The Office: Fall Cleaning
Title: Fall Cleaning
Author: Chase (AKA Angryhaiku)
Requested by: Swmbo
Fandom: The Office
Prompt: Dwight tries to organize the office.
Pairing: Pam/Jim
Spoilers: Through "The Initiation," generally, and through the end of season 2 definitely.
A/N: I wandered a little far afield from the original prompt, but I hope you like it anyway!
Friday, October 27
(“Every month Corporate sends us $100 as a reward for the employee of the month.” Kevin looked ponderously uncomfortable in front of the documentary crew, as he always did. “They canceled the program about a year and a half ago, but because of an accounting glitch at Corporate, we kept getting checks. They just went into the office account and vanished.” Kevin glanced around to make sure he could not be overheard. “We kind of just assumed Michael was stealing it.”)
When Michael walked out of his office with a demented - and familiar - look in his eye, Pam quailed inside. She covered it by thanking whoever she was on the phone with, transferring them to Stanley’s line, and pretending to continue talking to them. It was already quarter after four of Friday afternoon, and she was already imagining a bubble bath and glass of wine at home. Pam was desperate to avoid any unnecessary hardship in the last 45 minutes, but Michael was always a harbinger of hardship. “Mmm hmm,” she said, trying hard to look like she was engaged with the conversation.
“Pa-me-la!” said Michael insistently. Pam sighed, said goodbye to nobody, and replaced the receiver.
“Hello, Michael,” said Pam warily.
“Do you have a costume for the party next week? Going as a hula girl?” Michael waved his arms and hips in a way that Pam guessed was supposed to approximate a hula dance, but looked more like he was trying not to fall over.
Pam looked away, hoping for something to distract Michael. “Oh, I - didn’t realize it’s a costume party.”
“Cuh - It’s a Halloween party, Pam, not a stand-around-as-the-only-person-without-a-costume party!”
Pam tried desperately to think of some reason why it would be impossible for her to wear a costume. “Question,” said Dwight, making Pam promptly regret her wish for something to distract Michael.
“Yesss.”
“How can we be expected to celebrate when we’re surrounded by disorganization and clutter, ruining our productivity and eroding our personal strength.”
Pam looked around, too weary to be particularly baffled. There was some clutter - mainly documents that had exceeded the capacity of desks and the occasional case of paper for the benefit of the sales team.
“What…are you talking about,” Michael said, conducting a similar pan and coming up with only standard disorganization.
“Lao Tsu teaches us that the uncluttered mind is key to victory. This office is the mind of Dunder Mifflin. The office is cluttered, and so we cannot hope to triumph over our enemies.”
“What enemies?”
“Now is the time to purify our office and prepare for the upcoming battle,” Dwight said, plucking a framed photo of Ryan with an unidentified older woman off of Jim’s - no, Pam corrected herself, Ryan’s - desk.
“Hey,” Ryan objected, grabbing for the picture. Dwight waved it in Michael’s direction.
“These are a signs of weakness! Ryan should be dedicated to the company and to his own preparations, and not wasting his time thinking about his girlfriend.”
“That’s my mom,” Ryan objected, standing with an air of affront to take back his photo.
“She’s very hot,” said Dwight. Ryan looked revolted and snatched the photograph out of his hands. “Nonetheless, she is a distraction of the very kind that we must be vigilant against.”
Michael sighed. “Dwight, if you want to clean up here, that’s your prerogative.” Kevin, helping himself to a handful of the candy corn Pam had put in a bowl on her desk, paused to eavesdrop.
“So you’re putting me in charge of office organization. I’m assistant regional manager for office organization.”
“No, Dwight, you’re assistant to the - you know what, I just don’t have time for this today. Fine, Dwight, you have full authority to organize the office, provided it does not interfere with anyone else’s job functions.”
“You won’t be disappointed, Michael,” Dwight said, with all the solemnity of having just received a charge from royalty.
“That’s his prerogative, huh?” said Kevin, smiling creepily. “Like Britney.”
“Hey, Pam, maybe you could come as Britney to the party,” suggested Michael. “Show us your dance moves.” He struck a faintly pornographic pose that Pam supposed was how he thought of Britney’s dance moves.
“No, Michael,” she said, but he had already moved on.
“Speaking of which, hey, everybody, listen up!” He clapped and walked to the center of the room. “Next Tuesday’s Halloween party! Angela, still making your brownies?”
