Let's circle back to fifteen minutes ago.
I was sitting in my office, which is a generous term for a glass box that smelled faintly of despair and stale espresso. My name is Arthur Pendergast, and I am—was—the Operations Manager for OmniLogistics. If you don't know what an Operations Manager does, imagine herding cats. Now imagine the cats are on fire. And the cats also have access to the company credit card and no concept of a budget.
It was 11:45 PM. The office was a ghost town, except for the hum of the server room and the loud, wet chewing noises coming from the cubicle across from me.
"Hey, Artie," Kevin said, spraying crumbs of a questionable gas station muffin onto his keyboard. "You think the merger's gonna go through? I heard the new guys are gonna axe the whole logistics department."
I didn't look up from my triple-monitor setup. My eyes were burning. I had spreadsheets open on two screens and a frantic email draft on the third. "Kevin, for the last time, don't call me Artie. And we aren't getting fired if I can find the missing zero in this inventory report. If I don't find it, we're not just getting fired. We're getting sued into the Stone Age."
"Chill, dude. You're too high-strung. You gotta vibe." Kevin leaned back, putting his feet up on his desk. He was wearing mismatched socks. It took every ounce of my self-control not to walk over there and fix them.
"I cannot 'vibe', Kevin. Chaos is the enemy of profit. Disorder is the precursor to failure." I typed furiously. "I am the only thing standing between this company and total entropic collapse."
I wasn't bragging. It was a fact. My life was a series of checklists, color-coded calendars, and contingency plans for my contingency plans. I liked order. I liked knowing that if I put A in slot B, C would happen.
The universe, apparently, took that personally.