Work

"In the beginning...."

Okay, that may be a bit sacrilegious, so let me try again:

I woke to the "woosh-chacheck" of the printer spitting out page after page of reports and doing the weird back and forth shuffle thing it does when someone sets it to collated printing.

My neck felt stiff as I rose from my sleeping spot at the desk in the printing room, deep within the bowls of the Field Office, and I blearily headed back to my desk, hoping that I had a ready supply of Tylenol.

Despite being woken up by the printing of the morning reports, a task that happened before the influx of employees, some industrious person had been to my desk and delivered my mail. Yes, snail mail, you wouldn't believe how much of the government still relies on the stuff.

Sitting down, I dropped my phone, wallet, and keys to the apartment I was no longer living in onto the desk and began searching for pills, which, thank God, I found. That task done, I went to the coffee machine, and waited zombified for my morning pick-me-up.

After returning to my desk and retrieving a little six-pack of crackers with peanut butter like my mother would pack in my lunch back in grade school, I began looking through the first piece of mail on my desk and enjoying my breakfast of... okay, not champions, but highly effective federal agents.

The first was the expected closeup paperwork for one of the joint investigations we did with local PD and I set it in the bin dooming it to a future in the archives.

The second was in a textured envelope with an embossed address, meaning that it was definitely from either lawyers or a marketing firm. Not surprisingly, the first guess was correct. Infuriatingly though, it wasn't meant for Federal Agent Alex Douglas, but for Ms. Alexandra Douglas, loved and dumped ex to Derrick Julius Magnus Montgomery, the First, because the man was born with the assumption that some future child would be **** to follow in his grand footsteps.