Angela nodded curtly.
“Let’s hope there aren’t so many left over this time - maybe Phyllis won’t have to eat them all!”
A blush incended across Phyllis’s cheeks. She looked down.
“Creed is in charge of getting the music, and Pam and Toby are getting us some… acceptable decorations. Oh, and one more thing: the best costume at our Halloween party this Tuesday wins…” Michael paused for effect, looking around at the people who he imagined to be his loyal soldiers. “Two thousand dollars.”
Whatever reaction Michael had hoped for, it was not the skeptical silence that greeted him. “Where is this two thousand dollars coming from, Michael?” asked Angela abrasively.
“It is a private fund, don’t worry about it, I cleared everything with Kevin,” Michael said.
“He’s taking it out of the employee of the month fund,” Kevin said, trying to be helpful. Michael and Angela glared at him.
“There’s an employee of the month fund?” Stanley demanded, a little aggressively.
(Several hours later, Stanley would sit in the conference room holding up “Employee of the Month” certificates.
“October 1999. April 2000. February 2001. October/November 2001. January 2002…”)
“Thank you. Yes, there is an employee of the month fund, Stanley, but I thought it was wrong to use money that only one person could enjoy when we could collect it and use it for something that would improve the morale of the whole office.”
(“If I had gotten the $100 every time I won employee of the month, I could’ve paid for my daughter’s braces without having to put our living room set on layaway.”)
Pam was no longer paying attention. Her phone was ringing, and the display was flashing a 203 area code; Stamford’s area code, as Pam knew. She looked at the receiver for a second, contemplating letting it go to voicemail, then picked it up.
“Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam.”
“Oh, thank God,” said Jim. “I called earlier, but you were at lunch and Angela answered.”
Pam laughed, disarmed in the span of a second. “Did she tell you how much she’s been missing you?”
“Yeah, something about eternal hellfire. That means she misses me, right?”
“Right,” she said, cradling the phone against her shoulder and turning away from the scene Michael was creating.
“I’m not interrupting something, am I?” he asked.
“No, it’s - Michael’s trying to convince people to dress up for Halloween. He says the winner of a costume contest gets two thousand dollars.”
“Wow. That sounds like…a really great time. What’re you dressing as?”
“I don’t know. Michael suggested a hula girl, or Britney Spears.”
Jim grinned into the phone. “That sounds -“ he started, but changed his mind. “Hey, listen, I need to know how long polar bears live.”
“Polar bears? Why?”
“Sorry, it’s classified.” Pam laughed. “It’s like fifteen years, right?”
“No, it’s longer than that - it’s more like thirty.”
“That’s ridiculous. That would mean a polar bear could be as old as I am.”
Pam laughed again. “It may be ridiculous, but, it’s true.”
“Come on.”
Pam was momentarily distracted when the rest of the office started talking loudly. Evidently Michael had convinced them of the truth of his claim of a $2,000 prize, and Kelly was detailing the nuances of her costume at the top of her lungs. Pam did not notice Dwight, as he was unusually focused on following a phone cable left carelessly swinging at ankle height from Ryan’s phone to the wall and not on baiting her or anyone else.
“Really.”
“Then maybe you’d like to bet on it,” Jim said.
“Okay, fine, because I’m right.”
“Come on, put your money where your mouth is, Beesley.”
“You’re going to be eating crow,” Pam said.
“What’re the stakes?”
“What did you have in mind?”
Jim didn’t have to think about it for more than a second. “If I’m right, you have to ask Angela if you can go to her church with her on Sunday.”
“Ooooh. That is a serious penalty.”
“Well, if you’re so right, you won’t have to worry about it.” She could hear him smiling on the other end of the line.
“Okay,” she said, thinking hard. “And if I’m right, you have honestly try to win Michael’s costume contest.”
She had forgotten, momentarily, that Jim was in Stamford. It wasn’t until the bet was out of her mouth that Pam realized what she’d demanded: If Jim participated in the contest, that would mean a trip to Scranton. To the office.
Jim didn’t miss a beat. “Done.”
“Okay, you’re on.”
“I’m looking it up now,” Jim said, and in the background she could hear typing. “Ha. ‘In the wild, bears live an average of fifteen to eighteen years, although’ - uh, never mind.”
“What? What does it say after that?”
“’although biologists have tagged a few bears in their early thirties.”
