Monday Morning Monotony

By nature, I was not a violent person. I believed in the value of kindness. Heck, I even left the office and hauled myself to yoga classes four or five times a week to get my zen on and burn off the extra calories I consumed due to my fancy coffee addiction.

Despite those firmly held beliefs, when it took an entire ten minutes for my desktop to power on, my patience was lacking. It took another five to log in, bring up the desktop, and I audibly groaned when I clicked to open the browser and the screen just turned completely white. It would take a solid five to ten minutes more to restore my previous browsing session. I didn’t want to imagine how long it was going to take Word or Excel to open up at this rate.

I surveyed my desk, leaned back in my chair, and weighed my options. I’d already said good morning to my boss. I’d already put my lunch in the fridge. I even already ground up coffee beans and made an espresso with my hand-pull portable espresso machine. There was really no other way I could kill time within the parameters of reasonable morning office routines.

I stared at the desktop, my frustration rising as the taskbar of my computer flickered in and out. None of the system components were getting enough power; not the processor or the RAM. There was no good reason why it should take this long to get a day’s work started.

Knowing I might just make matters worse, I leaned forward and gently tapped my knuckle against the front of the slim desktop in a very gentle knock. I was as polite as I possibly could be, given how the slim desktop tower was small and even the slightest human touch could rattle everything inside.

I stared at the small glass window toward the top on the side of the computer. I waited patiently. Though large glass windows and even fully glass cases had once been fashionable in the PC-building and gaming communities, that was back when computers ran on old-fashioned electricity. Now that times had changed, so much glass was immodest.

A few more agonizing seconds stretched on. The power light on the computer went dark. I took a deep breath using a breathing technique I’d learned in yoga, hoping it would calm my frustration. Of course, it powered down. Of course, we’d have to do that all over again.

Finally, after I waited another small eternity, a tiny face appeared in the glass window of the desktop. I gave my best diplomatic smile as Theodora glared at me contemptuously.

“Good morning,” I said with espresso-fueled but not entirely sincere cheerfulness. “How are you doing, Theodora?”

She glared at me and fluttered a little higher up so I could see her crossed arms. Her blue wings were just about as large as her body and they sparked with excess electrical energy — energy that could have been powering my computer right now if she wasn’t being so petty.

The window was only about two inches tall and her very human-like body was about an inch long, giving me a clear look at her rigid and angry demeanor. Neither of us was very happy right now.

Again, I wasn’t a violent person. However, I was also raised in the days when electricity came from the burning of limited fossil fuels. Back then, when technology didn’t work well, we smacked the sides of the devices in hopes some pointless jostling would kick it into action. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but it always felt like such good catharsis.

That kind of behavior wouldn’t just be discourteous nowadays — it would be a case of unfair working conditions send straight to HR. If you were too rough, it could easily turn into a criminal investigation of nymph abuse.

“Could we chat for a moment?” I asked.

I couldn’t hear her, but I could see from the way she moved her mouth that she was grumbling profanity. The glass window opened from the inside and she fluttered out with her small, blueish wings, and perched on the edge of the open window.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I was just wondering if you might be able to increase the output a little,” I said. “I’ve got a few projects to work on today and I really need to get started.”

She glowered at me. “You didn’t get here early enough. You’re supposed to give me half an hour before the start of your shift to get everything going.”

“I know that’s what we agreed on…” I paused, trying to choose my words diplomatically. “But you know that’s an agreement just between us, not company policy.”

“I let you keep that horrible habit of having fifty browser tabs open in three different windows,” she said contemptuously, “which is a tremendous waste of power, and you let me take my sweet time getting ready in the morning. That’s our deal.”

I didn’t really like bartering with the small creature who powered my work desktop. My home nymph was by far more cooperative — since I was usually at work, on the train, or at yoga, I only used her a few times a week. She loved her job. Theodora did not. I looked away from the tiny nymph for a moment and to the front of the computer. I really wished that Dell had put a less lazy nymph in my computer.

“How about I keep it to just twenty tabs today?” I asked.

“Anything above ten tabs is a violation of common courtesy,” she said brusquely. “You know it’s tiring for us to continuously produce that much electricity. It’s not like I have any help in here!”

“Okay. Fifteen?”

“Fifteen and an espresso for me,” she said firmly.

I pursed my lips. “But you know you can’t finish an entire espresso shot.”

“I don’t care.”

“Maybe just have a sip of mine?” I offered.

“No,” she huffed, “you don’t put any sugar in yours. It’s bitter and sour and disgusting.”

I felt slightly offended at how much she hated my carefully-prepared, Italian-style espresso. This was a disagreement we’d had before, just like the many arguments we’d had in the past about my browsing preferences, but she didn’t have to use such harsh words. It was Monday morning, after all.

“Fine,” I said, opening the drawer of my desk to grind more beans.

“I’d like the French roast,” she said primly.

“Sure.”

“And make sure you heat the drum up again,” she said, pointing to my hand-press espresso machine. “And watch the pressure.”

“I always do.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s not true. The one you made for me on Friday was too weak.”

I wanted to shout at her that she was so tiny and she only had a few sips before I was left to either drink her sickeningly-sweet coffee or throw it away. As much as I fought with my desktop nymph, I did care about sustainability and the environment, and I hated wasting food, even if it was a fancy espresso.

I made her espresso with just as much precision and attention as I gave to my own then helped her put a horrifying two tablespoons of sugar into one espresso shot. It nearly made the tiny, glass espresso cup overflow. Theodora had the sense to flutter her sparking, electricity-charged wings over to an empty area on my desk and away from the computer to drink her espresso.

The cup was taller than she was, so I held it up and tried not to roll my eyes as I followed her instructions to tilt the cup at the perfect angle for her to sip from it. She wouldn’t be so undignified as to dip her hands into it and drink from there, or worse, just go in face first. Many of my colleagues did share human food and drinks with their desktop nymphs, but mine was by far the most high-maintenance.

As she took delicate little sips that were too tiny for me to even see the volume of liquid in the glass going down, I stared at the window. My frustration was only growing, so I decided to beat it down with some logic — I had to put up with Theodora. Ever since the discovery of nymphs and their incredible ability to generate massive amounts of electricity with just their bodies and wings, all technology was updated to run on nymph-powered electricity.

In return, we paid them and basically treated them like deeply respected colleagues. It was a symbiotic relationship, it was saving the environment, but it was also nearly 9:45 and I hadn’t done a single productive thing yet that morning. It was definitely shaping up to be one of those days where I could nearly forget that there was someone living in my computer and end up smacking the unruly piece of technology.

“Delicious,” Theodora said cheerfully.

“All finished?” I asked.

My wrist was starting to hurt from holding the little cup up at an odd angle. She gently dabbed at her mouth with a tiny nymph-sized handkerchief and stretched her arms. She was so leisurely about doing everything.

She seemed to think about my question for another long moment. “I think I’ll have a bit more.”

I grimaced and continued to hold the cup for her. I silently wished I’d never offered to share an espresso with her all those months ago when I’d gotten this computer. I’d just been trying to be nice, treating the nymph who powered my computer with the kindness I’d show any other colleague.

But here I was — a caffeine junkie office worker with a caffeine junkie desktop nymph. Neither of us could work productively without coffee.

~

Author’s Note: Here we go—my first attempt at writing some humorous magical realism. It’s a genre I’ve always been interested in, entertained by, but a little too intimidated to try my hand at.

This short story was written for the prompt “write about someone who works an average job — but incorporate elements of magic into it.”

That somehow turned into this very bizarre idea about a future where we break away from fossil fuels by harness nymph power in a humane way.