At least, that's what I told myself as I crawled out of bed, my arm still jerking around as I tried to find the snooze button on top of my insistently beeping alarm clock. It probably would have helped if I opened my eyes, but I was resolute in my determination not to do so for as long as possible. It was barely after five in the morning, for heaven's sake! Human beings were not meant to be awake at this hour, unless they were perhaps just getting in from a night out!

Finally, my grasping fingers felt the rubber coating on my clock and located the proper button. That rubber coating was important; my last three alarm clocks had all been broken when I drowsily swept them off of my end table and they smacked down upon my wooden floor. This one's rubber coating was already scuffed and scratched, but it was still holding up.

Speaking of that wooden floor... I turned my body as I sat up in bed, lowering my feet down to hang an inch above the ground. I took a deep breath, braced myself-

-and then slid down, out of bed, until my feet hit on the floor.

The shock of the ice-cold floor did what the alarm clock could not - it yanked my eyes wide open. "Oh my god, oh my god," I gasped out aloud as I hopped from one foot to the other, searching in vain for a warm spot.

For probably the fiftieth time, I told myself that I really needed to get a rug for my bedroom. Just something to spread out in front of my bed. Maybe something in green or turquoise, a nice soothing color, with those little shag piles that felt so nice beneath my bare toes.

Now up and on my feet, I staggered forward before my treacherous mind could convince me to climb back into the warmth of my bedsheets. I headed for the bathroom, mostly feeling my way along in the darkness. Five in the damn morning. This was absolutely wretched.

I rounded the corner into the hallway. Okay, good progress. The bathroom was just a dozen feet down, a straight line from here. No way to miss it now. Nothing to possibly run into. Whoop!

That was the approximate sound that emanated from my mouth as I suddenly felt one foot go shooting out from underneath me. I barely managed to catch my balance, my heart rate accelerated up to somewhere around a million beats per minute.

I reached down, feeling on the dark ground for what had nearly brought me crashing down. My fingers found a piece of smooth and silky cloth, barely big enough to count as a bikini top. Rachel.

"Rachel, I've told you a million times to stop just taking off all your clothes and leaving them around!" I fumed out loud. I knew that my roommate was surely lost in the sleep of the dead right now, so I was free to yell at her.

I spun around and chucked the piece of clothing down towards my roommate's mostly-closed door. Knowing Rachel, she probably had some guy in there with her right now, both of them draped up in each other in a sexy, naked tangle of limbs. Somehow, Rachel never had trouble with her love life.

That was another nasty mental avenue I didn't want to venture down. I tried not to think about how long it had last been since I'd even flirted with a guy. Sure, the nice fellow at the coffee shop nearest my office now had my order memorized, but he had also been there on the day when tampons had spilled out of my purse while I was digging for loose change. So he wasn't an option any longer.

My life had to get better from this point. Seriously, any day now.

I staggered the rest of the way to the bathroom, flicking on the light and flinching as the bright fluorescent viciously attacked my eyes. After I managed to open my eyes again in the harsh light, I examined myself in the mirror.

Melinda Gaines, age twenty-eight, a hundred and something pounds. The bathroom scale was right beside me, but I refused to make eye contact. The number it would reveal would only depress me.

My red hair was all in a massive tangle, big and bushy from my tossing and turning in bed. I pulled my brush from the little shelf behind the mirror and did my best to run it through my hair a few times. The brushing lowered the amount of frizz, but I wasn't sure how much better it really made me look. Now that my hair was less obvious, the bags under my eyes were even more apparent.

I fussed about with makeup for a while before eventually giving up and deciding to just swipe on some mascara and call it good enough. I couldn't resist one last glance in the mirror, however, just to torture myself. Sigh. It wasn't that I looked bad, exactly. Rachel always reassured me that I was totally attractive. But I could never seem to totally lose that tired look in my eyes.

I glanced at the clock as I hurried back to my bedroom. It wasn't even six in the morning yet, and I was already late! A startled little "eep" slipped out of my mouth as I hurried to find some outfit that looked sufficiently businesslike and didn't have any stains or uncomfortable wrinkles in it from lying on my frozen floor.

