T.G.I.M
by Edward Murray
Timmy Wisconsin had been an intern at the law offices of Quagmire, Chunk, and Stern for three glorious months. He had hoped to somehow devise a method of slowing time in order to drag out his final days at the firm, but he now faced the inevitable termination of his semester-long assignment.
Today was his final day, but he was determined to finish on a strong note. One of the most important things Timmy had learned at the firm was to end everything on a strong note. Both times that senior partner Stanley Chunk had addressed Timmy by his correct name, he concluded his lunch order with the phrase, "You’re gonna go far with that attitude, kid. Just don’t let up, it’s crucial to end on a strong note." Timmy remembered that. Timmy remembered all the important bits of wisdom that his gracious superiors imparted to him.
‘But why just end on a strong note? Why not be a strong note in every day … in every way?’ he asked himself in an uplifting tone reminiscent of the opening to a musical theatre number that would later be cut from the official cast recording.
And so Timmy always made sure to staple extra hard, he over-redacted with the paranoid eye of a Politburo overseer, and he relentlessly made it clear to the "START" button on the copy machine who was boss. He plowed through the fluorescent-dappled catacombs of the office with a countenance that belied his desperate longing for friends, and showed nothing but the relaxed, yet competent, professional acumen of a Junior Assistant.
It was during one of these regular workaday jaunts that he had resolved to transform his entire life, and he knew that today would be the day when he would be asked back for the summer season. It had to be today. Today would be the day that the firm would finally offer him a weekly travel stipend, maybe even pay for his lunches. From this day forth, it was only a matter of time before he procured an hourly wage, followed by the ineluctable reward of (dare he dream it?) an actual salary.
Timmy opened the door to his office marked ‘Storage 7’ and delicately maneuvered his way through the cramped room filled ceiling-high with cardboard boxes. He placed his jacket on a box marked "Dumbleton, L", sat down on his stool, and reviewed his meticulously crafted agenda for this long-awaited day.
Quagmire, Chunk, and Stern was actually a guerilla firm, a collection of lawyers and paralegals all hired on a temporary basis. The bulk of the firm’s work was sub-contracted by a large pharmaceutical company, Soleil Chem, which specialized in designer drugs meant to make people feel like celebrities. Recently, the company found itself in hot water when their new male virility pill, Vengeance, had been unofficially connected with the deaths of 5,230 German, Italian, and Czechoslovakian men all within five weeks of its release. As a result, the overseas litigation swamped the firm with civilized demands for documents pertaining to the development and distribution of Vengeance.
Timmy’s task had been to take each one of the requested privileged documents (some 44,000 sheets total) and place little stickers marked "CONFIDENTIAL" over the small "CONFIDENTIAL" stamp at the bottom of each page. He had nearly finished transforming the secret documents into ultra-secret documents, and he intended to complete his bang-up job. That was another thing about the firm of Quagmire, Chunk, and Stern, they were committed to doing only bang-up jobs.
Timmy liked that. He liked that a lot.
Upon finishing his breakfast of a granola bar and expired blueberry yogurt, Timmy opened his personal planner, a Christmas gift to himself, and tittered with the excitement of the blank days that lay before him. He stared excitedly at these pages that would be his future, and the burning potential they wielded was blinding.
As Timmy’s vision slowly returned, his gaze fell upon the current day, and his grin of ecstatic satisfaction, the one reserved by most men for the orgasm nurtured in solitude, fell from his face and over the edge of his gaping jaw.
"Friday?!" Timmy pleaded in a confused whine that he could never keep exclusive to his internal monologue. It was the end of the week, the end of his tour of duty, yes, but he had forgotten that it was also a Friday!
‘How stupid and selfish of me,’ he thought as he quickly jumped up and awkwardly shimmied his way, too fast, between the cardboard totems, past the box marked "Dumbleton, F", too fast, past "Dumbleton E", and knocked over an entire pile of "Dumbleton, C"s in his rush to amend what he had hoped was not an irremediable error.
"It’s Friday, it’s Friday, it’s Friday," he said in a focused, involuntarily audible tone that often made people pity the unfortunate nature of what seemed to be a developmental disorder. He rushed out of the room at a clerical trot, quickly finished berating himself, and shifted into a proactive gear of good humor.
