It seemed like not bad an idea to strip naked and run crazy down the street, banging the windows of passing cars, or to get a grilled chicken sandwich from the dark deli.

"I'm obsessed with them," said Britt.

"OK," I said.

The prices on the daily sandwich special signs taped to the deli case were drawn to look like the numbers on a calculator. Someone had painstakingly. Those blocky numbers, with the segments. At the bottom of these sloppy signs.

Britt had said it was unclear how much they'd charge you for the sandwich.

"They charge me four dollars and thirty-six cents," she said. "But they charge Tom three dollars and sixty-five cents."

They charged me four eighty-eight.

It was a hot day, hot fucking hot. And the AC in our office went out awhile and there was some issue with the door alarm so that it went "WEEEEEEEEEEEEE" and you just had to, you had to cover your ears. All day John pacing in the cramped confines of his cubicle proclaiming the energy in the office to be strange.

Out West there were developments afoot, an entire group being welcomed below our umbrella of products and services or is it just products or is it just services. Or a single product or a service. An entire, new group being subsumed that frankly seemed vaster than our own. That seemed a superset of the set it entered. "Welcome, welcome!" Higher-ups writing those five-paragraph e-mails. Thinkin' they're rallying the troops. One of them cocksuckers wrote something like, "Let's continue to have fun with what we do," with the bold and the italics, and it was about as convincing as a cuckolded husband saying please continue to love me with your body, baby.