It was a quiet autumn morning. The cold was setting in, the days were shrinking, and a colony of nicotine addicts had already formed long ant-like queue outside the cigarette vendor’s shop. I sat in my cabin, staring at my dead coffee and my dying financial model, which I’d been stuck at for ages.

That’s when I heard a familiar crash on my window followed by a plaintive wheeze. Being on the seventh floor, it was nothing unusual; our office was infamous for attracting suicidal pigeons.

Pigeons, a former regal breed that helped the Royal Air Force during WWII as a reliable, secure, and undetectable messenger, now operate as dormant shit carriers, nuking cars, patios, anything that comes under the way of their rectal bombsight. They faced the same wrath as their former imperialist employers and for some reason now just love cracking their skulls open on my glass. I had no problem with it; a little blood is always better than tons of shit. 

Even the lanky window cleaner agreed with this. We never had any formal greetings, the only time I ever saw him was with a glass between us and his facial features blending with my reflection half of the time but his ear-to-ear grin while peeling the pigeon’s half-alive, paralyzed body off the ledge and showing it to me before yanking it off, was a quiet ritual we had formed over the years. 

Around evening, I heard another crash. I ignored it at first, as suicidal pigeons were just a statistic. But then came the gasps, the wails, the screaming;  far too much grief for a bird, far too much noise from lungs that rotten.

It was only later I found out that somebody had jumped from the eighth floor. I’d seen her before — a young woman, maybe twenty-four. We’d crossed paths at the printer earlier that day. I gave her a tepid nod without even meeting her eyes. Now I am compelled to wonder if that nod would’ve nudged her over the edge. If that little corporate nod could’ve been a divine signal for her to end it all.

I always wonder how the word corporate has softly taken over as an adjective for jaded. It is easier to admit living a corporate life than a jaded one, it’s a quiet realisation everyone runs from. A realisation filled with what could’ve been and what is. 

Before the guilt could settle, I returned back to my model.

The following days were rough for the management. HR did its part: they lit candles, circulated emails with terrible doodles, held seminars, some even tried crying. I didn’t attend. The ones who did came back angrier, more neurotic. They blamed the company, demanded shorter hours, therapy allowances, incentives for overworking.

The quiet disobedience turned into a movement by the end of the week. People just love not working. I, too, follow that trend.

At the annual board meeting, the directors grilled the HR manager. No one defended him — not even his own team. But he was a shrewd man. Instead of sulking, he spent days consulting shrinks and returned with an absurd, unconventional idea: “The Scream Room”. A soundproof space where stressed employees could go and shout at a mannequin.

It was ridiculous; the board loved it. He had research to back it up, but all the board really cared about was cost-cutting. In the following week, an unused conference room was padded, and a lonely mannequin was placed at the centre to be screamed at.

In my opinion, it was genius. If the HR manager hadn’t wasted his time sucking up to the board, he would’ve been better off handling his own business.

To everyone’s surprise, the Scream Room was a hit. People lined up for their turn. I waited thirty minutes in the queue just to enter. The room was deafening; I could hear the vessels in my ears gushing blood in and out. The room was dimly lit and had an air conditioner, the mannequin looked innocent. They could’ve at least drawn a smug face on it. The mannequin and its blank soulless stare made it awkward all that came out of me was a squeak. I am glad there were no witnesses, I carried a stoic face after coming out.

When I returned I saw that the man behind me in the line was the window cleaner, it was the first time I saw him without my reflection overlaying on top of his; there were no glass between us. He looked young, in his 20s, ashy skin, dark complexion, he grinned at me like how he usually does and raised his hand for a salute; I grinned back, no words were exchanged from either side. He screamed his lungs out that day.

Demand exploded — not because everyone was stressed out of their guts, but because, as I’ve said, people just love not working, and I was one of them. This created a new problem: employees spent more time in line than at their desks. The HR manager, still shrewd, introduced a paid token system for entry. That nearly killed the entire operation.

In my opinion, it was genius how the HR manager’s sycophancy kept the board from firing him right then; he was better at sucking up anyway.

Employees revolted again. The board responded by upgrading the Scream Room: now with breakable objects and a baseball bat.

The Scream Room became a blessing in disguise, not just for us but for workers from other offices in the building. They paid twenty rupees for fifteen minutes of destruction and catharsis. Business boomed off TMD and tennis elbow.

Unfortunately, the cigarette vendor across the street suffered. With everyone venting their frustrations indoors, his sales plummeted and he shut down. I now had an additional revenue stream to include in my model.

When I finally completed it, the board was stunned. We were earning more from the Scream Room than from our actual products. The annual meeting dragged on for days.

Sycophancy has its own ways of operation. A sycophant is very well aware of the fact that he is one, and he keeps searching for an opportunity to break out. Always on a lookout to grab the reins from their masters and throw them off the saddle; the same reins they themselves handed over like a dog asking to go for a walk and the saddle they built keeping in mind the dimension of their master’s bottom to fit in perfectly, which was left unused for years.

The HR manager, smelling an opportunity to finally let go of the saddle, demanded forty percent equity in a new company built around his invention. Poor man. Brilliant idea, terrible timing. He was fired immediately. 

The board kept the idea, though. The saddle, after all, was custom designed for them, with no patents.

Mass layoffs took place in the following month, especially from HR and Commercials. The layoffs were justified as they created a new customer base off the now-stressed unemployed.

I, however, was promoted to financial head. New title, new office, new view, same old window cleaner.

It was a quiet spring morning. The heat was setting in, the days were growing longer, and a line of customers stretched outside our building. My coffee was hot, and my models were finally working.

Then I heard a loud crash. And the crash sounded familiar.

It was the HR manager.

The window cleaner stared at me, horrified. I turned to the glass, saw the smear of red across it, and thought — just as I always had—

A little blood is always better than tons of shit.