Darren knew he should have been fired today.
Instead, the woman he had been hitting on for a month in what she called a "vulgar and disgusting way" had quit in a huff earlier this afternoon, thus saving him his job by some stroke of luck. He wasn't about to over-analyze it. He still had his job and that's what really mattered in world where tolerable jobs were few and far between.
Still, he wasn't going to go unpunished. That would be a very bad example for all of the other hotel employees, who were right on the edge of bad behavior most days as it was thanks to their questionable leadership. His boss had given him a firm talking-to, which resulted in his being ordered to spend two extra hours in the basement's electrical maintenance room cleaning out all the old storage bins and completing the repair paperwork for the twenty-odd televisions that had been collecting dust down there- two jobs that absolutely no one wanted to do, and that no one had done for nearly a year. On any other day, he might have said no, but right now his job definitely depended on it and there would be no substitutions. He meekly headed down to the basement as soon as his routine work was finished and most of the better-looking cleaning ladies had gone home for the night.
The harsh, fluorescent-lit room he entered was a hodge-podge of wires, unfinished surfaces, black electrical casing, and randomly stacked bins and boxes extending in a large, fat L-shape. He set immediately to work, knowing that if he completed his tasks in less than two hours, his boss wouldn't make him stay longer just to sit out his sentence. If there was anything the boss, who demanded to simply be called "Ken," had intimate knowledge of, it was the mindset of a slacker.
He began to un-stack some of the bins to spread them around the floor for easier viewing. The first thing he noticed was a rather large insect corpse, which he plucked up and tossed away into the corner without much emotion. The second thing he noticed was a small tape-player with a long cord that seemed to have been tossed on top of the pile carelessly. It would be a shame to go about two potential hours of work in silence when there was a perfectly good tape player right here, assuming of course that it actually worked and contained a tape worth listening to. He plugged it in at the opposite wall, setting it on the empty metal table to the right of the outlet, and pushed the very stiff play button.
At first he didn't pay much attention to the tape, thinking instead about how to go about his business in the most efficient manner- he only noticed that it was a tape of someone talking...a woman. Most likely it was an audio-book. He set down the bin he was carrying and walked back over to the table, seating himself in a nearby folding chair. Now it sounded like a phone call that had been recorded on some pretty decent equipment, like a CIA tap or something.
"It's just nice to hear you," she was saying...sounding a little sad but good-tempered enough. "It's always weird going away like this and having to sleep in a strange bed by myself."
He continued to listen, eyeballing the workload from across the room and still not wanting to do any of it. He'd get to it once he made sure this wasn't evidence of some politician's secret affair or a priest's phone sex conversation. A man's slightly rocky, baritone voice responded with a comforting phrase or two- it seemed this woman was his woman, and she was away on business or some such thing. There was a moment of silence in which the two of them were obviously smiling wanly, positively missing each other.
"You know...I had the trippiest dream last night," she began again, pausing while he chuckled at her use of the word "trippiest." He prompted her to tell him more about it, and even Darren, who had only just "met" this audiotape woman, wanted to hear all about her trippy dream.
"I had a dream that I completely forgot our wedding day...and I spent the whole dream asking people questions about it trying to remember it....and of course I felt awful, because who forgets their wedding day? And oh God, Carl, you were so upset with me about it."
Well no kidding, Darren thought. The only reason a man ever agrees to a wedding ceremony is so that he can make his lady happy. The day she forgets about it is the day it never happened, and he's officially back to compensating again.
