The next day I quit my job, right after they told me I’d been fired for repeatedly violating the company dress code. It’s true, I had been secretly abusing that little booklet, especially page four with its detailed rules about appropriate hemlines.
But I couldn’t complain. It reminded me of my old friend Scott Free, a perverted lawyer who’d got himself off on a technicality. A thorough debriefing with him was still illegal in most countries.
I went back to my desk and gathered up my personal effects. I decided to leave the office supplies I’d secreted away over the years – after all, I’d never get that photocopier under my coat without arousing both suspicion, and those now dormant feelings I’d always got from inserting my original and enlarging until the toner was spent.
No, it was better this way. I’d been flogging myself senseless eight hours a day for thirteen years, though some days I’d actually made it into the office and done some work.
My life had a new light shining on it. An exciting light. A light like the torchlight of uniformed officials waking you in the night screaming about an irregularity with your documents.
But I was ready to follow it.
The aggressive, burly security guards gave me a special farewell in the only language they understood, an obscure African dialect called Fanagalo – the company always meant to stop using that Zulu agency.
And I stepped out into the big wide world, ready for anything that it had to throw at me, though admittedly a snowball in the kisser from a passing limo in the middle of June came as something of a surprise. And as I brushed the flakes from my face, like so many unique crystallized water particles packed together to form a spherical wintry missile, I knew adventure was in the air…