strangereality161

Life in a strange reality isn't easy. I frequently have to put up with incidents like the following.

It happened at work. Returning from lunch one day last week I spotted a half-smoked cigarette on the windowsill outside the office entrance door. I tut-tutted to myself and, after thinking about it for a moment, picked it up. I took it inside and disposed of it in a litterbin in the corridor, making sure it dropped to the bottom and was well-hidden among all the other rubbish.

I thought it was lucky that I had been the one who came across it, instead of one of the managers, who would have gone berserk and probably banned all smoking everywhere on site as they're always threatening to. As a smoker myself I thought it was extremely careless of whoever had left it. What were they trying to do, ruin things for everyone?

I pushed open the door to my office, and resumed my seat at my desk. (My seat. My desk. Whoever thought their life would turn out like this? I don't think anyone did.) There was a commotion on the other side of the room. I looked over.

Jeff and Dean, two of the company's blue-overalled maintenance guys, were chatting to and having a laugh with some of the ladies. I vaguely know most of the maintenance guys. My job requires me to speak with them several times a day. I can do a quite passable line of jokey, blokey banter when necessary. I am a master at conveying to them the impression that I go out on the town every night, bedding women and sinking foaming tankards of ale.

They saw me and shouted over. I said Hello back to them and pretended to get on with some work. A minute later, Jeff and Dean left the office to get back to their many and varied maintenance tasks. As they went out of the door they bade me farewell. “See you later, lads,” I said in a casually gruff kind of way. I am just a regular guy like you.

About five minutes passed. I got on with some actual work. Then the phone rang. I answered. “It's Jeff,” said Jeff. He jumped straight into it. “Did you pick up my cigarette off the window outside your office when you came back from lunch?”

They knew everything. I equivocated, playing for thinking time: “Your cigarette? The window?”

“I always chip my cigarette and leave it on the windowsill before I go into the office,” exposited Jeff, while I got my mental shit together. “Then I smoke the rest of it when I come out. It was gone just now, and you were the only one who came in after us, so...”

“No,” I said. “I didn't see a cigarette.”

“Oh,” said Jeff. “That's strange.”

“Maybe it blew off? In the wind?”

“No. Me and Dean checked all over the ground. Someone's had it.”

“Sorry Jeff. Don't know anything about it.”

“Okay. See you.”

“Bye.”

It was obvious that I was lying – that I had not only seen Jeff's half-smoked cigarette on the windowsill, but had taken it. The big question probably running through Jeff's mind was: why? He must think that I had taken it for myself, to smoke later.

I preferred him thinking that, rather than knowing the truth. I did not want to tell him that I had indeed seen it and taken it for the real reason I had taken it, which was to forestall a manager possibly happening along and seeing it, and launching an instant and possibly effective campaign to ban all smoking everywhere on site. I was thinking about all of us, Jeff. I was thinking about all of us smokers. I only had good intentions. He wouldn't understand.