Thirty-two new emails are far too many for a Wednesday morning.
Staring at the email portal of her office computer, Cassie could only wrap both her hands around an oversized breakroom coffee mug and hope the slight burn of the freshly filled ceramic might drag her out of an immediate sense of slightly-incredulous apprehension and back into the moment.
Cassie worked in IT, and the first thing she had learned in this job was that most error reports, user requests, inter-office memos and the like all came in on Mondays. Conversely, Friday was the day to get all the reports filed, device fixes rushed out, and the paperwork all squared.
The middle of the week was always decidedly the slowest.
Thus, the thought returned.
Thirty-two new emails are far too many for a Wednesday morning.
It would seem that answering the early morning correspondences might just become today’s job unto itself.
Cassie wearily began sorting through her inbox to see what she could ignore first – or at least, put off until later, first.
A whole seventeen of the emails were flagged as having been sent from outside the suburban Glen Waverly office she worked in, each one marked all-caps, bold, "URGENT" and having come courtesy of 'Barbara, Redun. Dept.'.
She didn’t know what the "Redun. Dept." was, nor had she ever heard of any Barbaras working for the company at any of their buildings before.
Either way, they were out-of-office messages and with as much on her plate as she evidently still had to get to, they could wait. Hopefully, Cassie thought, she might still be able to get through all these before lunch.
Her eyes had barely rolled back to the screen before another new email popped into her inbox.
Thirty-three new emails are far too many for a Wednesday morning.
Sure enough, another one from 'Barbara, Redun. Dept.'
Eyeing some of the other, non-Barbara, messages still filling up her screen, Cassie decided that the now-eighteen, allegedly URGENT, emails from someone she hadn’t ever heard of from some other unknown office entirely could wait until she’d dealt with the rest of her doldrum IT duties and her colleagues needing one technical solution or another from her first.
Cassie set her mind to taking care of the Barbara emails indeterminately later.
For now, she was happy with them simply being marked ostensibly-read with a simple swift shift-click, right-click, left-click of the mouse.
A sip of coffee.
Fifteen new emails is still far too many for a Wednesday morning.
First up in the un-Barbara-ed inbox, it looked like some other mid-management mid-weeker was requesting the repair logs from the desktop of someone on the sales floor. Computer 3-C. Fixed that one last week – just a simple reformat of the main drive and subsequent reinstall of the operating system. Easy stuff, just sometimes takes a while.
Cassie still easily remembered the job from last week, handled it herself. Could tell you off the top of her head that was Mark Lev🜽itt’s machine.
She opened the email and was taken aback for just the slightest moment at an unfamiliar name. The request for computer 3-C’s full repair logs had come from Reid Jimson, the whole sales floor supervisor, not just any old cubicle-jockey. But Cassie did have to half-cough out a small chuckle through her coffee once she realised he’d made a pretty obvious typo.
Jimson was apparently looking for the records of a "Levitt". She was relieved, squeezing out a quick spelling correction back to sales and asking if Jimson might already have the paperwork he needed under the right name would be easy.
And at the very least, waiting for confirmation back from him either way would buy her time to get around to clearing out the rest of the overstuffed inbox.
Cassie clicked open the ‘compose’ tab of her email client and got started touch-typing out a reply without needing to even look down over the keyboard once like the consummate IT professional of eight years’ experience she was.
Hey Reid, you got your salesman’s name wrong in your email here. You’re looking for Mark Levitt not–
Cassie paused a momentary scowl to herself.
Now she was making typos too. She tapped the backspace key until she removed the misspelt message entirely and tried again.
Hey Reid, you got the name wrong in your message. Check you haven’t already got the logs you want under the correct name. You mean Levitt, not Levitt. You miss–
Cassie sighed again and took a long draw of her quickly-cooling coffee, her sense of faint amusement now given away to a much more familiar early-morning frustration.
She drained the last of the coffee mug – maybe she needed the caffeine, not just the warmth.
She navigated the on-screen cursor over to the twice-misspelt name to delete it and very slowly typed out a third attempt at the seven-letter name.
