wrong printer

Day 4. Sent to the wrong printer...

i know i'd be totally fired if my boss caught me working on this at work but it really can't wait anymore. i have to tell him, and theres no way i can do that face to face. in the past every time i tried to speak to him about it i totally shut down, i'm sure he thinks I'm a nut case. i think the christmas party is really the only time we ever really interacted and that ended up on top of the copier in the supply office, which is what got me into this mess in the first place. i have suggested in the past that we get together for a drink somewhere or a cup of coffee if he doesn't feel comfortable drinking because again, the first place.
the thing is, I'm a lot weirder than a nut case, at least by earthling standards.

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she leaned back in her chair and stretched as far as she could get. These chairs were comfy but not that comfy, and she had been sitting at her desk for at least an hour finishing the swanson files for mr. bracken. She didn't particularly care for him, he was aloof if not downright unfriendly. The other members of management in her department insisted the staff call them by their first names, but not bracken. that would be too close to familiar and we couldn't have that. she and she alone was the accountant assigned to his clients unfortunately, the reasons were both obvious to her and elusive at the same time. no one else wanted to work with him, but she was particularly surprised he had chosen the only woman in the accounting department to handle his accounts. she had just always kind of assumed he was probably a bit of a misogynist.

she swiveled in the generic padded office chair and it squeaked underneath her. she cringed. sometimes if he heard her leaving her cubicle he would intercept her to add to her already considerable pile of shit to do. he preferred to communicate in person whenever possible about his requests for her assistance, she guessed it was so he could peer at her over his bifocals with his beady grey eyes. he probably thought it was a commanding gesture, as if he were peering into her brain to implant his bidding there. really it just made her think of mr. grant from the mary tyler moore show.

looking tentatively around the corner of her cube toward his closed door, she saw he was still in his office. he was at his desk typing away at his ancient laptop seemingly oblivious to the rest of the world. "i'm safe, for now" she surmised and headed down the khaki brick road down to the khaki printer in the khaki room with the khaki filing cabinets. working in this office was depressing but there were some comforts. the smell of freshly brewed coffee was always wafting through the corridors, and the chiming voice of the brewer of that coffee always made her feel good. the voice belonged to stephanie, mr. bracken's administrative assistant. she loathed when people called stephanie a secretary not because being a secretary is a bad job, but because the people who did meant it that way. because they don't understand or appreciate she does so much more than answer calls and take messages and type memos. without her, mr bracken would cease to operate as a functioning human being. the people who worked here were kind and downright fun once you got them out of the office. in the 7 years she had worked here, many of them had become like family to her.

the smell of printer ink was warm in the air as she entered the copy room. lost in her thoughts about the weekend and whether or not that guy she had met at the bowling alley on league night, she didn't quite look at the pages as she took them out of the printer tray. picking at a piece of string on her sweater, she crossed the room to the hole punch. she shuffled and tapped the stack of papers on the counter until they were even and then lay them down to collate. she froze as her eyes locked onto two words on the first page: "white power". what the hell was she looking at? she took in the entire paragraph: "the rising tide of white power in the us will only be fully realized when blacks, jews, gays, and people of latin descent are forced into poverty and drug abuse. we know the two are not mutually exclusive, and this is why we have placed operatives to sell heroin, methamphetamines, and prescription grade opiates within the neighborhoods detailed on the map included with this manifesto."

as the realization of what she was reading dawned on her, fear filled her belly with ice. if whomever wrote this knew she had seen it, it's possible her life could be in danger. this was obviously not meant for just anyone to see and the people it was meant for she didn't imagine were particularly good people. if someone were approaching the office she most likely wouldn't hear. the khaki carpets were pretty good at muting the sound of footsteps so she hastily shoved the papers into a folder along with her report that had printed while she was realizing the world of shit she could potentially be in by reading someone else's white supremacist manifesto. on the tab to the folder, she hastily scrawled swanson and made for the door. virtually simultaneously a figure rounded the corner and began to enter the room. in slow motion she collided with this figure, but thankfully not hard enough to knock the folder out of her hands. in the fraction of a second leading to this collision the faint smell of english leather (also somehow oddly reminding her of mr. grant from mary tyler moore) signaled to her consciousness she was about to run smack into mr. bracken.

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