I'm so hot

You know that it’s a mistake, but you do it anyway. You feel yourself trying to stop yourself, but you know that you lack the willpower. For the eighth time in the last ten minutes, you check your watch, confirming yet another fact of which you were already aware. It’s eleven o’clock at night, it’s still Friday, and you won’t be able to get out of here tonight. Despondent with memories of rearranging the sticky notes on your beige cubicle wall, you open iTunes and wind up the only song that gets you through times like these. You tell yourself that, if you crank right now, right this second, you might get out of the office before Saturday morning.

As you start to revise the presentation that you have to give to your peers on Monday morning so that it includes all of your boss’ comments, you remind yourself that, despite his insistence that the word ‘myself’ should be used whenever impossible, he is eminently qualified for his Vice Presidency. You sigh as you read the first page, where he has decided to change your first bullet, “Introduction to Viral Marketing,” to, “Convergence in the Internet eSpace: An Overview of Important Tactics.” Two years ago, had you read this change, you might have banged your head against the desk. Not anymore. You’re a smart one, and you learned from giving yourself a concussion.

You decide that you can’t take this anymore. Of course, you’ve decided this several times in the past few years, but that doesn’t mean all that much right now. You’ve had it. It’s time to find a new job, or at least find to sneak out of the office for the night without getting caught. You know that your boss will want to see a revision of this presentation by ten on Saturday morning, which gives you exactly eleven hours to turn it around.

“This shouldn’t take that long,” you say to yourself before you turn to page six, where your boss has insisted that you compile your company’s sales records for the last fifteen years next to a graph of the S&P 500’s growth rate. He insists that this will show that your company has grown faster than America’s largest companies over the period. Unfortunately, you don’t have access to this data. You’re not even sure who would have access to this data, besides Betty, the bookkeeper from Hell, and you’re not about to call her this late at night.

“Fuck this,” you shout. “This is my presentation, and I don’t have to listen to what he says. I’m leaving for the night! This thing is fine as-is!”

Do you:

- Storm out of the office, looking for a bar?

- Get up, go to the bathroom and give yourself a chance to cool down?

- Write an email to your boss, explaining your point of view as reasonably as possible?

- Try to find Betty the Bookkeeper’s home number and pray that she doesn’t turn into a werewolf at night?

(This is the first page of a 150+ page Choose Your Own Adventure story that I've been working on for my website, www.jonbrodsky.com)