It’s 2:17.

Two hours and forty-three minutes stand between Pam and her evening. She is keenly aware of this because two weeks ago she downloaded a little program to sit on her desktop and count down to 5:00 every day. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Tonight she has no special plans—not her drawing studio or dinner with any of the tentative new friends she’s making there. No, tonight she has two movies from Netflix in her mailbox and most of a six pack in her fridge. She needs to call her mom and repot the ivy she bought right after she moved into her new place. She wants to bake some cookies. It's going to be a good night.

It’s April, and the sun is finally shining for a few hours after she’s free for the day. Pam is anxious to start her car and turn the radio up too loud. Now. Instead she stares at the clock and bounces in her chair humming to herself. It’s not the same.

A few weeks ago Pam watched something on the Discovery channel about Zen Buddhist monks, and she’s been thinking about it ever since. She thinks she could learn to turn her biding of time in this office into something more profound. After all, she’s faced with forty hours of absurd and unanswerable questions here every week and could probably teach those monks a few things about stillness in the face of distraction. She has a mantra and everything. “Dunder Mifflin this is Paaaammmmmm.”

She never thought much about her job, like, ever, before Jim blindsided her last May. Now she thinks about it all the time. Can’t stop thinking about it, actually.

Currently, she thinks the office feels like a waiting room. This is where she comes to sit quietly, jiggle her foot, clear her throat, and try not to make eye contact with any of the other people who are also here… waiting. She looks out over her desk at the back of Jim’s head and at Phyllis and Stanley staring blank-faced at their monitors. They really do all look like they’re waiting for a nurse to call their names and take their vitals.

Or maybe, just possibly, they’re all waiting for a weird, Pennsylvanian version of satori. Kevin’s definitely got a Buddha thing going on. Pam looks up “Zen” on Wikipedia and makes a mental note to get Dwight all excited about Eastern religions the next time Angela gets on her nerves.

It’s only been 20 minutes since she last got up to freshen her tea, but she drains her mug and walks to the kitchen for more anyway. If Jim glances up at the movement, she doesn’t notice. Pam made herself stop noticing months ago when she decided she had to get used to being alone here or keep embarrassing herself crying in the ladies room.

Being alone here now is not as hard as it was when Jim was actually, physically gone last summer and her life was rubble at her feet. At least now she has a place of her own she is excited to go home to. And, yes, there are still those odd, exciting afternoons (mostly when Karen is out of the office or when Dwight and Michael are riled up because the camera crew is around) when Jim engages with her and things between them are an echo of what they were. She leaves work on those days feeling giddy and bruised and ready for a huge glass of wine with dinner. Okay, most of a bottle of wine.

Pam depresses the button on the electric kettle and leans against the counter pondering how long she can keep drinking tea at this clip before she has to start running to the bathroom three times an hour. If she’s not going to become a Zen master, then maybe her time behind reception could be used to stretch her endurance. She will be perfectly equipped for the long, boring, bathroomless stretches of rural highway she’s bound to encounter when she finally just gives up some afternoon and walks out of here forever.

She’ll pop one final jelly bean into her mouth, leave her cardigan hanging on the back of her chair, and call to leave a voicemail from the road. Her route is all planned out. Scranton, PA to San Francisco, CA: 2,818 miles. What did her receptionist foremothers do all day long without Google Maps to help them plan their getaways?

The kettle clicks off, and as Pam pours boiling water over her tea bag she thinks, just briefly, about how nice it was to have a strong pot tea out at her desk. But... no. Her teapot has been hidden away in the back of a drawer ever since Jim made it clear he wasn’t interested anymore, and she appreciates the time away from her desk to make it a cup at a time now anyway.

It’s hard to believe that there was a time when she didn’t sit at her desk and look forward to killing five minutes making a cup of tea. And when she’d felt like the only person alive who kind of looked forward to Monday mornings. When she thought maybe she was going to be happy without ever really trying. Things change.

The hardest parts of the last year should have been the end of her relationship with Roy, missing her chance with Jim, and starting over in her own place for the first time ever… all the things covered in the articles from O that her mother clips and sends in the mail. It’s all been hard, but starting fresh is easier than she expected.

The thing she is really, really struggling with is this job. Outside Dunder Mifflin she has new classes, new neighbors, new interests, new skills, and a new life. In here she is stuck with the old job and its old baggage. Baggage stuffed with landmines.

Pam plops back down into her chair with her tea and wishes there were voice mails to check. Paperwork to file. Fax cover sheets to fill in. Anything. Quiet days like this make her long for something improbable and complicated.

There’s one new email in her inbox. From Michael. “Fwd: Fwd: Woman drivers!1!! Hilarious!!!” Hoo boy. Four months ago all Michael’s forwarded email was filtered immediately into its own folder (“Important Business Correspondence”) so she didn’t have to look at it all. Now she has an ongoing contest with herself to see how long she can go each day reading each and every message he sends. If she makes it through an entire day of Robin Williams talk show appearance clips and stale jokes about Paris Hilton, she gets a prize.

She is probably going to make it until 5:00 today, and the reward for that is Chinese takeout for dinner. Or, she can try to go double or nothing and make it all the way through tomorrow for a box of oil pastels she’s been waiting for an excuse to buy. She’s never made it three whole days, but if she’s ever that bored and immune to the world’s worst email etiquette, the reward is a new job. Seriously. She has China Gardens' number in her phone and dickblick.com and monster.com all bookmarked and ready to go.

She’d spent half an hour this morning Googling phrases, looking for answers. Google is not as helpful as everyone thinks it is. “Your search – ‘how do i fix the mess i've made without a time machine?’ - did not match any documents.” Ditto: "i wish the back of his neck would shut up," “revenge of the fun jeans” and “the most kickass dojo in scranton”. She adds another hitless search to the list, “zen and the art of answering phones.”

It’s 3:02.

Pam opens a new game of solitaire. If she wins the first hand she’ll take it as a lucky omen, damn the rejection, and send Jim a friendly email. If not, well, there’s just an hour and fifty-eight minutes to go. She clears her mind, clicks to deal the cards, and settles in to wait