I emerged from the small office kitchen, life giving caffeine in hand, and into the main office. It was like a shed full of battery hens, all of us in our little cages, pecking away ar our computers. Cage after cage the same…ok not quite, Sally (two back, three over) had her cubicle filled with plastic toys with zany hairstyles, Cristal (three in front, two over) had numerous photos of her expanding family, Pete (two along from me) had his dubious calendar (I thought they went out in the seventies?) unless Brenda from HR was on the rounds (Clucking around like a mother hen) in which case the calendar was mysteriously replaced with the company standard one.

And so i sit at my desk and resume pecking away, virtually shuffling paper.

On to the next request to process I suppose.

Hum “20 hi-vis vests, yellow, Fire Marshal in red letters on back”

“Fire Marshal, do they guide the people away from the fire or the fire away from the people. Why did the fire start in the first place?..

For such a large animal, at first the dragon made no sound as it slunk up the stairs and through the double doors to the office. The padding of it’s leathery feet could not be heard above the clattering on keyboards and the chattering on phones.

Suddenly the screaming began as one person after another glanced up and their eyes went from dull & lifeless to scared for their lives in a matter of seconds.

Initially frozen in panic, the office clerks moved with a speed they would never achieve again as they scrambled out of the way of the flames.

Sally stifled a sob as her cubicle was reduced to ash and her precious collection nothing more than a mound of melted plastic with odd tufts of brightly coloured nylon. Pete was grabbing small pieces from his calendar as fragments floated across the room. Why hadn’t the sprinklers been set off? Surely heat of that magnitude would set off the alarms. Ah, there they were now…

What?

The screeching of the alarm filtered through.

The vision dissipated and the office was back to humdrum normality .

The alarm was still going but everyone seemed to be ignoring it.

Oh it’s nine am on Monday. Time for the weekly alarm test.

What? Only nine?

How many minutes until Friday at four?

Meanwhile the never ending stream of requests to process…

“20 sections of 2 metre copper pipe”…