by Chris Fletcher

Created on: November 03, 2008

Beep! You've got mail!

With a resigned sigh, Cathy clicked the icon. More junk mail, more offers for Viagra and male enhancement; the odd attempt to con credit card details from her, the occasional forwarded pictures of kittens stuck in trees.

How is it, she thought, that we can come so far, technologically speaking, over the past thirty years or so, and just waste it all with pointless mass messages? Email should be something... not exactly sacred, but certainly more precious that what it had become.

Cathy found herself longing for some work to do. The law firm had been doing so well over the past year that they had taken on dozens of new staff members - a wonderful idea with regard to expansion but, without a major increase in workload, there was less and less for each person to actually do.

It was nice to come to work each day in the midtown area of Manhattan, though. For a girl raised in the grey industrial areas of Jersey, the idea of being a proper city-dweller had always had incredible appeal. It gave her a little buzz every morning, flashing her company issued picture ID at the guards and taking the elevator up to the forty second floor. Buildings just never got that tall where she grew up; no reason and no inclination to do so.

She listlessly spun around in her chair a few times. Getting paid to do nothing had been wonderful originally - all the day's work could be rattled out the way by ten or eleven in the morning, leaving the remaining hours of the day at the mercy of YouTube and this month's Cosmopolitan. Today, however, the boredom was setting in.

She twirled a pen around her fingers until she dropped it. Fetching it from the floor would be a highlight for the afternoon, she thought, leaving it where it rolled.

Cathy visited the bathroom, grabbed a coffee from the machine and talked about nothing for a few minutes with Mark from Accounting. Nice guy, but with an unfortunate skin condition that made him look permanently sun-burnt. He suffered the remnants of a childhood stutter, the occasional stammer becoming more alluring than embarrassing. If only something could be done about his skin tone, she reasoned, he would be quite a catch.

Damn Cosmo. How shallow was she becoming, reading that aesthetics obsessed garbage every day?

Back at her desk, Cathy resolved to ask Mark out for a drink. The hell with the red face, he was cute and it had been far too long since she had dated anyone. About a year and a half, she figured, and that was only if you counted

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