It was a big deal of a Zoom call late on a Friday. The Return to the Office announcement everyone had been eagerly awaiting. Or dreading.
I was on one side of the table in the conference room. Wilson and Big Mike across from me. On the screen at the front of the room were a dozen little Zoom boxes with our colleagues. They were sitting in their homes looking smug knowing they were getting a jump on the weekend.
The singing was coming from one of the offices down the hall. It was off-key, bothersome at the very least, and quickly on its way to becoming annoying, especially on a Friday afternoon. I sighed and tried to let it go, but it grew louder. Now it was seriously distracting me from my top priority, following my March Madness bracket on company time.
It had been an exhausting morning of surfing the web on company time, but I had managed to accomplish something. I listed the Tornadex on Craigslist in the hope of finding a sucker, sorry, buyer to take the thing off my hands. The light was at the end of the pandemic tunnel and I needed to unload this industrial strength, turbine powered wind machine before everyone who bought extra fans last year flooded the market.
I got up, stretched and loosened my back and decided to put off work a bit longer with a walk around the office. It was a good time to see what the other sixteen of us who had been back at work were up to.
Wilson and I checked the address for the third time, then glanced at the house.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” he said, from the passenger seat. “It feels…”
“Creepy,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And it’s one in the afternoon. Imagine what this place looks like at night,” I said.
We had been parked in front of the residence for five minutes, both looking for a way out of the assignment. But we both knew that was hopeless. One of us was going to have to approach the front door and ring the bell.