“Ha!” said Pam, masking the true cause of her exultation in pleasure at winning the bet. “I hope you’ve got a good Halloween costume.”
“No way! It’s a question of average lifespan, not total longevity. Humans can live to be 110, but if you asked somebody, they’d say humans live to be 72, because it’s the average lifespan.”
“Fine, then I guess we both win,” Pam said.
“Or we both lose.”
Pam say anything for a long moment after that. “Yeah. Listen, I’ve got another call, I’ve got to go.”
Almost at the same moment, Jim said “No, maybe, that isn’t -“
“Okay, nice talking to you, bye,” she said.
“Bye,” said Jim, but she didn’t hear; the receiver was already descending to its hangar.
Pam didn’t pick up the phone again. Instead she looked at her hands for a few long seconds. When the phone rang again, she had to clear her throat before she could answer it.
At ten minutes after five, Pam thought she was the last person to leave. She turned out the overhead lights and walked to her car. It was only when he was sure that he was alone in the office that Dwight slipped out from underneath his desk and followed Ryan’s offending telephone cord to where it met the wall. He had waited until everyone had left so that nobody could hear when he gave it a sound yank, causing a ripping sound and a small cloud of plaster.
Monday, October 30
Pam arrived to find Phyllis, Kevin and Meredith in a small knot just outside of the elevator. Angela stood a few steps closer to the door, looking as though she hadn’t slept all weekend.
“Hey, guys, what’s going on?” Pam asked.
“Something’s wrong in the office.” Kevin looked quite pleased about it.
“We didn’t want to go in there,” Meredith added. “It smells funny. There’s white powder everywhere.”
“White powder?” Pam asked.
“We thought it might be anthrax,” Kevin said.
“Maybe the fire alarm went off over the weekend. I think the building’s sprinklers dispense that fire-dampening powder; that’s white.”
“Hey, what’s everybody doing out here?” Michael asked, stepping out of the elevator with Stanley.”
“Apparently there’s some kind of white powder in the office,” said Pam. “I was just going to go see what it is.”
“Uh-oh,” said Michael. “That can’t be good. Lead on, Pam.”
Pam turned, so he couldn’t see her roll her eyes, and opened the door to the office. It was, in fact, covered with white powder, and as Meredith had explained, it smelled funny. Having just moved, however, she knew that it smelled like drywall, rather than the chemical powder used to extinguish fires. It was also unevenly distributed, further arguing against fireproof powder. Something else was funny, but with all the strangeness from the powder she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Michael, and everyone else that had arrived, followed her gingerly, as though expecting attack.
“Who’s there?” someone demanded from the accounting desks. Pam identified it as Dwight when a ghostly figure leapt up and struck a karate ready pose. “Michael!” he exclaimed.
“Dwight?” he asked. “What’s going on here?”
Dwight frantically brushed powder off of himself. “I’ve been organizing the office, the way you said to.”
“Oh, my God, the phones!” exclaimed Angela. Pam followed her gaze to notice that everyone’s phone had been taken from their desk and put in an impractical - but undeniably neat - cluster on the table in the conference room. All the phones were labeled with name tags. Even more impressive was that they all appeared to be plugged in - impressive, considering that the conference room had only three phone jacks.
“It took all weekend, but I rerouted all the cable lines to the conference room. Now there won’t be any need for talking in the office, and we can all enjoy perfect silence while we work.”
“Are you insane?” Kelly asked, having come in behind Stanley. Pam tended to agree.
“Productivity is going to go through the roof,” Dwight bragged. He gathered empty cans of spackle - at least six that Pam could see - and threw them into the nearest trashcan.
“Do you have any idea what this is going to cost to fix?” Michael demanded, his voice pitched higher than usual.
“Fix?” Dwight asked, looking a little crushed.
“I can’t believe you did this without permission!”
“He did have your permission,” Pam objected. “You told him to organize the office if he wanted.”
“Okay,” said Michael, clearly panicking. “Ohhhhkay. We have to - okay, we’re going to need some spackle and some phone wires, and we’ll fix this today.”
“Michael, no, we’re not qualified for that,” objected Toby.
“You know what, Toby, I don’t need you right now!”
“Toby’s right, Michael,” Pam said. “We need to hire a professional to fix this.”
“Okay. Okay,” Michael said. “Oh! Okay. Everybody go home.”
