyone will ruin by 10:00 this morning. Ronda wanders back to her desk. She slumps back into her chair, wishing she hadn’t parked outside…The parking lot! With excitement, Ronda picks up her things and dashes to the elevator.

The parking lot is cold. Her breath is visible with every exhale. She puts her heels on and pulls her coat a little tighter around herself. All she can hear is the echo of her shoes as she looks for an exit. It takes her what feel like ten minutes to cross the massive space in her shoes. The metal steely gate is ice. The red button on the wall next to the steely mass doesn’t work. Ronda pushes it again and again, slamming it several times the gate doesn’t budge. Frustrated she kicks the grey mass and immediately regrets it. 

Ronda is back in the warmer office at her desk, staring out at the barely visible city spread before her. The blizzard seems to be getting worse. It’s 03:30 in the morning and the streets are now empty, there are no more random cars on the road. Who would be crazy enough to be out in this weather anyway. All Ronda can hear is the silence. The last time she experienced this frustration she was back home in Zimbabwe. The weather had been a lot warmer. She lived in a poorer suburb of a small city on the eastern side of the country. The day she’s thinking of her mother had sent her to the local borehole. Because she had gone at a time that most people were shutting themselves indoors there was no-one nearby. The pump’s lever was too hard for her to push down and she didn’t want to be out there that late. Ronda ended up doing what she’d always hated doing, asking for help. The woman who lived close to the man-made well behaved exactly how Ronda had feared she would: “What kind of young lady are you that you can’t work a borehole?” “You wouldn’t survive a day in the village.” “You city kids are spoiled.” All Ronda could do was stay silent and take it, she wasn’t going to get the help otherwise. Her resolve to make sure her life was better than that moment had grown.

Her wristwatch reads 05:45 as Ronda has resorted to swivelling on her chair and watching the skyline. This will be the first sunrise she gets to watch without being in a hurry, that’s if anything is going to be visible. The white blanket is growing thicker and looks dense as the sky grows lighter, greyer. She’s decided that she’ll wait for the first security guard who comes in an hour. This calls for half a day off, she thinks to herself. The swivelling has a calming effect on her. Suddenly, Ronda feels like a kid again. Even though no one else is in the office, she still looks around to make sure no one is watching. Ronda plants herself firmly in her seat, she uses her hands — one on the desk and one on the glass window — to push herself off. Legs spread apart, Ronda allows herself to feel the freedom of flying across the office space. She stops herself crashing into the wall with her outstretched arms. The rush is exhilarating. She swivels her chair and faces the opposite direction, but before she can gain momentum, a wheel comes off her chair. It pops under a colleagues desk. As Ronda retrieves it her coat gets caught in a desk drawer. Ronda unhooks herself and closes the drawer, but not before she sees a note in Gerald’s desk from Dinah, both married to different people. 

She’d heard rumours of office romances. One time a female colleague had to quit her job and go back to her home country because her husband threatened to divorce her and make sure she never saw their children again. Escaping back to Kenya was her way of calming things down. Ronda didn’t think it helped really. Colleagues whispered and with time gossiped outright. Of course the female colleague was demonised and deemed stupid for ruining her own family and wrecking the man’s. Why are men never the home wreckers? She seduced him, what if he seduced her? Preyed on her vulnerability, her weakness? She tries to forget what she saw and pops the wheel back in her chair. Her initial excitement is deflated but she still slides herself across the office carpet. 

Ronda wonders what else she’d find if she went searching through people’s desks. She’d always believed in minding her own business. It was the one thing her mother instilled in her. Their densely populated suburb meant everyone was in everyone’s business. “The only way you’re going to get out of here Ronda is if you stick your nose in your own books,” her mother used to say. The principle had served her well. It cost her having a lot of friendships but it landed her an education and job far away from the dusty streets of Sakubva. Being stuck in this office space with nothing better to do makes her want to ignore her principles, if only for a moment, just to know what else the people around her could be hiding. 

Against her better judgement, Ronda walks around the desks. She tries not to touch anything or move anything too much. She just casts an eye here, pulls a drawer ever so slowly there. After doing this at five or six desks Ronda sees nothing except paperwork, and tucked away sweets, and people's toiletries. She’s upset with herself for even snooping. But then she opens one more desk drawer and finds a large stack of cash barely stuffed in an envelope. She looks at the smiling photograph of Becca and her family on the desk. The bills are in large denominations. There could easily be four or five thousand Euros. Ronda wonders what the money could be for. Most people now used plastic rather than cash. Their jobs pay well; those with families may say not well enough. Why would someone have this amount of money just lying around, at work?

The elevator door dings. Ronda jolts out of her thoughts and looks at her wrist watch, 06:30. She’s made it to the morning. She shuts the desk drawer a little harder than she intends. She can’t get to her desk quick enough so she just has to look casual. The security guard walks out of the opening doors. 

“Ah, someone did get trapped in here. So sorry about that,” he says smiling at Ronda. 

“That’s okay, I just spent the time doing some work,” Ronda responds awkwardly. 

“We just got some guys to shovel the snow. It’s a bad blizzard,” he stops and looks a little too long at Ronda, or is it just her mind? 

“People have been told to stay home.” 

“Really?” Ronda is surprised she didn’t even bother to check weather reports or the news for that matter. 

“Yes, I just thought I’d do some rounds and make sure everything’s okay before we lockup again. I hate to think you could have been stuck in here all weekend,” the guard says. 

“I’m really lucky you came along,” Ronda says as she grabs her things. 

“Well, stay safe,” the guard nods to her as she enters the elevator. 

Ronda nods back. She's not sure her nonchalant behaviour was convincing. What explanation could she have had for standing around at a colleague’s desk. She tries not to think about it too much. She knows that the guard’s side hustle is office ‘information’ trading with other colleagues. All she can hope now is that her discovery of that money is not going to come back to haunt her.