By Jody E.

This takes place about a month before Conflict Resolution. Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

Monday Morning

The harsh buzz of the alarm clock jolted Jim out of a deep sleep. "I have got to get myself a clock radio," he thought sleepily for approximately the thousandth morning in a row. He looked blearily at the clock. 7:00 AM. Ah, but he always kept his clock set 10 minutes ahead, so it was really only 6:50 and he allowed himself one push of the snooze alarm button. His hand snaked out and punched the button. In the blessed silence, he rolled over and closed his eyes. Usually he slept lightly during these stolen ten minutes, but not this morning. Twice more his hand reached out and pushed the snooze button, when that hideous buzzer tried to wake him from the first real sleep he’d gotten all night.

Jim’s eyes opened in panic. Suddenly wide-awake he looked at the clock. 7:30 proclaimed the large white numbers. "Damn," he thought, "I’m screwed!" Even the realization that it was really only 7:20 did little to change the fact that his morning routine was wrecked. Could he skip washing his hair? That took time, but nah, he hadn’t washed it all weekend and it was definitely greasy. How did women manage every morning, he wondered, like Pam with that long curly hair of hers? "Great, " he thought to himself with disgust, "my first Pam thought of the day, and I’ve only been awake, what twenty seconds?" Was this a new record? He thought not.

Thoughts of Pam with her long hair, wet from the shower, brought him to his other usual morning problem. One that he usually solved in the shower, but there was definitely no time for that this morning. Which was a shame, since it usually helped mute the sexual tension that he felt all day sitting there ten feet from Pam’s desk. "Well, Too bad, Halpert, you’re just going to have to suck it up!"

He yawned, still not quite managing to get out of bed. The last time he remembered looking at the clock last night, it had been 3:20 AM, after what seemed like a lifetime of tossing and turning. He hadn’t really slept well all weekend, for some reason. He hadn’t done much. On Saturday he had gone food shopping and done his laundry, and watched the World Series of Poker on the tube. On Sunday he had looked up some web sites about Australia, trying to whip up some interest in Barrier reefs and Aboriginal villages. He bookmarked a couple of side trips to follow up on. Later that afternoon, he had gone over to his folk’s house for dinner, pot roast with mashed potatoes. He hadn’t had a lot to drink, just a couple of beers during The Sopranos, and had been in bed by 11:00. A pretty quiet weekend. And yet he hadn’t felt quite right since Friday, had felt out of sorts and irritable. Even his roomate, Mark, commented on it, and he was pretty oblivious most of the time.

Jim shot a panicked look at the clock, 7:35. He had been lying there thinking about getting up, but not actually moving. He counted down from ten, an old trick of his from his High School days, when he had turned oversleeping into an art form. When he got to zero, he practically leaped out of bed, and into the bathroom, which thankfully wasn’t occupied, since Mark was on the late shift today.

Jim showered hastily, and rubbed his hair dry with the towel. He combed it back from his face, but it always fell forward when it dried, anyway. His razor felt dull, but he didn’t want to take the time to hunt through the drawer for a new one. In hindsight, however, it probably would have been worth the extra ten seconds it would have taken since he managed to cut himself twice with the dull razor. He threw it into the garbage in disgust, and dabbed at his cuts with the styptic pencil. Grimacing at himself in the mirror, he thought, "Maybe I’ll grow a beard while I’m in Australia. Just think of the look on Pam’s…" He stopped mid thought and frowned at his reflection. Lecturing himself out loud in his best Stanley drawl, he said, "Now you just stop that, you heah? Bah the tahm you git back from Australia, she’s gonna be a married woman!"

Back in his bedroom, Jim dressed quickly, grabbing a white shirt and tie at random. One of his shirt buttons came off as he was buttoning it, but luckily it far down enough that hopefully it wouldn’t show when tucked in. He wondered if today was a taping day. The cameramen didn’t come every day, which was lucky for them since they would have all died of boredom by now. But they never announced when they were coming for fear that people (Michael) would plan something "special." They wanted to catch the denizens of Dunder-Mifflin being themselves. But somehow they always managed to be present when anything interesting went down. Like the time that Todd Packer pooped on Michael’s carpet.

As Jim tied his blue striped tie he noticed a vague kind of headache starting behind his eyes. It wasn’t really a headache, but not really not a headache. It was probably due to lack of sleep. Maybe breakfast would help.