“What?” Pam wasn’t the only person to ask.
Michael grinned, as though he was presenting them all with a generous gift. “You can all go home. It’s okay, everybody, I’ve got a plan. You can consider this Halloween Observed and head back home.”
Pam considered objecting, but thought about the novel she had left unfinished last night and the stack of unfinished drawings on her drafting table, and the idea that if anyone got in trouble, it would be Michael. She walked for the door. Angela stayed to argue with Michael, and shoot worried looks at Dwight, but most of the other employees seemed content to follow Pam’s lead.
(“Carol’s brother is an electrician,” Michael told the documentarians. “And Dwight is very lucky that he agreed to repair the damage for just $2,000. Or he’d be out of a job right now. It’s too bad about the prize for the costume contest, though”)
(“I’m pretty sure Michael doesn’t have the authority to send us all home.” Ryan told the camera. “I’m also pretty sure that the $1.99 movie theater just got Jackass Two, so it’s not like I was really campaigning to stay.”)
(“We have a rule in my house about looking a gift horse in the mouth,” said Stanley)
(Kelly frowned. “I hope this doesn’t interfere with the Halloween costume contest. I spent, like, $300 buying Pussycat Doll costume on eBay. I’m totally going to get the money back when I win the costume contest, though, so it’s okay.”)
Tuesday, October 31
Jim sat in his car, driving southwest. The windows were open; the the last day of October had dawned unseasonably warm and clear, so as long as he could see the ocean, he wanted to feel the clean fall air. The whistling of the wind made it difficult for the producer’s microphone to pick up Jim’s remarks.
“I didn’t want to welsh on a bet. Plus, if I go down there, Pam has to go to church with Angela, and I think it’s important that she develop spiritually.”
The cameraman asked a question, but it was unintelligible on the recording. “What about polar bears? No, nothing. I just wanted to talk to - I was just wondering. I think I saw the first part of a documentary about polar bears on Animal Planet or something, so I had polar bears on the brain.”
The camera panned to his backseat, to a devil costume still in its original packaging. “Yeah, it’s pretty lame, I know, but it’s the only thing the costume shop had left. I’ll just wait until Michael or Meredith passes out, and swap costumes with them.”
Author: Chase (AKA Angryhaiku)
Requested by: Swmbo
Fandom: The Office
Prompt: Dwight tries to organize the office.
Pairing: Pam/Jim
Spoilers: Through "The Initiation," generally, and through the end of season 2 definitely.
A/N: I wandered a little far afield from the original prompt, but I hope you like it anyway!
Friday, October 27
(“Every month Corporate sends us $100 as a reward for the employee of the month.” Kevin looked ponderously uncomfortable in front of the documentary crew, as he always did. “They canceled the program about a year and a half ago, but because of an accounting glitch at Corporate, we kept getting checks. They just went into the office account and vanished.” Kevin glanced around to make sure he could not be overheard. “We kind of just assumed Michael was stealing it.”)
When Michael walked out of his office with a demented - and familiar - look in his eye, Pam quailed inside. She covered it by thanking whoever she was on the phone with, transferring them to Stanley’s line, and pretending to continue talking to them. It was already quarter after four of Friday afternoon, and she was already imagining a bubble bath and glass of wine at home. Pam was desperate to avoid any unnecessary hardship in the last 45 minutes, but Michael was always a harbinger of hardship. “Mmm hmm,” she said, trying hard to look like she was engaged with the conversation.
“Pa-me-la!” said Michael insistently. Pam sighed, said goodbye to nobody, and replaced the receiver.
“Hello, Michael,” said Pam warily.
“Do you have a costume for the party next week? Going as a hula girl?” Michael waved his arms and hips in a way that Pam guessed was supposed to approximate a hula dance, but looked more like he was trying not to fall over.
Pam looked away, hoping for something to distract Michael. “Oh, I - didn’t realize it’s a costume party.”
“Cuh - It’s a Halloween party, Pam, not a stand-around-as-the-only-person-without-a-costume party!”
Pam tried desperately to think of some reason why it would be impossible for her to wear a costume. “Question,” said Dwight, making Pam promptly regret her wish for something to distract Michael.
“Yesss.”
“How can we be expected to celebrate when we’re surrounded by disorganization and clutter, ruining our productivity and eroding our personal strength.”