Timmy was a legend in the office; he always injected a sense of levity into the dreary banality of the weekly routine with one of his witty quips on the weather or a sound recommendation for the city’s public transportation system. His rapacious wit was known throughout the building, and due to his penchant for well-timed one-liners, he was often viciously accused of regurgitating Thursday night’s popular sit-coms. Timmy assuaged the potentially volatile mix of fraternal jealousy and admiration by humbly offering the fact that he had not yet saved up enough money to purchase a television, which always seemed to calm the indigestive turbulence of the early morning water cooler.
Although he could not yet, indeed, afford a television, Timmy’s frugal resourcefulness allowed him to doubly outwit his fellow office mates. He had discovered a morning radio program (captained by the brash genius Jumpin’ Johnny Cheeks and his erudite, if not alcoholic, sidekick, Moonshine) that played the highlights of the previous evening’s sophisticated comic fare.
As he came to the end of the musty hallway, Timmy tugged at the frosted glass doors several times before remembering to swipe his visitor’s security pass.
The scanner emitted an electronic tone of approval that always made his heart skip a beat before entering the main division of the legal office.
"Hello, Ann-Marie," Timmy said to the receptionist.
Ann-Marie Bergovsky was a short, squat, Swedish woman in her forties, a former glass and fire eater, who ran away from a traveling circus in order to join the city. Once a week, Timmy’s persistence of presence was rewarded with her smashing her diet cola bottle over the auburn, faux-marble desk in mock anger and sprinkling the glass shards over the bacon bits of her cobb salad as she aggressively shoved the lacerating legumes down her throat.
"Timmy," she said, barely looking up from her computer screen covered with several internet windows filled with advertisements for Solitaire computer games that guaranteed its user could lose at least 5 pounds a week with their software.
Timmy really liked Ann-Marie. He wished that she was his mommy.
Ann-Marie really disked Timmy. She wished that she could have forced Timmy’s mother, at knifepoint, across a tightrope during her final trimester with Timmy.
Timmy placed his elbows on her desk in his customary fashion and propped his head up with his palms on either side of his cheeks. Ann-Marie refused to give him the simple satisfaction of eye contact.
"Guess what, Ann-Marie?"
"Timmy, I don’t have any today, see?" She banged an unbreakable bottle against her desk. "I get plastic, now, see?"
"Ohhhh," he whined. "Well, that’s alright, I suppose. I wasn’t going to ask for that, anyway."
"Then what do you want?"
Timmy wound up, stepped back, and delivered.
"T.G.I.F.," he said playfully with two horizontally-gangsta finger guns.
"Yeah, sure, whatever," she said as she buzzed him into the office proper.
Timmy made it a point to make his co-workers’ hearty Friday leap from their beds a little more enjoyable, it was his trademark. By extending his courtesy to everyone who happened to leave their door open during his weekly "T.G.I.F." rounds, not only did he bring the weekend a little closer to everyone, but he also expressed his charming vulnerability as a hip cat, just as human as they were, with the same longing for contact. It was what Timmy lived for.
"Hey, Chad!" he shouted to the Document Storage Manager.
"Timmy," Chad nodded, barely breaking his gaze that drifted slightly above the Teletype.
"Looking fit, you working out?"
"No, Timmy, I’m not working out. I’m too tired to workout when I get home and I can’t afford a gym membership anyway, how many times do I have to tell you that?!"
"At least one more, apparently," Timmy said brightly.
"Christ," Chad muttered and returned to pecking up an airmail waiver with two somnambulistic index fingers.
"Oh, by the way, T.G.I.F.!"
A confused look crept over Chad’s face as he looked up.
"What?”
"Yeah, you know," Timmy shook his head loosely and rotated his eyes crazily, "Thank Goooooodness It’s Friday!"
"Friday?” Chad asked himself quietly.
"Yeah, good one, Chad," Timmy laughed.
"I didn’t say anything."
"Man, has anyone ever told you that you’ve got the best deadpan sense of humor?"
Timmy turned off his back heel and gave his rear end a tight, jovial shake, from side-to-side.
Sandra Micilic, a gorgeous young lawyer with long, ebony locks and patented Eastern European cheekbones jerked violently when she saw Timmy coming her way.
"Oh, no God!" She quickly put her hand over her face, but he had her centered in the crosshairs of his comedic stylings.