When he got into the kitchen he noticed that the clock on the microwave said 7:45. This one was more or less correct, so there was no time to make coffee. He’d get it later at the office. No. Hell, he needed it now! Hastily, he dumped coffee into the coffeemaker, not bothering to measure, and added water. While it was perking he poured a bowl of cereal, and put two pieces of bread into the toaster. His toaster was old and fussy and required him to baby-sit the toast to prevent burning. But he had to make his lunch for today, wondering, as always, why he didn’t do these things the night before. When he looked into the cold cut drawer of the fridge, he remembered that he had forgotten to buy new cheese and the few pathetic slices he had left were turning an unbecoming shade of green. He tossed them into the garbage can under the sink and quickly made a ham sandwich, which he threw into the bag with a snack size bag of chips and an apple from the bowl on the counter. Just then the toast, which he had forgotten, popped up, filling the small kitchen with the bitter smell of burning. The black slices joined the cheese in the garbage. Maybe Kelly would bring in some muffins for Ryan again and he could snitch one. Kelly was kind of a ditz, but she made very good muffins.

The coffee, when Jim finally tasted it, was strong beyond belief. He really should have measured. But it did finish the awakening process, and he now felt it was at least possible to get though the day. As he ate his Honey Nut Cheerios, he wondered exactly when he had started dreaded going to work in the morning. He had never loved his job at Dunder Mifflin, but he hadn’t hated it either. It was boring, sure, sometimes mind-numbingly so, but there had once been compensations. Well, one compensation. Pam. But it was getting more and more difficult to sit ten feet away from her every day, knowing that in a little over two months she would become another man’s wife. A man, who, in Jim’s opinion didn’t begin to deserve her, and had no idea what he even had. Sure, they still talked as though they were friends and he still played tricks on Dwight because a. he deserved it and b. it made Pam laugh. But more and more the Pam he knew, and loved, had been turning into Pam the bride to be, a person he barely recognized.

Roy had apparently opted out of all wedding preparations, leaving Pam to shoulder everything by herself. From what Jim had observed, Roy seemed to think that his entire contribution to the wedding consisted of setting the date, and showing up on the big day, neither drunk nor hung over enough for it to be noticeable. And Pam, of course, since she worked full time, had to do most of the planning at the office, where Jim got to hear every last detail. Usually he got up and took a break when Pam was doing wedding business, but sometimes he was stuck at his desk on a sales call or finishing paperwork and was a captive audience.

Jim put his cereal bowl into the sink and grabbed his lunch. When he opened the front door, the overcast skies threatened imminent rain. He put on his trench coat and ran for his car, slamming the door behind him. Now if he could just make good time into the office, he might not even be late.

Unfortunately, that crucial twenty-five minutes of oversleeping was the difference between avoiding Scranton’s rush hour traffic, and hitting it dead on. He put on the all news station, hoping that war and disaster would occupy his thoughts during the tedious drive, but he soon tuned out the droning voice.

What had been Friday’s major wedding crisis? Oh yes…Pam’s out of town bridesmaid, Cindy or was it Mindy, (it ended with an "indy," that much he knew) had neglected to send in her measurements in time for the deadline! Now Eugenia, of Eugenia’s Bridals was afraid that her dress would not be done in time. Oh no! All of this was eventually resolved after several frantic phone calls and a rush trip on Mindy’s (or Cindy’s) part to her local dry cleaners where the measurements were taken and phoned in to Pam, who phoned them into Eugenia, thus averting certain disaster.

And Jim, stuck on terminal hold with the factory, about some misplaced delivery, had been forced to listen to it all. He who wanted to know nothing about this wedding, who had planned a trip to Australia to avoid it, now knew every lousy detail! He even knew Cindy’s (or Mindy’s, or Lindy’s...was that even a name?) measurements, even if he didn’t quite remember her name.

But still, twenty minutes later, he and Pam were laughing at lunch about the previous night’s episode of Survivor and their favorite contestant, Shane, who made Dwight look normal by comparison. In fact, they speculated about what would happen if Shane came to work at Dunder Mifflin and tried to imagine him and Dwight and Michael in the same room. They had started laughing so hard that Angela had come into the break room and given them one of her patented death glares. So, on the balance, Friday had turned out to be a pretty good day.

Maybe that’s why his weekend had seemed so empty by comparison. Jim pulled into the parking lot. He was 15 minutes late; there was no getting around it. Luckily, the documentary crew was nowhere to be seen. Jim knew all of their cars by sight. As he walked in the door of Dunder Mifflin, he felt all eyes upon him. Angela looked pointedly at the clock with a disapproving frown, and Dwight smirked. Pam was busy on the phone giving Michael his messages, but managed to look pointedly at her watch and shake her head in mock disgust as he hung up his coat and went to sit down. Of the two people whose actual business it was whether Jim was late or not, Toby and Michael, only Toby was visible. Michael was, thankfully, in his office. Jim looked at Toby apologetically and Toby just shrugged and gave him a small smile. The message was clear. "You’re late...it’s not an issue. Forget it." Thank heaven for Toby who was one of the few truly sane people at Dunder-Mifflin.