Pam looked around, too weary to be particularly baffled. There was some clutter - mainly documents that had exceeded the capacity of desks and the occasional case of paper for the benefit of the sales team.
“What…are you talking about,” Michael said, conducting a similar pan and coming up with only standard disorganization.
“Lao Tsu teaches us that the uncluttered mind is key to victory. This office is the mind of Dunder Mifflin. The office is cluttered, and so we cannot hope to triumph over our enemies.”
“What enemies?”
“Now is the time to purify our office and prepare for the upcoming battle,” Dwight said, plucking a framed photo of Ryan with an unidentified older woman off of Jim’s - no, Pam corrected herself, Ryan’s - desk.
“Hey,” Ryan objected, grabbing for the picture. Dwight waved it in Michael’s direction.
“These are a signs of weakness! Ryan should be dedicated to the company and to his own preparations, and not wasting his time thinking about his girlfriend.”
“That’s my mom,” Ryan objected, standing with an air of affront to take back his photo.
“She’s very hot,” said Dwight. Ryan looked revolted and snatched the photograph out of his hands. “Nonetheless, she is a distraction of the very kind that we must be vigilant against.”
Michael sighed. “Dwight, if you want to clean up here, that’s your prerogative.” Kevin, helping himself to a handful of the candy corn Pam had put in a bowl on her desk, paused to eavesdrop.
“So you’re putting me in charge of office organization. I’m assistant regional manager for office organization.”
“No, Dwight, you’re assistant to the - you know what, I just don’t have time for this today. Fine, Dwight, you have full authority to organize the office, provided it does not interfere with anyone else’s job functions.”
“You won’t be disappointed, Michael,” Dwight said, with all the solemnity of having just received a charge from royalty.
“That’s his prerogative, huh?” said Kevin, smiling creepily. “Like Britney.”
“Hey, Pam, maybe you could come as Britney to the party,” suggested Michael. “Show us your dance moves.” He struck a faintly pornographic pose that Pam supposed was how he thought of Britney’s dance moves.
“No, Michael,” she said, but he had already moved on.
“Speaking of which, hey, everybody, listen up!” He clapped and walked to the center of the room. “Next Tuesday’s Halloween party! Angela, still making your brownies?”
Angela nodded curtly.
“Let’s hope there aren’t so many left over this time - maybe Phyllis won’t have to eat them all!”
A blush incended across Phyllis’s cheeks. She looked down.
“Creed is in charge of getting the music, and Pam and Toby are getting us some… acceptable decorations. Oh, and one more thing: the best costume at our Halloween party this Tuesday wins…” Michael paused for effect, looking around at the people who he imagined to be his loyal soldiers. “Two thousand dollars.”
Whatever reaction Michael had hoped for, it was not the skeptical silence that greeted him. “Where is this two thousand dollars coming from, Michael?” asked Angela abrasively.
“It is a private fund, don’t worry about it, I cleared everything with Kevin,” Michael said.
“He’s taking it out of the employee of the month fund,” Kevin said, trying to be helpful. Michael and Angela glared at him.
“There’s an employee of the month fund?” Stanley demanded, a little aggressively.
(Several hours later, Stanley would sit in the conference room holding up “Employee of the Month” certificates.
“October 1999. April 2000. February 2001. October/November 2001. January 2002…”)
“Thank you. Yes, there is an employee of the month fund, Stanley, but I thought it was wrong to use money that only one person could enjoy when we could collect it and use it for something that would improve the morale of the whole office.”
(“If I had gotten the $100 every time I won employee of the month, I could’ve paid for my daughter’s braces without having to put our living room set on layaway.”)
Pam was no longer paying attention. Her phone was ringing, and the display was flashing a 203 area code; Stamford’s area code, as Pam knew. She looked at the receiver for a second, contemplating letting it go to voicemail, then picked it up.
“Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam.”
“Oh, thank God,” said Jim. “I called earlier, but you were at lunch and Angela answered.”
Pam laughed, disarmed in the span of a second. “Did she tell you how much she’s been missing you?”
“Yeah, something about eternal hellfire. That means she misses me, right?”
“Right,” she said, cradling the phone against her shoulder and turning away from the scene Michael was creating.
“I’m not interrupting something, am I?” he asked.
“No, it’s - Michael’s trying to convince people to dress up for Halloween. He says the winner of a costume contest gets two thousand dollars.”
