The Impossible Quest Of Hailing A Taxi On Christmas Eve (Scrooge Retelling)

Stave One

"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that," he read out loud from the first page and then shut the book closed. He exhaled, a puff of frozen breath forming in front of his mouth and said, "And this is supposed to be a fairytale? How morbid."

He held the book in his hands, a real, physical print of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. It was only a mass-produced cheap copy but it was vintage enough in this time and age. His late partner had left it on his desk, with a handwritten dedication for him. Scrooge never figured out why.

His name wasn't really Scrooge of course. He was John.

People just called him like that, and the nickname stuck. It was just that every Christmas Eve since his business partner's death on the exact same day, he was reminded of the man. Scrooge didn't have any pictures or anything, just the worn old book in his drawer. He never got to read the thing, it was too dour. He just held it in his hands, feeling the paper, thinking. There's something about the texture of books that appeals to people. The shiny, glossy surfaces of the reading devices nowadays just don't evoke anything similar.

Across the freezing office was his assistant, Clara. She was a single mother of one, in her late thirties and needed a new dye of blonde hair. She could have been attractive, if she had managed to get some sleep, enough money to pay her bills and a miracle to lift the worry off her shoulders. She was an accountant, the only employee to Scrooge, and she ended up juggling every single job, manning the phones, doing the accounts, fixing technical issues with the techs, keeping the office livable with a couple of plants.

She was currently rolled up in a blanket like a gyro wrap, shaking and sniffing her nose. The frigid office was dark, illuminated only by the lights outside, some colourful ones from the Christmas decorations, others simply street signs and lamp-posts, and also by the computer monitors on their desks. She was wearing knit colourful gloves and was tapping away on her phone, constantly stopping to check out something on her monitor by pressing a button, sighing, and then turning back to her phone. It was doing gling sounds all the time, filled with incoming and outgoing Christmas wishes to old friends and faraway family. The glove tips wouldn't normally work on the touchscreen, but she had those popular touchscreen gloves with capacitive elements sewn in the fingers. It was a small comfort in the cold office.

"Mr. Tsifoutis, it's still not working," she nagged to no one in particular.

"The server works half the time, so it's good enough. How many hours do you need to input a few accounts woman?" Scrooge grunted, his eyes not lifting towards her.

"But I'm waiting for over an hour to finish this up and go home. The IT isn't responding, they must have left the office for Christmas Eve." She sniffed her nose. In the beginning, she was trying to do it quietly, discreet like a lady should, but after years and years of enduring a winter office she had just given up and pretty much blew her nose like a loud trumpet.

"Bah! Customer service they call it! It's the same thing every Christmas, you just can't get any work done anywhere," Scrooge spat out, his face turning sour.

"People just want to go home to their families Mr. Tsifoutis," she explained softly.

He got the hint. "Days off with pay... In my day, you could work 14 hours a day 7 days a week and not get paid till four months later," he said shaking his finger.

She waited calmly for him to finish his rant, pulling up the blanket in a futile quest to make herself warm.

"Christmas! Bah! Nothing but a marketing ploy, I tell you. Selling Christmas ornaments and Christmas gifts two full months before the holiday itself. And the waste of it all! The city lights, paid with my taxes. Stupid snow frosting on buildings, requiring money to put on and then money to clean off! A waste. They slap a Christmas packaging on products and mark-up the price by 30%!"