With a small sigh, Jim went through his messages and planned his sales calls for the day. Monday, for some reason was a terrible day for getting people in, especially clients. Maybe they all took long weekends. How nice for them. He always ended up just leaving messages on voice mail. Not too many places even had receptionists like Pam, anymore. In a way she was a dying breed.

Speaking of Pam, Jim glanced over at her desk. He guessed that her weekend hadn’t gone too well, either. She was wearing her beige cardigan, the one he didn’t like. It’s not that it was ugly, or anything, it was just so incredibly bland and blah. Not like the pink one she wore that brought out the roses in her cheeks and made her eyes sparkle. He had noticed over the years that she tended to wear the pink sweater when she was in a good mood and the beige one when she wasn’t. Today her eyes looked tired, and he saw her yawn, discretely. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping well either.

Jim thought it might make an interesting scientific study. "The effects of cardigan sweaters on mood." After all, he didn’t really know if it was the sweater that determined her mood, or her mood that determined her sweater. Was it a conscious or unconscious choice? He could spend years on a study like that, perhaps adding a third sweater to the mix. He had seen a pretty blue one in Macys a couple of weeks ago, which would look really good on her.

Well, this train of thought could only get him into trouble, so Jim abruptly got up and went to the Men’s room, coming back to his desk a few minutes later with a decent cup of coffee from the break room and one of Kelly’s muffins. Thank goodness for Kelly’s terminal crush on Ryan. She had decided recently that he was too skinny and was determined to fatten him up a bit, while winning his heart through good cooking. So far, the only person who wasn’t enjoying Kelly’s muffins was Ryan, who never touched them. Jim hoped that Ryan hadn’t really believed him when he jokingly suggested that perhaps the muffins were drugged with a love potion. After all, everybody else ate them (Kevin had eaten several), and none of them had thus far succumbed to Kelly’s charms. Maybe Ryan just didn’t like muffins.

Since Jim’s calls had all been fruitless this morning, he turned on his solitaire game, and started playing distractedly. He looked up to see Dwight staring at him, hostility practically oozing from every pore. He was apparently still fuming because Jim had gotten away with such egregious lateness.

"You were late!" he hissed at Jim, "Why weren’t you punished?"

"I was, " admitted Jim, taking out his notebook and turning to a fresh page, with a giant sigh. "Toby got me in the break room. I have to write 1,000 times, ‘I will not be late for work on Monday mornings ever again.’"

"Good!" declared Dwight, his faith in world order restored. Over at her desk, Angela smiled her tight little smile.

Jim looked at Pam. She didn’t see him because she was involved with something on her computer, Solitaire perhaps or Sodoku, or maybe a web site. He recalled the time she had read his palm based on a web site she had found while idly surfing. Good times. He tried not to remember the rest of that day, which had ended with one of their few fights, after he had embarrassed her by picking her up in front of Meredith. Jim noticed that his sort of headache was turning into an actual one. Was it time to go home yet? The clock on the wall said 10:00.

Pam picked up her phone, and lowering her voice slightly, asked for Roy. Jim decided to get up and take a walk to clear his head, but at that moment, his phone rang. It was Bill Rittmaster of WJR Printers, for whom he had left a message earlier. He had to take this. For the next several minutes, he and Bill talked paper, and he managed to tune out most of Pam’s conversation with Roy. Still, from her tone, he could tell it was not a happy one. As he hung up the phone, after taking the order, she was still talking. She was speaking in a loud whisper, but Jim could still hear her side of the conversation clearly. Too clearly.

"Well, since you couldn’t be bothered, I went ahead and made the reservations. Three nights."

"On Expedia. It’s much easier than calling every where."

"Well, I’m sorry. If we had a computer at home, I could have done it there and not had to bother you at work."

"Anyway, I checked and it’s only ten dollars more per night for a king sized bed."

"Why not? We’ve never slept on a king-sized bed. I thought it might be fun."

"Well, how much gambling are you planning on doing? It’s only our honeymoon!"

That was it. Jim got up and practically ran into the men’s room. Talk of bridesmaids’ dresses he could bear; beds and honeymoons were another thing all together. It was just too damn much. He came out of the men’s room and sat down in the break room. He needed to be alone for a while. His headache, which had been fooling around up to now, decided to fully commit to the pain thing. He sat at the table with his head in his hands, wishing he had the strength to walk over to Meredith’s desk. She had an entire pharmacy in her bottom drawer, with every kind of headache medicine known to man. Toby came in quietly and sat down at the table with him.

