Start by asking after someone who has left. Push off from this if it helps: vending machines at 3am.

Nights? Please. Bruno retired five years ago. You’re thinking of some kid who just started, probably barely old enough to forget his own keys. The vending machines in round three got replaced with those sleek touchscreens last spring. No more staring at buttons like they owe you money. Now people just stare at screens like they’re waiting for a text that never comes. It’s quieter, I guess. Less interesting. Bruno would’ve hated the upgrade.

Quiet isn’t the word. It’s sterile. Like the building held its breath and forgot how to exhale. Bruno’s spot’s gone, too. Replaced by a fake ficus that’s actually plastic. I walk past it every morning on my way to the copy room, where the machine jams if you look at it wrong. Same old boredom, just… polished. You’d hate it. Or maybe you’d like the order of it. I don’t know. I’m just tired of explaining why the coffee tastes like burnt water to people who’ve never actually tasted real coffee.

Order. Yeah. That’s the word, isn’t it? It used to be chaos, but messy. Now it’s just… quiet discipline. I hate the copy room, sure, but at least the jamming was loud. A warning. Now, nothing breaks. Everything just works until it doesn’t, and then it’s all tickets and SLAs. I miss the panic. You always seemed to thrive in that specific kind of wreckage. Now there’s just the ficus. And me. Still here, still watching the little red light blink like a dying eye.

Exactly. It’s never just fixing. It’s logging the fix, auditing the log, then fixing the process that allowed the break in the first place. I spent Tuesday arguing with IT about why the new printer didn’t “sync” with the old one. There was no sync. Just wires. I wanted to scream, but then I’d have to file a complaint about my screaming. You’d love it. The logic is bulletproof, even if it’s insane. I miss the tangible. The smell of ozone from a fried circuit board. Now it’s just data. Invisible, weightless, and endless. I keep waiting for the ficus to die, just to prove something can still rot.

The ficus is synthetic. I checked. Plastic leaves, plastic pot, plastic roots. Nothing to rot. It’s just… there. Staring. I tried to knock it over last week, but it’s bolted to the floor. I felt ridiculous. Standing there, yelling at a plant. The janitor just watched, sipping his terrible coffee. He didn’t even blink. That’s the real horror. Not the order. The acceptance of it. You’d have laughed. Called it poetic. I just wanted it gone.

It wasn’t yelling. It was a groan. A low, frustrated noise that got cut short when the fire alarm tripped. Just randomly. Because the sensor was dusty. Of course it was. The noise was deafening. Not from the siren, but from the sudden, sharp intake of breath from everyone in the building. You remember that sound. The collective flinch. Now? Silence. Even when the fire alarm screams, people just check their phones. They think it’s a test. Or a glitch. They don’t even look up. That’s what kills me. The indifference. I miss the flinch. I miss the fear. It felt real.