Champion Dave

Dave sat in the unadorned beige conference room staring at the clock. As a kid, Dave would watch the clock waiting for the bell to ring. Anticipating dashing out the door, desperate to get back to whatever fantasy game he had been playing at the time. Now, he could see the meeting he was in was already ten minutes past its scheduled end time and if the way his boss Diego was talking was any indication, it likely would be another thirty minutes before he got out.

Somewhere along the way, Dave's life had become as dull and gray as the walls of his cubicle. There was a gradual leak that sprung sometime after college. It was barely a drip at first, staying in to finish a paper, foregoing a party with his friends because he had to get up early to go the day job he got because his dad knew a guy in HR at an accounting firm looking for a mail boy. Then that leak became a trickle, and the trickle became a steady flow. Now his life was a washed out painting, devoid almost completely of color. Even his favorite fantasy shooter video game Champions had begun to lose its luster.

Dave felt someone nudge his elbow and turned to see Larice cocking an eyebrow and as subtly as possible directing her eyes towards their boss who was standing at the other end of the table staring at him, waiting for a response. "Think you can handle that David?" His boss said, obviously expecting that Dave had been paying attention and not just counting the seconds as they ticked off the clock. Diego was the sort of man who worked his way to the top through hundreds of hours of mediocre work, delegation, and simply tolerating management BS until there was nobody left to promote.

"Yeah, sure. Shouldn't be a problem." Dave said back, clueless as to what he was agreeing to. "I'll send you the repot once we're out of here. We can wrap this up now. Larice, I'll expect you to have the meeting minutes out to the team within the hour." And with that, everyone stood and walked out of the conference room.

Dave was the slowest to stand, seeing no reason to rush off to just sit at a desk. He leaned into Larice who had been organizing the notes she had taken. "So, what exactly did I just agree to do?" he asked, enjoying the scent of honey and ginger that always seemed to float around her. Larice tapped her stack of papers into a neat pile. "Well," She said, trying to hold back a smirk, "Diego is looking for an audit of last quarters reporting on the Benson project." Dave's eyebrows furrowed in confusion. The Benson project had been the department's biggest project for the past two quarters. "Which reporting?" He asked. Larice picked up her portfolio of papers and tucked them under one arm and turned to look at him with a bright smile "All the reporting." And walked out the door. Dave groaned knowing exactly what happened. Diego was responsible for auditing the department output reports and submitting a review each quarter which meant someone on the team would inevitably be assigned to do the task whenever Diego had a deadline to meet and didn't feel like putting in the work.

There was a crack of thunder and Dave could hear the heavy rain pounding against the windows. An image of his umbrella flashed in his head right where he left it. On the kitchen counter.

Dave's day seemed to go from bad to worse. He realized as his stomach growled that right next to his umbrella was his lunch which meant he had no choice but to eat the suspect meatloaf in the office cafeteria that would have made a middle school lunch lady shudder. The sudden storm cause the power to go out briefly, only seeming to affect Dave's terminal and losing the entire afternoon's worth of work. To top it off, as he ran through the pouring rain, nothing but a stray Better Homes and Garden he found to protect him from the storm, he saw his bus home pull away from the stop a full six minutes early for the first time in the history off the automobile.

With the next bus not arriving for a full fifty-five minutes, Dave had a long wait in store for him. He slumped down on the bench, not caring that his outstretched feel were fully in the rain. There was no keeping dry at this point and the magazine was completely ruined so the only thing he had to occupy his time was staring at the rain.