“Wow. That sounds like…a really great time. What’re you dressing as?”
“I don’t know. Michael suggested a hula girl, or Britney Spears.”
Jim grinned into the phone. “That sounds -“ he started, but changed his mind. “Hey, listen, I need to know how long polar bears live.”
“Polar bears? Why?”
“Sorry, it’s classified.” Pam laughed. “It’s like fifteen years, right?”
“No, it’s longer than that - it’s more like thirty.”
“That’s ridiculous. That would mean a polar bear could be as old as I am.”
Pam laughed again. “It may be ridiculous, but, it’s true.”
“Come on.”
Pam was momentarily distracted when the rest of the office started talking loudly. Evidently Michael had convinced them of the truth of his claim of a $2,000 prize, and Kelly was detailing the nuances of her costume at the top of her lungs. Pam did not notice Dwight, as he was unusually focused on following a phone cable left carelessly swinging at ankle height from Ryan’s phone to the wall and not on baiting her or anyone else.
“Really.”
“Then maybe you’d like to bet on it,” Jim said.
“Okay, fine, because I’m right.”
“Come on, put your money where your mouth is, Beesley.”
“You’re going to be eating crow,” Pam said.
“What’re the stakes?”
“What did you have in mind?”
Jim didn’t have to think about it for more than a second. “If I’m right, you have to ask Angela if you can go to her church with her on Sunday.”
“Ooooh. That is a serious penalty.”
“Well, if you’re so right, you won’t have to worry about it.” She could hear him smiling on the other end of the line.
“Okay,” she said, thinking hard. “And if I’m right, you have honestly try to win Michael’s costume contest.”
She had forgotten, momentarily, that Jim was in Stamford. It wasn’t until the bet was out of her mouth that Pam realized what she’d demanded: If Jim participated in the contest, that would mean a trip to Scranton. To the office.
Jim didn’t miss a beat. “Done.”
“Okay, you’re on.”
“I’m looking it up now,” Jim said, and in the background she could hear typing. “Ha. ‘In the wild, bears live an average of fifteen to eighteen years, although’ - uh, never mind.”
“What? What does it say after that?”
“’although biologists have tagged a few bears in their early thirties.”
“Ha!” said Pam, masking the true cause of her exultation in pleasure at winning the bet. “I hope you’ve got a good Halloween costume.”
“No way! It’s a question of average lifespan, not total longevity. Humans can live to be 110, but if you asked somebody, they’d say humans live to be 72, because it’s the average lifespan.”
“Fine, then I guess we both win,” Pam said.
“Or we both lose.”
Pam say anything for a long moment after that. “Yeah. Listen, I’ve got another call, I’ve got to go.”
Almost at the same moment, Jim said “No, maybe, that isn’t -“
“Okay, nice talking to you, bye,” she said.
“Bye,” said Jim, but she didn’t hear; the receiver was already descending to its hangar.
Pam didn’t pick up the phone again. Instead she looked at her hands for a few long seconds. When the phone rang again, she had to clear her throat before she could answer it.
At ten minutes after five, Pam thought she was the last person to leave. She turned out the overhead lights and walked to her car. It was only when he was sure that he was alone in the office that Dwight slipped out from underneath his desk and followed Ryan’s offending telephone cord to where it met the wall. He had waited until everyone had left so that nobody could hear when he gave it a sound yank, causing a ripping sound and a small cloud of plaster.
Monday, October 30
Pam arrived to find Phyllis, Kevin and Meredith in a small knot just outside of the elevator. Angela stood a few steps closer to the door, looking as though she hadn’t slept all weekend.
“Hey, guys, what’s going on?” Pam asked.
“Something’s wrong in the office.” Kevin looked quite pleased about it.
“We didn’t want to go in there,” Meredith added. “It smells funny. There’s white powder everywhere.”
“White powder?” Pam asked.
“We thought it might be anthrax,” Kevin said.
“Maybe the fire alarm went off over the weekend. I think the building’s sprinklers dispense that fire-dampening powder; that’s white.”
“Hey, what’s everybody doing out here?” Michael asked, stepping out of the elevator with Stanley.”
“Apparently there’s some kind of white powder in the office,” said Pam. “I was just going to go see what it is.”
“Uh-oh,” said Michael. “That can’t be good. Lead on, Pam.”