"Sandra!"
"Timmy, what are you still doing here? I thought you were done on Friday."
"Exactly! I am, and today being such, I offer to you, milady, the most congenial and heartily sincere," he wrenched her left hand from behind her back and kissed it, "T.G.I.F."
"I don’t get you," she said, as she tore her hand from his clammy vise and wiped a drop of Timmy’s eager moisture from the back of her palm.
"What’s to get?" Timmy shouted in mock surprise. "There ain’t nothing to get … but your weekend groove on!"
"Timmy, are you ok?"
"Not really," he said adopting his best Woody Allen impression, which was really just a poor Richard Lewis impression. "I really, I just, well, it’s just that I, I wish you’d reconsider having dinner with me. Tonight? My place? I—I really do make a … great pasta and Italian sauce dish."
"I don’t go out on weekdays,"
"What are you talking about? It’s Friiiiiiday!" He indulged his body as if he were air-drying his hips.
"Timmy. Today is Monday."
"Oh, right, like I’m gonna fall for that old one! Anyhoo, I think--"
"Your last day was last week, why are you still here!" she shouted.
Timmy glanced over his shoulder and saw the rapid blossoming of human heads, sprouting from the terra infirma of corkboard walls and snaking around doorjambs like stalks of prying over-educated ivy. The entire floor was staring directly at him.
"No," he whispered through his teeth, "Today … see … it’s today. Today is my last day. But I’m trying to end on a strong note so it won’t really be my last--"
"Whatever, Timmy. Stop sending me those stupid e-mail forwards." Sandra brushed past him and opened a pair of heavily gilded rococo doors to which Timmy did not have proper authorization access. Confused, he had no recourse but to make a spectacular face-saving dunk in the final seconds before a capacity crowd.
"Hey everyone! T.G.I.F!" His voice cracked slightly with desperate embarrassment.
The entire staff of Quagmire, Chunk, and Stern replied in merciless unison, "It’s Monday!"
Doors slammed and heads dropped below the cubicle horizon as quickly as they had appeared.
Timmy looked at his watch; it indeed informed him that the day was Monday. This made no sense! What happened, did he have a blackout? How did he lose 2 days? There was only feasible explanation for this error in perception. This was a joke. Another cruel joke. But at the hands of whom? His office cohorts, his legal partners in legal crime? Absolutely unthinkable. But if it wasn’t his
colleagues … of course, that left only one culprit; the Man at the top.
God had played a horrible prank on Timmy by reversing the week. He searched his toolbox of Almighty jest and chose to execute the most obscene abuse of paternal power by mocking the commitment of his civilized, tax-paying, and above all, loyal, constituents. He had turned Friday into Monday, Thursday into Tuesday, and Wednesday; well Wednesday was always hump-day, no matter how you looked at it, that’s why people brought in bagels and orange juice in the morning.
Timmy needed a moment to consider the full ramifications of this divine betrayal. He sat at a computer terminal in the center of the office, next to a man who had always refused to give Timmy his name. Never one to go down without a fight, Timmy tried one more time. He tapped the man on the shoulder.
The man ignored him.
Timmy tapped him again. No response.
Timmy tapped him repeatedly as if he were racing to bring a pair of elevator doors to a close.
"What?!" the man finally turned and shouted.
"T.G.I.F.?" Timmy eked.
The man pulled back his eyelids with the tips of his fingers and hissed at Timmy with the ferocity of a wildcat protecting her young.
Suddenly, the infamous doors that led to the nucleus of the firm whipped open and out bolted Stanley Chunk, the most portly and physically intimidating of the firm’s partners.
"Who the hell is making such a G.D. ruckus out here?" he shouted.
Arms emerged from all directions, from doors, cubicles, and a gangly pastiche of pasty limbs even protruded from a random pattern of missing ceiling tiles where electricians had been working on a faulty wiring problem since 1983. Extended pointer fingers indicated Timmy as the decibel culprit.
"Really?" Chunk made a lumbering beeline to Timmy’s cowering frame. "And just what do you mean by all of that screaming, son? This is a law firm, and we need some peace and quiet in order to maintain our business! Isn’t that right, folks?!"
The accusing fingers instantaneously morphed into hitch-hiking thumbs of eager affirmation.