"Hey, are you okay?" he asked in his quiet way, "You looked kind of upset when you came in here."

"Just a headache. I think I’m coming down with something. Maybe I should go home."

"Sure. I’ll tell Michael. It’s not like you make a habit of this sort of thing."

"Thanks, Toby." He hesitated. Toby was a nice guy, maybe he could help. "Toby...I, uh, do you think you could do me a favor?"

"Sure, Jim. What is it?"

"Well, I don’t want to make a big deal about this, but it seems like it would be much better coming from you.."

"Is it Dwight? I know you two don’t exactly get along."

Jim lowered his voice to a whisper and looked around to make sure that nobody else came into the room, "No, it’s, uh, Pam."

Toby looked surprised," Pam?"

Jim hesitated again. This was probably a huge mistake. But, dammit, how much could one man take? "Well, it’s nothing really, it’s just that she’s planning this wedding, you know?"

Toby nodded. Pam’s wedding was pretty much impossible to avoid.

"…and well, I understand that she has to do some of the planning at work, I really do. But honestly, some of it is really...inappropriate for a work place." (Damn now he was sounding as prissy as Angela, but no way was he giving his real reason)

He was warming up now. "I have to make important work related phone calls, and sometimes it’s very..distracting to hear all this wedding talk. So do you think you could just kind of mention it to her?"

Toby placed a notebook on the table, which Jim hadn’t noticed him holding, and started to write in it. Toby’s handwriting was small and cramped, and Jim couldn’t read it upside down, though he tried.

"What’s that? What are you writing?"

"Just taking notes, Jim. I always do, every time somebody comes to me with a complaint. It’s part of my job. To handle employee complaints."

"Yeah, but I don’t want Pam to know I said anything."

"Jim, anything you tell me can be confidential, if you want it to be. I’m the only one who sees this."

"But why do you have to write it down?"

"So that I can follow up, if anybody else come in with the same complaint, or if the situation continues. This way I have documentation."

Jim didn’t like the sound of that, but he knew Toby was a trustworthy guy. If he said he would be discreet, he would be, unlike certain managers he knew.

"Listen, Jim," Toby said; "I can’t talk to Pam right now. I have to go out for a while. But I can do it later, okay?"

"Sure, fine, whenever. It doesn’t matter, "Jim said, his voice choking up against his will, "I just want it to stop." He hadn’t meant to say that. He hoped that Toby didn’t notice how really upset he was.

Toby got up, and closing his notebook, headed out. Jim sat there, staring into space. He couldn’t believe he had just ratted out Pam to the HR director. What if this complaint of his found its way into Pam’s Permanent Employment Folder? It could look bad if she ever wanted to apply for a different job, or even that internship in New York. What if it said that she wasted company time doing personal business? That was just the kind of thing potential employers look out for. Toby had said it would be confidential if he wanted it to be. But still, there was no such thing as confidential at Dunder Mifflin. He had learned that the hard way. He got up, determined to tell Toby to forget the entire thing. But when he asked where Toby had gone, Michael told him that Toby had gone out on some "personal business," using his fingers to make air quotes. Michael always thought that Toby was up to no good, somehow plotting against him, as though Toby, just because he didn’t work under Michael, was the head of some rival company.

Jim walked back to his desk in a daze. In addition to his headache, he now had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. There was nothing he could do but wait for Toby to return. He looked up at Pam, who looked a little more cheerful that she had before, and who smiled at him in a puzzled way. He hadn’t been to her desk once today. He looked down at his order forms, unable to meet her eyes, and tried to fill them out.

When he was seven years old, Jim had broken his father’s favorite recliner while playing GI Joes with his friends. The chair had made a wonderful battleground, but it was old and couldn’t stand up to the weight of three jumping boys. The chair had broken at 10:00 AM, and Jim had had to wait until 6:00 PM when his father came home from work to find out what his punishment was going to be. All throughout that interminable day, he had felt the way he did right now.

He had planned to go home early, but now he had to stick it out. He looked up and noticed that Pam was at his desk. "Hey," she said.

"Hey." He tried to sound natural. Luckily he was good at imitations. He gave her his best Jim imitation, smile and all, "how was your weekend?"

"Okay. Yours?"

"Not bad."

Silence. Apparently they had exhausted their conversational topics for the day.

After a few more awkward moments, Pam asked, "Are you okay? You look a little green around the gills. And I noticed you came in late. Are you sick?"

"Yeah. Could be. I have a really bad headache."

