I'm a morning person, and I like to fill my early hours with the most pertinent activities - sleeping and ignoring the alarm clock. I don't want to be caught sleeping on the job, see, so I just show up at the office just before lunch (on good days).

The boss sold me to another team effective for a couple of weeks. I'm stationed one floor up, with my desk just a few meters away from the CEO's office. As my current boss set a 10am meeting for today, I grudgingly got out of bed after putting off the alarm clock for only three times. In my partially brain-dead state, I had unflavored oatmeal porridge for breakfast and decided after to take the long route to the garage just to pick myself up. I passed by a lively litter of kittens behind the house, and taking care not to step on the cute little creatures, I didn't notice a low-hanging beam blocking my way. It was of the hard and metallic kind that more or less lined up with the tip of my cranium. The devious physics of momentum, you see, is such that regardless of how slowly one is walking, a collision with an inanimate metal fixture with practically infinite mass will generally render one's mass negligible and cause both parties involved an infinite amount of pain. After making sure that the metal beam was not hurt, I tried to absorb the impact one nerve-ending at a time but in vain. The devious physics of neural transmission, you see, is such that regardless of how slow one's brain is running, a blow to the head is going to be felt instantaneously and will hurt like the heebie-jeebies. I cattily eyed the kittens prancing about at my feet and thought of underlining my status on the food chain by doing an Ozzy and biting each of their wretched feline heads off. Feeling the oatmeal heaving in my stomach and not wanting to pick on a bunch of pussies, I decided instead to just drive my partly concussed carcass to the office at once because I had to get to that meeting and I was already running late.

I did make the meeting on time with no unwelcome developments, thankfully. I think I'm still somewhat dazed from the kitten incident. I filled up a water bottle with ice and held it to my head for most of the morning, earning curious stares from my new cubicle mates. Not that I expected them to have something to say anyway. I think that having been positioned a mere couple of cubicles from the CEO for an indeterminately long period has left them incapable of speech. The clinic is but a few meters away from my desk, making sure that I can continuously smell the nice wafting aroma of antiseptic, ammonia, and alcohol. The temperature here is also a slight notch above freezing. Given that the carpeting mutes footsteps, only clicking keyboards can be audible. I start to think that soon enough, not only will I need wall-to-wall carpeting but padded walls as well because this assignment can very well drive me to the crazyhouse. Everything here is deathly silent that I may as well be working in a coroner's lab. Then again, watching embalmers at work can probably be better for my mental health. Just to keep up with the environment, I have been playing The Who on heavy rotation, specifically 'Who are You,' 'Won't Get Fooled Again' and 'Baba O'Riley,' incidentally the themes to CSI, CSI Miami and CSI New York respectively. I do feel like I'm in one of the more inferior spin-offs at the moment, but luckily this assignment will only last for two weeks, after which I go back to the land of the living. In my dazed state, I actually do not mind the occasional silence, but I will have to see if hitting my head on a daily basis can somehow convince me that I am enjoying this.

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