Drip… drip… drip…
The sound finally catching her attention, she pauses her work, listening to the slow and steady flow of water from the faucet fifty feet away. Sighing, she continues to pretend she can’t hear it, but now the act is in vain: as her determination to ignore the annoyance grows, so, too, does the sound grow in the back of her mind, lurking closer and closer to the forefront, a shadow on the wall rousing suspicion to delay progress.
Drip… drip… drip…
On a normal day, she wouldn’t even be able to hear it. The office is typically quite noisy with the hustle and bustle of work, but today, she was the only person in. As a transplant from the northeast, she could handle a few inches of snow without a problem, and some deadlines made her wary of taking the day off. Her coworkers, however, all took the day to stay safe instead of testing road conditions. All of them.
Drip… drip… drip…
When she blinks, she finds her eyes straying to the top of her cubicle, hovering there, unseeing yet fighting the remarkable urge to glare at the leaky piping. Decidedly continuing to type, she can’t manage to draw her eyes away from their perch until she needs to proofread the paragraph – at which point she discovers gibberish as the result of consistently typng one character to the left of where she thought she was typing. Her fists clinch.
Drip… drip… drip…
It was an eerie experience, having the enormous floor of the even more massive office building to herself. For all she knew, she was alone in the complex; there was no guard on duty this morning in the main lobby when she swiped in. She often preferred to be alone when working on individual tasks, but it was weird to have so much space to herself. Distractingly weird, as it were, and her thoughts meandered with the droplets from the kitchenette. Such quiet was still welcome after the rush of the busiest season of the year. The solitude was generally helpful as the only interruption she needed to tune out to focus on her work was the pinging of her email… and that obnoxious leak.
Drip… drip… drip…
Forcing a strong exhale, she stands, tugging her blazer flat and buttoning the bottom button. She cracks her neck, slides her chair back under her desk, takes a deep breath, and strolls toward the kitchen, pumping her arms and lifting her knees high as though marching. As she turns the corner to face her adversary, she reaches out, gripping the wall and swinging around the corner. Foe in sight, she nods, determined to fix the problem.
Drip… drip… drip…
An inanimate object would make a worthy opponent for the simple fact that it can’t die. So, too, wouldn’t that make it an enemy not worth defeating because it doesn’t feel the sting of defeat? The saying that the sweetness of victory depends on the comprehension of escaping a bitter loss seems to correlate somewhat with schadenfreude: if the adversary cannot feel the pain of defeat or savor the taste of triumph, is the conquest itself nearly as glorious as it could be?
Drip… drip… drip…
Cranking the knobs, she discovers the problem won’t be so easily solved. Opening the underbelly, she purses her lips and crawls underneath; she knows little or less about plumbing and she isn’t interested in mucking anything up. However, she still looks, hoping for something that will pop out at her, be it a physical sign or an epiphany. Finding nothing, she traces the pipes with her fingers, hoping they might provide some direction. They offer nothing.
Drip… drip… drip…
Who wanted a kitchen on every floor, anyway? What’s the point to having a de-centralized cafeteria system? Sure, it takes a few minutes off of coffee-fetching time, but how many cups of coffee does the average person drink each day, anyway? And the food would be substantially better if it didn’t all come from a vending machine; requiring employees to go off-site to purchase a halfway decent lunch certainly had to cut into productivity. Maybe the owners of the building thought professionals all packed lunch from home. A silly assumption, but perhaps they don’t know better, or they think too highly of professionals generally to be realistic about their everyday decision making. Who knows.
Drip… drip… drip…
Sighing, she closes the cabinets and leaves the kitchenette, heading back to her desk. As she yanks out her chair, she plops into it, gliding back to her desk and drawing up an email to the office building maintenance. Careful of the wording, she ruminates on a phrase as she brings up an online radio station to stream classical music – or perhaps some jazz – to occupy the part of her brain fixated on the sounds and lack thereof of the office. As she sends off the email, she notices one hit her inbox from her supervisor with the subject line CALL ME ASAP – BEFORE 2PM. Glancing at the clock, she notices the lack of margin for error: it reads 13:52.
Drip… drip… drip…
Everything happens for a reason, right? The leaky faucet caused a bit of a commotion – departing from the cubicle to try to amend the issue then returning to request professional help – and resulted in catching an email on time that otherwise would not have been seen until too late. It’s curious the way such things sometimes work: perturbing us to action, that action resulting in an unrelated save on the day. And often we don’t even feel the gratitude that we should for such happenstances, instead just hurrying along as though nothing even happened. Minute quasi-miraculous interventions happen every day, yet we often miss these graces given to us. Perhaps we might open our eyes a little more every day to appreciate the simple gifts granted us.
Drip…
