By Robert J. Boland

Mitch hoarded petty grievances the same way a paranoid squirrel cached acorns for the winter. In the almost ten years he’d worked at Hobbs & Clarke, he’d discovered extremely good reasons to hate everyone he worked with: from the snobby barista at the in-house cafe to Jane in Accounts Payable with the teeth, and all the way up to the senior partners, who were, unsurprisingly, the literal worst humans imaginable.

On lunch breaks and in those moments drifting in the corporate liminal space between adding to pointless email chains and attending unnecessary meetings, Mitch plotted his vengeance. He even kept a little notebook on hand at all times, on the off-chance the payback muse struck him at some odd hour.

Returning to his cubicle, he overheard his closest desk neighbours whispering. Nicki was blonde, bubbly, late-twenties, and described herself as a “pocket rocket”. Antony was mid-thirties, dark-haired, and was friends with everyone. Mitch hated them both.

‘You’re sure Mitch doesn’t know?’ asked Nicki.

‘Not a clue,’ Antony replied.

‘When’s this happening?’

‘This time tomorrow. Peter wants to be the one to do it.’

Peter Davies was head of HR. There was only one reason he descended from the corporate heavens of level sixteen: to smite whichever unsuspecting soul the company was sacrificing to appease the eldritch god known as The Bottom Line. Peter Davies was going to fire him a day before his tenth anniversary. Bastard.

Nicki clapped excitedly. ‘Yay. Can I bring something?’

Bring something? To his firing? Like what, popcorn? The woman was more sadistic than he’d realised.

‘Let everyone know,’ Antony said. ‘Wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.’

It was to be a public execution, then. So be it. 

Before he left, they’d all know they’d crossed Mitchell Adams for the last time. 

Mitch immediately consulted his notebook. Twenty-four hours wouldn’t be enough to orchestrate all of his plans, so he’d have to confine himself to the special few who’d made it to the top of his Shit List. Those who’d earned not just vengeance, but a derisively clever nickname that, he felt sure, if revealed, would be almost as psychologically devastating as the ironic nature of their richly deserved punishment.

He stopped several times on his way home to pick up essentials, then stayed up all night working on his preparations. Despite this, he arrived at work the next morning feeling refreshed and alive, more awake, in fact, than he’d ever felt before. He was sustained entirely by his holy mission.

Target Number One was Rob Ford, alias Robin Food. While mild-mannered in appearance, the man was to food theft what Da Vinci was to art. No one had conclusively been able to prove he was responsible for the spate of missing lunches, though everyone was sure it was him. No matter what security measures were employed, he evaded them effortlessly. Today, instead of delicious stolen morsels, he’d taste vengeance.

The sandwich was the Platonic ideal of sandwiches. Sourdough, ham, cheese, mustard, pickles, and a special ingredient in a container marked DO NOT EAT. Mitch only had to wait ten minutes for the bloodcurdling scream. He, along with several others, rushed in to see Robin Food pouring milk down his throat and all over his face as he tried to fight the Carolina Reaper chillis that had been meticulously blended in with the mustard. At 1,641,183 SHU on the Scoville scale, it would’ve been fractionally cooler to eat molten lava.

Patricia “Post-it Pat” Kennedy left passive-aggressive notes everywhere, like ‘It would be great if people could wash their own mugs occasionally (winking smiley face)’. Mitch had saved every single one. He upturned three boxes of multicoloured notes, making it look like a rainbow unicorn had exploded in her cubicle. He filled her widescreen computer monitor with a message scrawled on giant 279x279mm bright yellow Post-its: NO MORE POST-ITS.

Mitch felt a giddy rush. This must be how Batman felt every time he hospitalised his most recent mental health outpatient. He was unleashed. He was payback personified.

Sam “The Sloth” Symonds was perpetually late – to work, meetings, deadlines – everything. It was time to get even. The Sloth had indirectly shared his password when he’d mentioned it was his home address. A quick Google search allowed Mitch to login and set his system’s date and time back a year. If the guy liked being late so much, maybe he’d enjoy being really late. To everything. Forever.

Jabba the Hutt, named not for his physical size (he was actually off-puttingly thin) but for his aggressively audible eating style, could often be found eating an entire barbeque chicken at his desk at ten in the morning. When he slurped ramen noodles, it sounded like a rusty chainsaw trying to cut through a wet log. Mitch rigged a microphone under his desk and uploaded the audio, along with a video of him eating, to TikTok, where it immediately went viral.

He sneezed directly into the open mouth of Personal Space Invader when the close-talker entered his territorial bubble. 

He reported the sneakers Sweaty Betty left under her desk after every lunchtime jog to the Environment Protection Authority as hazardous material.

He set up a live YouTube feed of the stationery closet where Mister Sandman hid himself away for his regular afternoon nap under the channel Sandman’s Secret Stationery Siestas.

Crossing the last name off his list, Mitch basked in the red warmth of vengeance. They might be about to fire him, but he’d had the last laugh.

As he headed back to his cubicle, he realised something was wrong. It was almost lunchtime, but the office was quiet and empty. Where was everyone? Had they  gathered somewhere so they could watch as he was fired, collectively delighting in his misery like the horrible people they were?

‘There you are!’ Nicki bounced through the swinging doors from the break room. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere. Can you come in here?’

The blazing fire of vengeance burning in Mitch’s heart sputtered. He swallowed.

‘I’ve got a lot to do…’

‘It’ll only take a moment.’

Mitch trudged after her with the enthusiasm of a man walking to the gallows. He entered the break room, expecting to see Peter Davies with a box of his stuff, surrounded by a Greek chorus singing his misfortunes. Instead, Mitch found Pete under two gold balloons shaped, respectively, as a ‘1’ and a ‘0’. He held a knife that looked to be for cutting the slab of chocolate cake nearby, rather than for stabbing soon-to-be ex-colleagues in the back.

‘SURPRISE!’

‘Congratulations on ten years with the company,’ Peter Davies said. ‘Here’s to ten more!’

Mitch gawked. This meant he wasn’t being fired after all, which meant he’d been … slightly premature in burning his bridges. Maybe no one would figure out it’d been him?

Maybe everything would be fine… Looking around, mixed among the smiles, Mitch saw a familiar furious glint in some of their eyes, suggesting that everything might not, in fact, be fine. When he’d been coming up with plans for payback, Mitch had thought he was digging their graves. But now? He couldn’t shake the feeling he’d only been digging his own.

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Robert lives in Sydney with his lovely family. He teaches his students History and how to deal with sarcasm, writes fantasy and runs a moderately successful satirical X (Twitter) account (@DeathStarPR). His writing has been featured in The Big Issue Fiction Edition 2023, the School Magazine, and Two Wolves Digest.
https://robertjboland.wixsite.com/author
https://www.instagram.com/robertjboland
https://x.com/deathstarpr