'Til The Cows Come Home

There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

The day started better than usual in our humble office on 42nd Street. Everyone was in perky spirits, the phones were quiet and, best of all, Office Assistant didn't burn the coffee.

Boss managed to drag herself into the office at an almost respectable hour and was in such a good mood that she decided to spring for a pizza lunch for the entire office. The monumental significance of this must not be overlooked, as our company doesn't even have enough money to buy a box of paper clips. It was indeed a rare and special event.

Since lunch was going to be delivered, I took a fifteen-minute breather instead of my normal lunch hour. Little did I know that the next world war would erupt during my absence.

I could hear them from the hallway. I would have gotten back in the elevator, but there was pizza inside. I took a deep breath and entered the war zone. Upon entering, I found Boss, Office Manager, Office Assistant and Vice President were in a screaming match over who was a bigger tyrant and idiot.

The pizza was sitting on my desk. In between racial epithets, curse words and piercing decibel levels, I grabbed a slice of pepperoni and calmy slid into my chair. For a moment I tried to decipher the snarls and sneers to find out what went wrong, but after the words "leave my big fat black ass out of this, you fucking dago" were spoken I decided it best to just slip my iPod headphones into my ears and decide whose side I would take in the lawsuit.

The battlefront inched closer to my desk and before I knew it the troops were exchanging fire directly in front of me. I cranked up the volume on the pod and raised the slice of pizza to my mouth. But before I could even get the tip in (tee hee), Boss whipped around and ripped the piece of pie from my hands.

"This pizza is burned and cold and I'm getting my money back, so fucking help me God," she said. Cold and burned pizza is usually okay in my book, but in her wrath she sprayed saliva all over my almost-lunch, so I wasn't going to fight to get it back.

That's when the Vice President (aka Boss's ex-husband) called Boss an "over-reactive Irish Q-Tip" and said she should go take a flying leap off the terrace. As the war of words erupted with renewed furor, I pocketed the pod, grabbed my wallet and headed downstairs to the deli for a chicken caesar wrap, leaving them to battle to the death.