First off there’s the woman who may or may not be a midget. I mean there are midgets, right, but then there are unusually short people and I can’t tell with her, I really can’t. She is certainly below cubicle-wall height. I have to ask. I must know. “Are you a midget or what.” That’s a perfectly reasonable question and I will update you soon on the answer.

Then there’s the meeting with this freelance Flash guy, but he’s like one of these people who write code but then has a struggling indie band on the side? Like he’s wearing heavy leather wristbands and his eyes look all beat-up and he’s handsome in an unshowered kind of way? And the woman from our tech dept is basically sliding off her seat she’s so in love, and he’s making like PHP nerd jokes that only she would get, and she’s all: Oh tee hee! Oh you! And it’s all just kind of weird because when did the Flash developers get cool?

Then there’s the photo shoot I did, which sounds glamorous but in this case was my boss taking pictures of this one guy getting ice cubes thrown at his crotch, and me drunkenly humping a copy machine. Hand to god, this is for an ad campaign and now out there on the world wide. It’s like the psychological humiliation of being a copywriter made flesh and/or writ large, I can’t decide which olde-tyme expression to use.

And while we’re taking pictures I notice the door to the candy machine is ajar. So I go over there and open that thing wide and am all: “Lookie!” And everyone has the same reaction, which is stunned silence. It was like seeing a vagina for the first time — that same degree of shock and wonder and should I be seeing this? We didn’t know what to do with ourselves, but it’s pretty telling that we didn’t do what you’re supposed to do, namely click your heels and sing a gay old ditty and then grab fistfuls of free candy and run away. We just stood there, looking at each other, looking over our shoulders, our insides twisting into horrible dyspeptic knots. I said: “After all these fuckers have taken from us, we deserve this.” And there was some uncomfortable laughter (my specialty!), and then I slowly closed the door and clicked it shut.