Finding My Way(Preview)

Seth

Parking my car in the underground car park I glance at the time and see that I'm a little late today. Great start to the week! If only Max had his headphones on last night, maybe I would have had a better night's sleep. Man, that guy loves his surround sound! He is such a gamer. All he does when he gets home from work is fire up his two computers and multi-play his 'virtual life' away. If he paid a bit more attention to his 'real life' the house wouldn't be in such a mess and he wouldn't have misplaced his bloody headphones. I'll make it my mission to find them for him when I get home tonight. I'm not going to toss and turn again tonight listening to explosions and grunts from whatever online game he's playing to all hours.

I grab my satchel from the passenger seat of my car and head for the elevators. I've only been working here for four weeks and I'm really enjoying it so far. I'm yet to make real friends as I've been so busy learning the ropes. Bob, the guy I took over from, was nice enough but he was old and set in his ways. He'd been doing the job so long that it was second nature to him which made getting information out of him rather difficult. He wasn't that good as a teacher, often making me feel like an idiot for asking any questions.

Looking after the computer programming for a company of this size has been a huge adjustment for me. The last job I had only had ten people in the office compared to the thirty or so employees they have at G & C Printing. However, I'm starting to settle in now.

I've never really been that good at making new friends but I think that, given time, I will possibly make a few here. One of the office girls, Sophie, has been quite friendly, good looking too, but overly talkative. Pete in accounting is nice, we've gotten lunch together a couple of times. Emma, the receptionist, is okay, she usually seems preoccupied or a bit stand-offish though. My new boss Julia is pretty easy-going, too.

When I get off the elevator I see Emma at her desk.

"Hey Emma! How was your weekend?" I ask when I reach her.

"Seth," she says huskily. She obviously has been thinking of other things because she seems startled to see me. She blushes. "Sorry, I was daydreaming," she says, looking me right in the eyes.

"You do that a lot," I reply, thinking maybe she just doesn't like her job or something because she seems to be on another planet whenever I talk to her. "So, how was it?"

"Oh... it was a blast! Big night! Kat had a great time... I think. It's all a little blurry," she says with a slight grimace on her face.

"That good huh?" I smile at her. She told Sophie and me all about the hens' night she had planned for her friend on Saturday night, stripper included. She strikes me as the kind of girl that would love to party, so not my type at all.

"Well I'm glad that it went well," I say before I walk away. I can't help but smile as I can see that she is daydreaming again and probably hasn't even heard me.

My office is situated at the end of the horseshoe corridor that spans the floor. I grab my laptop out of my satchel and place it on the table that is to the left of my desk and glance out the window on my right. Unfortunately it's only an internal window that gives me a view of the corridor that leads back to reception and the office opposite mine which belongs to Pete. It's not exactly the office I pictured I would end up in when I accepted the job. Working on the fifth floor of a building in central Melbourne I had hoped for a window looking onto other buildings, offering some natural light at least. Instead I ended up with an office not much bigger than a bathroom, the only light offered from a fluorescent globe above. I don't mean to complain, I am grateful, it's just not what I expected is all.