His email box was collapsing in on itself. Snake eating snake. This weather was going to be the end of him.
One way or another.
The month end’s were pending. Looming like a boggart over his shoulder. Taking the place of where the chips should be.
Beryl had cocked things right up with her latest stunt. Imagine simply copy pasting the weather code from the day before. How could someone be so lazy?
Cutbacks and corona meant that Travis was running a tight ship with loose morals. The compunction of some folk was to do as little as possible. Skating through life with hardly a care for how the details would cause others misery and graft.
Just this morning he had seen the binmen struggling with the amount of waste and refuse carelessly lobbed about the streets. Grenades of rubbish exploded about street corners and driveways.
Landmines of cardboard and plastic heaped into piles and left to fester.
And in his office? Well, the numbers had started to drop off as soon as that weather reporter had had a meltdown live on TV. If even she had said the whole thing was a waste of time, then why did other’s need to toe the line.
Travis could strangle Tony. The jumped little twit. Except he wanted to replace the i with an a. He’d never dealt with such a lummox in all of his years managing the meteorological bureau.
Twenty years forging a path to the top of the food chain, Travis felt a shark in this pond. And the pond was full of scum. The kind that bobs and floats and never goes away.
And Travis was a shark with ulcers and sciatica.
The emails were resignations, sick notes, excuses of why employees could not work.
‘My dog has depression’
‘I ate some dodgy prawns’
‘I have a friend who spoke to someone who had read an article...online, about why working is bad for you’
‘I forgot my masks’
‘My eScooter battery is flat’
‘My Guru says I should find a better path to enlightenment’
‘To be honest, Travis...I just can’t be bothered anymore’
So, there it was, Travis alone in the office. His sighs echoing through the empty corridors. HQ would need the facts and figures by the end of the day. They’d expect the routine to be just that...routine.
He had left his car at least 500 metres away and the walk here in the sun, uphill, had near finished him off.
Travis closed the email box and it’s unending updates. He called up the data from 2019 and 2018 and randomly took the numbers from columns here and there as he filled the empty data lines.
No one would know, how cold they. For years this had been mere snake oil. And people opened their mouths happily.
Swallowing it down without question.
He’d deal with Beryl and Tony later.
