BrynLeretu Habitica 01-21-2021

Written by BrynLeretu

[Finish the story] [I had a conference call in five minutes. Marcy had my meeting papers laid out along with some fresh pens, Post-its, and a notepad all ready for me. At least until I walked in and spilled my Starbucks down my white blouse and all over my desk, papers and keyboard. Who would have thought that a grande covered so much horizontal space? This was my moment to shine and...]

...I just had to frig up somehow, I think as I take off my blouse and my bra and try wiping the affected area as if I was washing the table; after all, they’re already soaked in coffee, so what would it matter if they got soaked in even more coffee?

“Ugh, dang it,” I say, my voice low and my teeth clenched. Then I untie my mercifully mostly-dry jacket from around my waist, button it up and put it on backwards and proceed to take my phone out of my pants pocket, which—gasp!—was not only spared as well from my maladroit manœuvre, but could also hold my phone in the first place!

Maybe I should shop in the men’s section more often….

I dial the office, praying to no one in particular that Marcy will pick up the phone. Which she does.

“You’ve reached the office of Lavinia Taylor, chief finance officer of Ferden And Schlockenbultz Limited, the finest balloon animal balloon manufacturer east of Toronto, which in turn is the biggest joke north of...wait, is that you, boss?”

“Yes,” I say, my voice trembling somewhat. “Marcy, there’s been an...incident.”

“Define ‘incident.’”

“I entered the teleconference room and promptly spilled my grande everywheres. The papers, the desk, my shirt, my laptop...yeah, ‘virtually everywheres’ does cover that pretty well. Plus I’m sorry about the notepad.”

I get up, my drenched shirt and bra in one hand and my papers in the other. As I do so, I can hear Marcy sigh and I can almost see her put her palm to her face.

“The notepad?” she asks. “Your laptop is most likely ruined and you’re worried about the notepad?”

“It’s a nice notepad, you know,” I say as I wring out the bra and shirt over the garbage can after putting the papers on the radiator. “Fairly understated but elegant nonetheless. I mean, it’s periwinkle with golden swirls in the bottom left corner! You can’t get classier than that.”

“I know, Lavinia. I’m the one who put it out,” Marcy says whilst I walk back to the desk, put the aforementioned blouse and lingerie combo back on the computer keyboard, take the first fifty pages of the notepad and try to yeet them into the trash can. (I miss.)

The aforementioned can is metal, about one and a half feet tall and has yellow sequined flowers on a background that consists of a blue and burnt orange swirl. It’s also the least garish component of the office, which combines the neat, orderly and admittedly quite blah nature of modern architecture with what resembles the hybrid of every single pride flag and complete insanity. There’s no neutral colours or pastels anywhere except for the clothes that the employees and executives of Ferden And Schlockenbultz wear, and that’s only so we stand out against what is basically Weird Al’s “Tacky” given form in a corporation’s HQ.

(Incidentally, us executives unanimously decided to make that Ferden And Schlockenbultz’s theme song back when Mandatory Fun came out. Before that, it was “Dare to be Stupid.”)

I look at my digital watch, which is the colour of rose quartz. The neon-green numbers read 5:32.

''Three minutes left, Lavinia. You have three minutes until this blasted call.''

“Can I please borrow your laptop?” I ask Marcy. “I got three minutes before this call starts.”

“Fine,” I hear her say. “Just don’t spill coffee on it. I only got it two weeks ago.”

“I won’t. I haven’t any coffee left to spill.”

---

Two minutes later, I’m running back to the teleconference room, glasses askew, hair flying everywheres and Marcy’s laptop clutched to my chest. All the while, I’m repeating a couple mantras inside my head, namely Don’t be late and Don’t drop the frigging laptop, Lavinia.

What can I say? Anxiety’s a real pain.

I arrive back in the room and place the laptop on the neon pink, yellow, blue, forest green, purple and a pukish green-brown table that looks as if abstract expressionism, bad taste and the ‘80s had a baby, on the opposite side of the coffee mess. The table in question is oval and about ten feet long; surely no one would notice the state of that end during a Zoom call, let alone a conference like this one that is taking place via telephone.

I’m in an absolute tizzy for the next minute or so—I gotta log into the laptop, gotta bring the papers and notepad over from their respective spots...you know the drill. Fortunately, the phone doesn’t ring until after I plop my podex onto the teal, grey and chartreuse beanbag chair, albeit a couple seconds afterwards. When it does, I jump back out of my seat on account of how loud it is.

“Round and round, let the city—”

“Wazzup?” I say as a prompt appears on the screen, whereupon I promptly enter some access codes.

“Ms Taylor,” a low, melodious voice responds. It belongs to the president of this company and renowned cheese eater, Venandra Schlockenbultz.

Her grandfather, Xavier Marcus “I Mark The Spot” Schlockenbultz, and his secret boyfriend, Darius Charles “Swiss Chard” Ferden (potential disclaimer: he may or may not have actually been Swiss) had opened their first store in their adoptive city of Moncton, New Brunswick in 1883, as a way to cash in on the then-new phenomena of clowns, whom they catered to specifically, and balloon animals.

They’d wanted their first store and their subsequent ones to be “Thine One Stop Clowning Shoppe [s],” but after an incident in 1952 involving most of their Atomic Age-themed merchandise and a mix-up between the uranium isotope 238 and gunpowder, and which amounts are acceptable for such things, Venandra’s father decided that it was best for Ferden and Schlockenbultz to exclusively make and sell the long, skinny balloons that clowns have historically used to make the aforementioned balloon animals, a decision that Venandra has kept so far.

“Hello, Ms Schlockenbultz,” I say. I am then muted; Venandra is presumably greeting the other guests and vice versa.

