Today was an especially long and dull day, and by midafternoon I felt my eyes closing and my head drooping down onto my keyboard. I did a mental inventory of the possible places in the building that I could safely and surreptitiously sleep for twenty minutes, but drew a complete blank. As with any issue that presents itself at work, I immediately ventured to Caitlin’s desk.
Upon my arrival, she suggested that I try sleeping under her desk while she worked. I know how stupid this sounds now, but at the time it seemed brilliant and cozy. I was exhausted and I had a new tee shirt that had just been Fed-Exed to me by a vendor that was going to make an ideal pillow, so I scrunched up under the desk and crawled beneath her feet. Because of the layout of her cubicle, the position of her chair, and the lighting, I was fairly hard to notice. In the diagram below, I am the red “X” and Caitlin is the green “X”. The third wall of the cubicle is marked with the dotted lines.
Things were going smoothly and I was just about to doze off when I suddenly heard the company vice president’s voice as he made his rounds of the office. He paused for a terrifying moment in the doorway of Caitlin’s cubicle to say hello while I struggled to contain the contents of my entire excretory system. When he walked away, she and I both breathed a collective sigh of relief, but then, for some ungodly reason, HE CAME BACK. He stood a mere four feet from my hiding spot (while I peered up at him like a petrified rodent) and jovially joked with Caitlin about some cute notes she had hanging on her wall. He laughed, she laughed, I wet myself, and it all went really well. His position is denoted by the skull in the drawing.
After shaving fifteen years off my life, the vice president moved on to chat up other employees, giving no indication that he had even seen me. (He is not the type to kindly ignore the presence of one slumbering employee under another employee’s desk, which leads me to believe that I may actually have gone unnoticed.) Caitlin hissed at me to get up, and then pressed her hands to her ever-reddening cheeks. “My God!” she exclaimed, visibly shaken. “You could have AT LEAST moved your legs.”