Pam turned, so he couldn’t see her roll her eyes, and opened the door to the office. It was, in fact, covered with white powder, and as Meredith had explained, it smelled funny. Having just moved, however, she knew that it smelled like drywall, rather than the chemical powder used to extinguish fires. It was also unevenly distributed, further arguing against fireproof powder. Something else was funny, but with all the strangeness from the powder she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Michael, and everyone else that had arrived, followed her gingerly, as though expecting attack.
“Who’s there?” someone demanded from the accounting desks. Pam identified it as Dwight when a ghostly figure leapt up and struck a karate ready pose. “Michael!” he exclaimed.
“Dwight?” he asked. “What’s going on here?”
Dwight frantically brushed powder off of himself. “I’ve been organizing the office, the way you said to.”
“Oh, my God, the phones!” exclaimed Angela. Pam followed her gaze to notice that everyone’s phone had been taken from their desk and put in an impractical - but undeniably neat - cluster on the table in the conference room. All the phones were labeled with name tags. Even more impressive was that they all appeared to be plugged in - impressive, considering that the conference room had only three phone jacks.
“It took all weekend, but I rerouted all the cable lines to the conference room. Now there won’t be any need for talking in the office, and we can all enjoy perfect silence while we work.”
“Are you insane?” Kelly asked, having come in behind Stanley. Pam tended to agree.
“Productivity is going to go through the roof,” Dwight bragged. He gathered empty cans of spackle - at least six that Pam could see - and threw them into the nearest trashcan.
“Do you have any idea what this is going to cost to fix?” Michael demanded, his voice pitched higher than usual.
“Fix?” Dwight asked, looking a little crushed.
“I can’t believe you did this without permission!”
“He did have your permission,” Pam objected. “You told him to organize the office if he wanted.”
“Okay,” said Michael, clearly panicking. “Ohhhhkay. We have to - okay, we’re going to need some spackle and some phone wires, and we’ll fix this today.”
“Michael, no, we’re not qualified for that,” objected Toby.
“You know what, Toby, I don’t need you right now!”
“Toby’s right, Michael,” Pam said. “We need to hire a professional to fix this.”
“Okay. Okay,” Michael said. “Oh! Okay. Everybody go home.”
“What?” Pam wasn’t the only person to ask.
Michael grinned, as though he was presenting them all with a generous gift. “You can all go home. It’s okay, everybody, I’ve got a plan. You can consider this Halloween Observed and head back home.”
Pam considered objecting, but thought about the novel she had left unfinished last night and the stack of unfinished drawings on her drafting table, and the idea that if anyone got in trouble, it would be Michael. She walked for the door. Angela stayed to argue with Michael, and shoot worried looks at Dwight, but most of the other employees seemed content to follow Pam’s lead.
(“Carol’s brother is an electrician,” Michael told the documentarians. “And Dwight is very lucky that he agreed to repair the damage for just $2,000. Or he’d be out of a job right now. It’s too bad about the prize for the costume contest, though”)
(“I’m pretty sure Michael doesn’t have the authority to send us all home.” Ryan told the camera. “I’m also pretty sure that the $1.99 movie theater just got Jackass Two, so it’s not like I was really campaigning to stay.”)
(“We have a rule in my house about looking a gift horse in the mouth,” said Stanley)
(Kelly frowned. “I hope this doesn’t interfere with the Halloween costume contest. I spent, like, $300 buying Pussycat Doll costume on eBay. I’m totally going to get the money back when I win the costume contest, though, so it’s okay.”)
Tuesday, October 31
Jim sat in his car, driving southwest. The windows were open; the the last day of October had dawned unseasonably warm and clear, so as long as he could see the ocean, he wanted to feel the clean fall air. The whistling of the wind made it difficult for the producer’s microphone to pick up Jim’s remarks.
“I didn’t want to welsh on a bet. Plus, if I go down there, Pam has to go to church with Angela, and I think it’s important that she develop spiritually.”
The cameraman asked a question, but it was unintelligible on the recording. “What about polar bears? No, nothing. I just wanted to talk to - I was just wondering. I think I saw the first part of a documentary about polar bears on Animal Planet or something, so I had polar bears on the brain.”
The camera panned to his backseat, to a devil costume still in its original packaging. “Yeah, it’s pretty lame, I know, but it’s the only thing the costume shop had left. I’ll just wait until Michael or Meredith passes out, and swap costumes with them.”