Looking down and directly at her keyboard like she was still a first-year in the receptionist pool, Cassie meticulously hammered out each letter slowly and carefully.
The deliberate, percussive, tap of each keystroke over the silence of her clenched breath filled the air in the one-woman IT office annex.
You are looking for the Lev–
Cassie’s hand hovered, uncertain, right over her keyboard for a six-second eternity. She was paused perfectly in place. Utterly confused.
She held onto each side of the cheap matte-black plastic office keyboard and angled it slightly up towards herself to get a proper look at it head-on.
Her keyboard didn’t have the 🜽 key.
And not as if it had been pulled off or anything like that.
As if it had never been there to begin with.
In every other respect, it looked like her usual keyboard – it even had her annex’s official room number written in slightly-faded felt-tip marker above the numberpad. But it was distinctly missing the letter which usually sat on the keyboard between the letters V and B.
Cassie visually scanned the rest of the keys.
It all looked fine, except that one row of letters of now just plainly missing one character and there wasn’t even a key-sized gap where it should be. It looked like the other letters that should be to the 🜽’s right scooted towards the centre and made room for a conspicuously extra-long righthand shift key as if to evade at least a cursory inspection without arousing suspicion.
Cassie didn't try to stop herself from rolling her eyes, just ever so slightly impressed.
This must be one of Cohen’s usual tricks.
She stuck her head through the annex’s side-door where Levi Cohen – the office’s other fulltime IT employee, and a consummate practical joker – "worked" most days. Mostly on the hardware side of things, when the need arose.
"Nice one, Levi." Cassie leaned on the door jamb. "Where’d you get the board? Find it buried somewhere in your boxes of old crap?"
Cohen looked up from his own large mug of quickly-cooling breakroom coffee with a start. "Oh, hey Cass – what board? What’s up?"
"The joke keyboard on my desk – it one of yours?" It wouldn’t be entirely out-of-character for him to keep playing dumb for a bit either, Cassie knew. "It doesn’t have an 🜽 key."
"I didn’t put any joke keyboards in your office." Levi’s own eyes narrowed into the same half-confident, half-confused stare Cassie had started the conversation with too. "Uhh... you okay?"
"There was a new keyboard on my desk when I just came in, looks just like the normal cheapo office ones, but without the 🜽 key on the bottom row of letters."
Cohen held a befuddled look at his own keyboard for a split second, then swiveled his chair back round to face Cassie. He looked even more confused, and she was growing wearier by the second. He involuntarily waved his head ever-so-slightly and opened his mouth cautiously, "I still don’t know what you mean."
Cassie sounded stern this time. "The letter 🜽. The one between V and B on the keyboard. You know, 🜽."
She started drawing the shape with the tips of her pointer-fingers in mid-air, “The one that looks like two circles with lines on top and below.”
Levi might have assumed this was reciprocation for one of his own old pranks had this somewhat surreal performance been coming from anyone else in the office apart from the usually no-nonsense Cassandra Craft.
"… No?"
At this point Cohen was thoroughly confused, and really hoping to see where his coworker was going with this.
Cass huffed with frustration one more time, feeling desperate to make her meaning known to the man opposite her in the IT support room. "The orp sound?"
Cohen had barely made one slow shake of his head, mouth slightly agape with bewilderment, when Cassie started up again.
She started muttering the alphabet from the start under her breath in order to find her place.
“Aye, bee, cee, dee, ee, eff, gee. Haitch, eye, jay, kay, ell, emm, enn… orp... oh, pee. The one that comes after N and before O.”
"Cass, I–" Cohen consciously hesitated. "I think you might need to take a short time-out or something, you’re not–"
Before Levi could finish his sentence or Cassie could properly even begin to formulate a response, the main door to Cohen’s office on the other side of the room suddenly swung open.
A portly man in a slightly-too-large two-tone blue argyle lozenge sweater-vest carrying a pile of musty cardboard boxes stacked so high as to obscure his face entered the room.