"Now, you listen to me, you little S-Head!" Chunk seethed as he leaned in close.
Timmy could see the important pores on his important nose and smell the important mix of coffee and Kaluha on his important breath. "I want you to go back to whatever hovel you occupy during the day here and shove your thumb … up your ass!"
Timmy blinked twice.
"That way," Chunk continued, "maybe you’ll think a little more about what it is we do here and what you can do to make sure your cocky little punk-self doesn’t get fired! I don’t want to deal with this crap, not on a Monday! Get it?! Got it?!"
Timmy nodded.
"Good!" Chunk withdrew and swayed his body from side to side in order to gain enough forward momentum for his take-off down the hallway and hurtled himself into the dark abyss that lay beyond the ominous double doors.
As Chunk disappeared, the heads of Timmy’s peers re-appeared. Timmy mustered up a smile that he hoped somebody would find charming and perhaps return to him in kind, but there were only blank stares.
Back in Storage 7, Timmy began picking up the loose pieces of paper of "Dumbleton, C" that were strewn chaotically across the room as a result of his earlier carelessness. ‘It’s like a paper tree in late autumn,’ he thought, ‘Wait a second, paper does come from trees.’ The profundity of this statement made his head bubble weakly like a can of warm orange soda pulled from the trunk of an off-road vehicle. He stared at the boxes that besieged him and was filled with the desire to leave; to leave the social effort that only led to social embarrassment that only led to social isolation.
He wanted to leave the firm forever.
Timmy delicately made his way between the stacked boxes, sat at his stool, put his head down on the table and refused to cry.
‘Today was supposed to be different,’ he thought. ‘Well, it was different, but it was supposed to be the same, it was supposed to be the right day … only different.’
It was then that it dawned on him that he had actually earned a stay of employment from the big boss, and there was no doubt that anyone could overturn that decision. For, implicit in Chunk’s threat to fire Timmy, was an admission that Timmy was actually employed by the firm in the first place! This was all that Timmy could have hoped for, and yet, it felt so wrong.
Timmy stood up and regarded the "CONFIDENTIAL" stickers still to be placed under his command. Would he really? Could he leave the job unfinished, to be handed over to a perfect stranger with the mental capacity of a 10-year old? What about the firm? Quagmire, Chunk, and Stern had taken care of him … but who was taking care of Quagmire, Chunk, and Stern? Who was looking out for the big guys? Was he so unfeeling and ungrateful that he would just up and abandon his post?
No.
Timmy Wisconsin had an obligation to the firm, and Timmy Wisconsin was going to make good on that; he was going to end on a strong note. No, not end, for this was just the beginning, and he was going to hold that strong note with a champagne flute-shattering fermata that would resonate throughout the duration of his paralegal aria.
Such a minor glitch of observation. So it was Monday. So God was cruel. But He works in mysterious ways, and now Timmy was staring straight into the beatific eyes of the lifelong commitment of his dreams. Just as significant, however, was the fact that Timmy had gleaned a new piece of wisdom from one of the ten most powerful men in The City, even if it was given inadvertently. And he would take this advice to heart.
Timmy sat on his stool, reached his arm around his back and felt his way along the matted fetlocks of the right hemisphere of his rear end. He inhaled dramatically, as a prologue to his entrance through the grand gates of the legal world, closed his eyes, savored the echo of Chunk’s reverberant sagacity, and pulled his arm upward in one quick jab.
Timmy Wisconsin shoved his thumb. Up his ass.
The shock was not altogether unpleasant, a bit enjoyable, even. Timmy adjusted himself with a sly smirk, and shifted his weight slightly so as not to lose his newly acquired anal grip on the opposable digit that separated man from monkey.
He would have to learn how to place the "CONFIDENTIAL" stickers on the appropriate documents with only one hand, but Timmy’s ambition frothed at the call of that challenge. He was innovative, he had mastered the art of fortitude, and just like the inspirational hang-gliding poster in the company bathroom proclaimed: he could accomplish anything he set his mind to, as long he used the right urinal cakes.
The initial joy of discovering the secret to his desired success faded quickly, however, and Timmy’s eyes fogged up with the algae-green vapors of vacancy as he stared at a sheet of paper in front of him.
"T.G.I.M." he sighed, and drowsily placed a sticker on document #10-4391, "T.G.I.M., indeed."