Keys. Purse. Folders. Wrinkled twenty dollar bill that will hopefully transform into lunch, if I have time for lunch today. Shoes. Bus pass. Fancy microchip-embedded building security access card pass thing. Do I have my keys?

Forty minutes later, I was staggering up the steps to my office building, still struggling to get one foot to go all the way into the heel. My stockings hadn't shown any runs in the dim light in my bedroom, but they kept on bunching up around my heel. Finally, with one last stomp as I reached the threshold of the building, I managed to get the shoe all the way onto my foot.

I straightened up, plastering a successful, confident, strong businesswoman smile on my face. I was here, I wasn't too late, and I was going to earn that promotion. Things were going to get better. I was sure of it.

Three steps later, my heel snapped and I pitched forward.

Thanks, universe. Glad to know that you're on my side.

Ten minutes later, I limped into my office. My shoe's heel was now inside my purse, mixing with the loose change and other assorted odds and ends in there. I really just wanted to get to my desk and sit down before anyone noticed. I'd have to get up and go out to lunch later, but that was something for me to worry about when it arrived. Perhaps one of my coworkers would have an extra pair of shoes that they didn't need and wanted to give to me as a gesture of thanks for all the hard work I do every day. That would be nice.

I settled into my office chair, for once grateful that my desk was located up near the entrance to our division. "Marketing needs a bright, cheery face to greet any visitors as soon as they arrive," my boss, Keith, had told me.

The unspoken implication in that sentence was that I was going to be the bright and cheery face. At least, I assume that's what Keith was going for. Although if he really wanted me to be as happy as all that, maybe he should stop getting so angry at me all the time.

Like all the desks in our Marketing department, mine had two wire baskets bolted onto the front corner; one of them was labeled with "In", and the other with "Out". Keith read about this technique in a magazine somewhere, and how it was super useful for boosting productivity by showing us workers how much we still had to do. Some reason like that. So the next day, he bought us all these wire baskets.

A week later, after the baskets seemed to keep on mysteriously disappearing, he paid the maintenance workers to come in after work and to bolt them all down to our desks.

I'm sure Keith meant well when he picked out these baskets, but I didn't exactly feel motivated when I looked at mine. My "In" box was piled high with papers, a tall and untidy stack that looked like it was about to go toppling over at any moment. It would probably fall down mainly into my "Out" box, which had almost nothing in it at all.

Of course, when I did finish one of these papers and dropped it in the "Out" box, that just meant that it now belonged in someone else's "In" box. And when it got there, it would cause them more resentment. If I took care of all these papers, I wasn't lowering stress; I was simply transferring it over to someone else.

Considering that, I felt that it was best for the papers to stay where they were now. At least then I wouldn't be burdening anyone else. It was really very noble and self-sacrificing of me, I felt. So instead of taking a look at the newest level of papers added to the strata of my wire baskets, I instead booted up my computer. After a second, the "Panther Worldwide" logo of our company flashed up on the screen slowly spinning around in a very pretty little display.

I still felt a little surge of pride every time I saw that logo come up. I worked for Panther Worldwide! It was one of the year's hottest companies, had its finger in everything, agreed by all the industry experts on those news channels I never watched to be the best stock to buy and hold in a portfolio. And I was at the heart of the company!

Well, maybe not the heart. But definitely the liver, or some other important organ.

I'd been hired about six months ago, and had started as nothing more than a lowly secretary. My responsibilities had mainly consisted of getting coffee and biscuits for my bosses, and making sure that letters got taken down to the mail room. But then I got promoted, and we got a mail boy, so I didn't have to take care of letters any more. I still fetched coffee and snacks, of course, but that was just a little way to help out in addition to my other duties. And I was certain that I'd be up for a promotion any day now!

With my computer booted up, I clicked on the little mail button at the bottom of the screen. My email opened up, and I sighed as I watched new email after new email appear at the top. Most of them from Keith, demanding that I send him on this-or-that file, needing updates on some project that I hadn't even heard of, or asking why the coffee didn't taste the same as it had last week.

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