"Oh, no wonder…well, I have some Advil in my desk. Will that help?"

"Yeah, probably." He started to get up.

"No. Stay there. I’ll bring it to you. Water?"

Jim nodded, feeling sicker and guiltier by the minute. In a few minutes Pam came back with a plastic cup of water and two Advil gel caps. "These are the best, even for tension headaches."

"You get tension headaches?" Jim asked, swallowing the capsules.

"Sometimes. This whole wedding thing…so much to do. My parents want to help but they really can’t afford much. Neither can we, really. But it’s like taking a tiger by the tail, you know? It just runs away with you."

"A juggernaut," said Jim, liking the word.

Pam smiled, "Maybe you should go home early."

"I..I can’t. I have to wait to, uh hear back from some customers."

"You can do it, you know. Even Angela went home sick once."

"I remember. I felt like I witnessed history being made. But I think I’ll stick around for a while." The phone on Pam’s desk rang, and she went to answer it, leaving him alone with his guilt.

Eventually, the Advil kicked in and Jim felt better physically, but he still sat numbly, watching the clock. Where the hell was Toby? His unfinished solitaire game had reverted to the screen saver. He had managed to finish the forms for the WRJ Printing account, which should mean a bit of commission. He didn’t much care at this point.

At lunchtime Jim couldn’t avoid Pam so they sat together, as usual. She was increasingly concerned, after he tossed his mostly uneaten sandwich in the trash. Kelly was there too, though Ryan seemed to be hiding out somewhere, as usual. Poor Ryan…if it wasn’t Kelly after him, it was Michael. At least Michael wasn’t making him muffins. Yet. But Kelly’s nonstop talking concealed the fact that Jim, himself, wasn’t saying much of anything. Jim and Pam heard every detail of Kelly’s weekend, almost none of which were in the last interesting, except for the fact that Ryan seemed to figure in them prominently. Jim thought it was odd the way he avoided her so at work, yet they seemed to be dating outside of the office. It was funny the way people that you knew so well, inside these walls, had whole other lives that he didn’t know anything about. Like Pam. He never saw her life outside Dunder Mifflin. All he knew of her was the part of herself that she brought in here five days a week. But that part was enough for him to have fallen in love with her. He could only guess at and long for the rest.

After lunch, Jim sat at his desk and tried to stay awake. If he only had one of those cubicles they had in some offices, he could put his head down on his desk and sleep. But not in the middle of an open room. He drank some more coffee and a coke from the machine. And watched the clock.

Finally, after an entire lifetime, at 2:00 PM, Toby came back. Jim jumped up and cornered him in the break room, where he was getting a cup of coffee. "Toby, can I talk to you a minute?"

"Listen Jim. I’ll talk to Pam as soon as I get settled."

"No. No. I don’t want you to talk to Pam. I want you to forget I ever said anything. It was stupid. It really doesn’t bother me that much."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I don’t want there to be any written record in her file or anything."

"No, there wouldn’t be. Unless she committed some major offense. We don’t put stuff like that in personnel files," Toby smiled.

"Well, I still want it erased, or deleted or whatever you do."

"Wait here a second." Toby left the break room for a moment, only to come back in with the sheet of paper from his notebook, and a self-inking rubber stamp. He put the paper down on the table and stamped it across the front. The stamp said, ‘REDACTED" in large red letters.

"Redacted…what does that mean?"

"It’s just Human Resources speak for cancelled. It’s done. Like it never was."

"Can’t you just, you know, tear it up?"

Toby shook his head, "I’m afraid not. But it will go in a separate redacted file and nobody will ever see it. I promise."

Jim smiled, his relief palpable. "Thanks, Toby."

When Jim got back to his desk, he felt a hundred percent better. His headache and stomachache were gone, though he was still sleepy. He walked over to Pam’s desk and helped himself to some jellybeans, suddenly feeling very hungry.

"Damn, "he told Pam, with a grin, " I kind of told Dwight that I have to write ‘I will not come in late on Monday morning ever again,’ 1,000 times. Maybe I could sneak out for a while and come back with my arm in a cast. It would be easy enough to get, my brother in law, Ted, is a doctor."

Pam giggled at the thought, but shook her head, "Bad idea. Michael would be totally jealous."

"Ooh that’s right. Can’t be sicker than the boss. I forgot. But what am I going to do? I’m certainly not going to do some stupid punishment that I made up for myself."

"Well, maybe we could convince Dwight to do it for you."

"Oooh. Intriguing idea, Beesly! Do you have a plan?"

"Maybe."

The two conspirators huddled together at Pam’s desk. The rest of the day sped by.

The End