The blue sweater-vest-wearing man put down the boxes onto an empty desk at the side of Cohen’s room with a light thud.
He eagerly turned to face Levi and spoke, "Here’s the cables you wanted out of storage. Got ‘em out first thing today like I said."
"Thanks Joseph." Cohen wheeled his attention away from Cass for a moment.
"No problem. Had nothing else to do this morning anyway - boss is getting my computer replaced again so I can't do anything until-"
Cassie shot out one arm with a single finger pointed between the two men now in the room.
"Did you just call him… Joseph?"
"Joe-seth?"
"Nah, I know him, he’s one of the sales guys’ PAs, and his name’s Jos🜽eph." Cassie proclaimed.
"What?" Both men muttered, in almost perfect unison.
“Jos🜽eph. Joes-orph-eff. Cassie sounded it out, but was getting only silent, blank, stares in return.
A small part of her just wanted to throw up her hands and ask these two how far they were prepared to take this already very unfunny practical joke.
Maybe it was just the oversized mug of coffee Cassie had made with three spoonfuls of the instant freeze-dried stuff and the month-old, slightly-damp, sugar she'd mixed up in the breakroom this morning and gulped down mere minutes ago, but enough of her was still fixed on explaining herself to these two oblivious brick walls in business-casual before her.
Looking around the room for a potential visual aid, Cassie snatched up a handily available notepad and ballpoint pen off Cohen’s desk and rapidly scrawled out all twenty-seven letters of the English alphabet - capitalised, in order, and in full - over three neat horizontal lines on the uppermost leaf of the pad.
A B C D E F G H I J
K L M N 🜽 O P Q
R S T U V W X Y Z
"See, right there in the middle." Cassie poked with one extended pointer-finger around the centre of the pad where she had drawn all the letters.
The man who most recently entered the room was the first to voice his objection. "That’s… not a letter. ... And my name isn’t Joes-orph-eff, either"
Levi spoke next. "Yeah... it looks... made up. All different to the others."
Cassie’s voice raised beyond basic office fluster to full-blown triple-digit-decible exasperation, "What do you mean made up? They’re all made up if that’s what you mean. It’s just two curved bits and a couple lines. Just like B, or the G. And all letters look different to one another. That's what makes them different letters!" Cassie puncuated her last two sentences with rapid, exasperated, finger-swishing motions as she spoke.
Both men stood still and didn’t say a word to their wildly gesticulating coworker.
Thankfully, something else would draw Cassandra’s attention away from them before their dumb-struck hush lingered too much longer.
"Knock-knock-knock, anyone home?" An unfamiliar, feminine, voice spoke aloud with just the faintest air of humour at the same time as its owner gently rapped a manicured hand against the wide-open main door at the other end of Cassandra’s personal annex.
As Cassie turned and walked fully back into her own office room to greet this unexpected visitor to the IT department, she heard Jos🜽eph's rustling argyle sweater-vest and podiatrist-prescribed derby shoes file clumsily out of the adjoining room behind her, but she didn’t hear a relieved Levi Cohen very gently shut, then lock, the door between their separate annexes.
The newcomer was a woman, of perhaps her late twenties, with shoulder-length brunette hair and green eyes – not much unlike Cassie herself. Except donning a bright orange-coloured blazer jacket and matching ensemble pantsuit trousers that made her look distinctly more formal and flashy than almost anyone else you’d ever see in the office, except for maybe on the occasional forewarned-inspection-by-the-executives days.
The orange blazer lady flashed a pearly-white smile and extended an open left hand. "Hi there. We haven’t been properly introduced yet. My name is Barbara, and I’m from the Redundancies Department."
"Oh."
Surprised, Cassie only got the one sound out.
This was Levi’s most involved prank yet, he’d gone so far as to get their co-workers in on the joke and now an outside actress who must also have filled up her inbox overnight too.
Cassie mentally noted that she’d have to congratulate Levi at the end of the day. He’d outdone even his usual self.
Lost in her own thoughts for an increasingly-long second, Cassie forgot to say anything else, and inadvertently neglected to shake Barbara’s outstretched hand.
