Displaced

Chapter 1 - Rewrite

An email landed in Blake Myers's inbox, triggering a notification that popped up on the bottom right of his screen. His eyes scanned the pop-up more by habit than anything else, and his annoyance at the arrival of another in a long line of distractions and interruptions that made his job so much more difficult morphed into disgruntled apprehension. Normally, the sender and the subject were all it took for him to get an idea of how long he could put off a reply. This time, however, the entire email fit into the notification:

From: Andy

Subject: My office

Now.

Blake held back a sigh and rubbed his temples. He didn't exactly know what this was in reference to, but he had a strong hunch that it involved Jared. The prep school daddy's boy had been weeping and moaning in Andy's office earlier like the wet sack of shit that he was. The only real question was how much of Blake's valuable time was about to disappear forever.

Locking his computer, he stood up with an exasperated grunt. He made his way to his boss's office his own way at his own speed, taking a detour to the bathroom, followed by the water cooler outside the lunchroom, before finally heading toward his final destination. Andy could wait a few extra minutes as Blake built up his mental tolerance for whiny bullshit. When finally ready, he opened the door and stepped inside.

Andy sat in his large office chair behind his thick, wooden, "I'm the boss" desk, the light from the LED light strips overhead shining down on his shaved head and thin, angular glasses. He looked like one of those guys in their forties who got really into fitness after a mid-life crisis, mostly because he had. Obnoxious preaching about the benefits of low-carb diets aside, Blake had always found Andy to be a fairly decent manager, one who didn't micromanage too much or waste his time with constant meetings. He wondered if that evaluation would hold true by the end of the day.

"Sit down," Andy said without even looking up from his laptop, his voice icy and foreboding.

Blake didn't need to be told. Plodding over to a waiting office chair, he plopped down and waited for the oncoming storm to pass through.

That storm didn't come immediately. No, Andy continued to read something on his laptop for over a minute, leaving Blake to wait in silence. Blake was sure this was some sort of tactic his boss had read about on some stupid "Ten tips to better assert your authority" list posted on "boss-advice.com" or something. Andy would have been better served following the advice "know your employee", as all he was managing to do was annoy Blake more and more with each passing moment.

"Alright, this has been fun and all, but the ACN deliverable deadline isn't going to push itself back just so you can waste my time," Blake grumbled, standing up to leave.

"I said sit," Andy growled.

Begrudgingly, Blake lowered himself back down. For the moment, at least.

"I was just reading the latest email in a long chain I've had with Preston since this morning. You fucked up big this time, Blake."

The mention of Kale Preston, the company owner, crystallized the issue at hand in Blake's mind. Now he knew exactly what this was all about.

"I fucked up how? By telling that walking prep-school compilation error the truth? It's not my fault he's been pampered all his life to the point where he can't handle objective reality."

Andy rubbed his face with his hands and let out a long-suffering sigh. "So you did not, as several people have quoted to me, tell him that his work could be done better by thirteen drunken monkeys with a single copy of Visual Studio?"