Episode 2 - Ready for Action

It was his third visit to the kitchen in 30 minutes.
It was not that he did not enjoy doing what it was he was paid to do, Charles just sometimes liked to leave it to the last minute.

For the maximum satisfaction, there had to be stress, anxiety, the rush of adrenaline.
And the relief. The smug satisfaction that he had managed it against all the odds. And against all of the hurdles that he himself had set.

It was 3.25pm and the deadline for proceesing was 4pm.
Charles had started dealing with the invoice an hour earlier. He had spent the first five minutes looking for the VAT position and the next 55 advising his gullible assistant Gemma, to play hardball with her wedding caterers. ‘they won’t say no Gemma, even if they do, don’t back down. It’s your wedding. They will do as you say’.

On a good day he would have made sure that everything was in place before lunch. But today he was feeling resentful. Ella had still been in bed when he left the house and he knew that the lazy hound would be spending her day lounging on the sofa, drinking gin and watching mid afternoon weepies. This itself did not upset him as much as knowing that the there was cricket to be watched and Ella would be wasting the opportunity watching badly acted, drippy love stories which were, for want of there being videos in 1953, the predecessor to the ‘straight to video’ phenomena.

He fully anticipated having to go home, wash up, cook, wash up, put the laundry in and hang the laundry up. All the time being pleasant to Ella. It was her birthday after all.
Nonetheless, it had to be more fun than Invoice 6.

At 4pm the invoice remained unprocessed and a cursing Charles was frantically trying to work out why the database did not want to accept the information he was trying to store. Banging the keyboard helped as much as kicking the casing of the hard drive, stomping his foot, swearing at IT and sighing in a manner mostly associated with weak amateur dramatic acting.

A smirking Charles emerged at 4.25pm, triumphant. ‘Ha!’.
White collar rebellion at its lowest level.

During the next 35 minutes Carles arranged his email inbox, sorted his intray into chronological order, made another cup of coffee, and one for Gemma, spent several minutes changing into his trainers, checked the BBC website in case anything exciting had happened since 3.55pm (it had not) and casually meandering to the coat stand.

At 5.00pm he was out of the office door, heading home.