After a minute of me sitting in silence and twiddling my thumbs whilst humming “Tacky,” Venandra unmutes me.

“So, the first order of business: demand for balloon animals has, weirdly enough, not gone up or gone down despite the last few fiscal years being oddly reminiscent of a roller coaster. Indeed, said demand has remained stagnant ever since the Great Recession.

“As the CFO of Ferden and Schlockenbultz Ltd., Lavinia Taylor is one of the people to know what such stagnation means for this company’s financial future,” Venandra says. I beam in my seat before proceeding to look at my meeting papers, which are damp and virtually completely illegible.

''Oh, baloney sandwiches. I’m screwed. I can’t even scream externally right now ‘cos then everyone’ll hear me.''

Wait, screaming internally ''is still a possibility. Observe: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa—''

“Now, Ms Taylor, could you please tell everyone what this entails?” the president asks me.

What comes out of my face hole next is “Oh,” which is followed by a word that is composed with four letters, its initial letter being that of the last name of one of this company’s founders.

Aaaaaaaand you just did something worse than scream during a conference call, I think.

“Is it that bad, Ms Taylor?” she asks, her voice slightly more stern than usual.

“Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssss what that bad?” I laugh very, very nervously.

''What do I do? What do I do aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh??! I can’t make another copy of these notes; they were saved to my computer, which is currently most likely ruined!''

''The cloud is a thing, you know. Did you save it to the cloud?''

''Frig, I don’t know if I did or not. Either way, my cortisol levels are too high for me to figure that out.''

“Ms Taylor?” Venandra snaps her fingers. “Earth calling Ms Taylor!”

I jump in my seat again.

“Uh, yes Cassandra?” I stutter.

“What is the financial state of Ferden And Schlockenbultz?”

“Uh…uh….”

I can see Venandra filling out a pink slip in my mind’s eye.

“I-don’t-know-and-can’t-remember-I-had-the-notes-this-morning-and-everything-but-I-didn’t-have-them-memorised-nor-did-I-save-them-anywheres-but-my-laptop-which-turned-out-to-be-a-Very-Bad-Idea-because-five-minutes-before-the-call-I-got-back-from-a-trip-to-Starbucks-and-wound-up-spilling-coffee-everywheres-so-now-my-laptop’s-ruined-and-so-are-my-papers-I-am-a-constant-screw-up-okay-bye!” I say in one breath, before getting up, putting everyone on hold and running to the bathroom so as to find an optimal place for screaming four-letter words.

---

''“Lavinia Taylor, please make your way to President Schlockenbultz’s office. I repeat: Lavinia Taylor, please make your way to President Schlockenbultz’s office.”''

I look up from my sandals and up at the ceiling. Virtually all the lights are off, which makes the multicoloured swirls and splatters that adorn it resemble not the crazy insanity and chaotic energy that only a clown supply shop turned balloon animal balloon manufacturer founded by two bisexual men who’d fled from Germany to Canada after inadvertently giving the kaiser the finger at a circus could willingly make their entire brand, but rather every monster from Lovecraft’s works fused into an eldritch entity that defies any attempt at description. This fact provides me with no consolation, and does nothing to counter the burst of adrenaline I feel.

''Guess this is the end of me. Or at the very least, my time here at Ferden And Schlockenbultz.''

With a heavy and rapidly beating heart, I get up and wipe the tears from my face before turning on a light.

In the mirror, I see a somewhat pathetic individual, which is a fairly accurate description of myself. Dishevelled brown hair, glasses askew, tear tracks on my face, a high pimple population density...nothing new. I sigh and walk out of the bathroom, despite the sinking feeling in my heart spreading to my legs.

Ten minutes later, I’ve arrived in Venandra’s office, where she (understandably) looks right livid. She’s tapping a pen against her wrist as if she were a cop with a night stick, for crying out loud.

Which, incidentally, is something I would like to do right now.

“Uh...hi, Prez,” I say.

“Nice outfit, Ms Taylor,” she replies, nodding for some reason. “Sit down.”

I do. Venandra sets the pen down and starts twirling her onyx hair around her finger.

If only I had hair like that...it looks so healthy and curly.

Focus, Lavinia!

''Oh, right. Being fired. Sorry...Lavinia.''

I clear my throat.

“Yes?” Venandra gives me a quizzical look.

“I don’t have much to say,” I tell her, shrugging.

“That was very unprofessional, what you did during that conference call. In a way, it was, in a couple words, rather tacky,” she says, accentuating the word tacky by tapping the desk with her right index.

I kick at an invisible spot in her glow-in-the-dark rug and make a face that could only be described as an awkward smile-like expression.

“Which is why—along with your severe case of butterfingers, that is—you are hereby relieved of your duties as chief financial officer, and either promoted or demoted to either our company spokesbloke or our new mascot,” Venandra continues. “I honestly haven’t decided yet. At any rate, you in your turmoil and tantrum proved that you are qualified to be either one.

“You, Lavinia Artemisia Taylor, embody all the traits that my grandfathers admired in the chaotic: audacity, honesty, courage and running like a sissy to avoid the proverbial tomato getting thrown at you. Somehow, you managed to embody both those last traits.

You’re completely and utterly ridiculous, what with you cussing during a conference call, getting flustered and putting us all on hold and wearing your jacket backwards. If this was any other company, you would have been fired pretty much immediately.

Fortunately, this is Ferden And Schlockenbultz, which frankly specialises in the ridiculous. You’re perfect for the company, which is to say you’re a gigantic screwup just like the rest of us, albeit one who screwed up somewhat brilliantly,” she finishes.

“Uh...thanks?” I say.

“That’s the spirit,” Venandra tells me, breaking out a toothy grin. “Now go forth and clean out your office. I’ve a decision to make: mascot or spokesbloke?”