Nevertheless unperturbed, Barbara simply retracted her hand away from her absent-minded conversational partner, and, without dropping the perfectly pearly smile for a single second, cleared her throat in such a way as to politely snap Cassie back to the discussion.
"You were such a rather tricky person to get in contact with, Ms. Craft. I realised I ought to swing by for an in-person visit. No trouble, I was already in the area."
"Oh."
Cassie said again.
She was listening now, but still confused and unsure how best to respond. This sort of tendency to zone-out talking to people is why she had graduated out of the company’s typing pool into an IT annex, and not the reception desk.
"Sorry, I don’t usually read or respond to emails overnight and I only just got in."
"That’s no trouble." Barbara simply doubled cheerfully. "But I do need to ask that you stop using that letter, the 🜽. You’ve already used it seven times this morning by my count, and that’s at risk of putting us over-budget for the month as it is."
"Oh."
Cassie paused.
"That’s… crazy." She absently continued in a mostly flat affect. "I would've th-..."
Barbara raised a flat hand up into the 'stop' gesture with an almost patronising detachment, before gently lowering it again to speak.
"That’s why I’ve made such an effort to contact you. You were the one remaining person at this office who is unaware. We’ve decided to finally dispense with that letter. And to be quite frank, we ought to have done this years ago."
"What are you-" Cass began again, this time with some emotional lilt to her voice. But Barbara’s 'stop' hand shot up again and cut her off wordlessly.
Cassie wasn’t completely sure if she was still impressed or just annoyed by the commitment to the joke at this point.
"Cassandra, it’s our job in Redundancies to remove anything that we feel is unnecessary, or superfluous, or uses energy that could more productively be better directed into other efforts." Barbara explained. "And we’ve concluded that the aforementioned character is just no longer needed."
Cassie paused blankly again, then began to closed-mouth chuckle. "Okay, sure thing." She wheezed out through a dawning grin. "And how exactly did you all come to this great administrative decision?"
Cassie wasn’t usually much for pulling pranks herself, but she had a sense of humour about things and had learned how to banter along with them.
Barbara’s emerald-green eyes lit up at the question and her genuine pollyanna smile widened even further. "I was afraid you weren’t going to ask."
She took a pocket-sized ledger and a three-inch ballpoint pen from an inside pocket of her blazer, opened the book in one swift flick motion and made a tally mark in it entirely one-handed before replacing both items the same way and continuing.
Barbara beamed back at Cassie.
"Pay attention. Because obviously I’m only going to explain this once. Essentially, our department has decided that the character in question often doesn’t impact the pronunciation of the seven most-common English words; the, be, to, of, and, a, and in. And as a consonant sound, it’s mostly vestigial in the words it does appear in, so we've axed it entirely."
Raising one hand in order to pull herself out of confusion just as much ask a question like she had to back in primary school, Cassie began her objection. “But a minute ago, you used–”
"Stop."
Barbara’s own hand raised to silence Cassandra once more, this time with a verbal reprimand.
"Yes, I did say that letter out loud before when I was addressing you. But there was an important distinction. I was making it explicit to you which letter we needed you to stop using. We in Redundancies take a lot of pride in being thorough. Which is also why we’ve been working around the clock since Tuesday evening to make sure you were aware of the change. Thank goodness we managed to get a technician here to fix your keyboard before you clocked in. At any rate, I’m glad I finally made it to you before you said... it... too much."
The orange blazer stranger from Redundancies beamed to the IT woman before her.
The pair were mutually wordless.
Cassie wasn’t sure what she was doing standing up in the middle of her office annex doorway, looking out at nothing in particular.
The faded liquid-crystal digital-display clock on the wall only read 9:12 AM, so she mustn’t have been getting up to go on break already, and she’d already gotten a hot cup of coffee on the way in.
Still confused, but assuming that whatever she had evidently stood up for would either come back to her if important or was already taken care of, Cassandra Craft sat back down to her desk and logged into her email portal.
Three new emails?
Three new emails are far too many for a Wednesday morning.