Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. She let it ring. She wasn’t looking forward to going on the booze cruise again, but she’d promised herself—after all, if there was a solution to this thing it probably lay there, in redoing whatever it was that she’d left screwed up before. Though how she was supposed to figure that out with the giant disillusionment of Roy’s proposed date staring her in the face, she couldn’t quite make out.

Maybe that was it. Maybe what she needed to do was figure out how to get Roy not to propose June 10th as a wedding date. Or any wedding date for that matter. Oh, obviously, that wasn’t the only thing she needed to do: she was pretty sure he hadn’t picked a date on the cruise when she’d drunk until she passed out either, though she had to admit that she couldn’t be entirely sure. And probably he hadn’t on the days she wasn’t there, though the fact that he’d done it when Pam wasn’t in the room that one time she’d been with Larissa outside gave her a little pause.

In any case, it wasn’t sufficient but she suspected it might be necessary. So she went about her day with that in mind. She bought Dwight’s wallet again, just to have something to fiddle with when she was waiting to get through the day. She could tell she was settling into the routine. There was Angela, buying two Baby Ruths from the vending machine and dropping one off for Dwight as she always did. There was Kevin misplacing a 7 as a 1 and running around like a chicken with his head cut off looking for $6,000 of lost revenue until Oscar quietly got up, typed a decisive single number on Kevin’s spreadsheet, and calmed the big man down. There was Kelly, running crying into the bathroom after Ryan said something stupid, and there she was fifteen minutes later ignoring him as if he didn’t exist. It wasn’t all that different from any other day, really, but she was all the more familiar with it, and it almost lulled her to sleep.

The one thing that kept her awake, though, was Jim. She wasn’t sure what it was about him—after all, if she could recognize the same things in everyone else’s day to day routine, why wasn’t his repeating itself in the same way?—but he always had something slightly new to say. He’d make a slightly different joke about jelly beans, or nod at Michael’s retreating back and make a different face, or wink at her when before he’d knocked on the desk.

Maybe, she reflected during Kelly’s fifteen minute sob, it was because what Jim did involved her in a way that no one else’s day did. Jim made his jokes to her, got his jellybeans from her, knocked on her desk. It was inevitable that if she made a slightly different response, because it wasn’t the first time she’d heard a joke or made a comment, he’d make a slightly different response back until their dynamic was…well, not entirely different, but just unusual enough to keep her awake. She couldn’t be sure that this time when he approached her desk he’d say or want or do the same thing as the last time—or rather, the last cycle—unlike Dwight’s repetitive request for twenty-three copies of a single purchase order, or Michael’s exactly repetitive infantile jokes. It was actually pretty impressive that each of them was so similar time after time—but also soul-sucking in a deep and painful way.  She’d thought before these cycles even began that she’d heard Michael’s same jokes too often, but now she knew that she had had no idea whatsoever of what she was talking about.

She spent most of the day trying valiantly to overcome her instinct to rush ahead: to act like people had already said what they had to say, or done what they had to do, because of course she already knew it all. The last few hours, however, she realized that while she was still pretty sure that the booze cruise held the key to whatever was making her repeat the day, Bill Murray hadn’t just fixed his lazy reporting, or his relationship with his producer, he’d fixed the whole town’s day. And that meant she might need to make her work life as good as possible as well as improving the cruise.

So she conscientiously closed the Freecell window (apparently random numbers generated the same across cycles: she’d had to press the button for a new random seed every day to make sure she didn’t just play the same game each ever iteration, alternating between traditional Windows Klondike solitaire and Freecell). Instead of solitaire, she dove into territory she usually avoided: the branch client directory. OK, she didn’t actually avoid it as such, because she had to use it whenever one of the sales or customer service reps had something to send out or needed her to do their calling for them (not actual sales calls, of course, but things like scheduling with the secretaries of busy offices to make sure that the sales calls would find someone at work who could make a purchase order). But she avoided it as much as she could, and she had pulled out a large number of frequent clients’ information onto the gigantic mass of Post-It notes that continually threatened to overwhelm her desk. This was because the directory was poorly organized, for one, but even more it was because no one had actually ever taught her how to use it. Before Roy had gotten her this job, Michael had contrived to drive away six secretaries in five months (which she desperately hoped was a record that would stand for a while), and only secretarial staff actually had to use this particular directory: it included different information than the sales, customer service, quality assurance, and managerial databases, each of which was separately hosted and managed.

God, someone needed to overhaul the technology at this company. She giggled to herself as she remembered the Dunder Mifflin “website,” long-promised but never realized. Jim had tried to convince her once that it was the Platonic ideal of a website. He’d stolen Dwight’s glasses and droned on in a mock-lecture like a particularly bad English professor she’d had before she dropped out of college: “a website with no actual content, always striving, always improving, always about to be and never bogged down in the prosaic reality of ‘is’: it’s the future, Pam, because it’s never stuck in the present.” They’d laughed long and hard that day.

But the result of all this technological mayhem was that there was no one around who knew the least thing about how to actually use the secretarial client directory back when she was hired, and so no one to train her. The extent of her training had been Michael showing her the computer, waving his hand, and saying “there’s some kind of directory or something in there. Or as I call it, an indirectory,” while looking at her expecting some kind of response. So she had taught it to herself, but the sheer unpleasantness of the experience meant she only knew the most surface-level functionality of the database, and she used it as little as possible.

That changed today.

She dug through the bottom drawer of far side of her desk, where she’d stuck everything she didn’t feel comfortable disposing of but didn’t really use or need. Aha! There it was, printed on old dot-matrix paper with the edges still on: “A Brief Guide to the Dunder Mifflin Client Directory.” The copyright date was in Roman numerals. She flopped the printouts onto the desk in front of her and began to go through it line by line. It wasn’t like she had anything better to do.

Well, something better to do of course came along, in the form of one Jim Halpert. She was halfway through Section IV Paragraph iii: Advanced Searches when his friendly face hove into view above the desk.

“So what do we have here? Doing some office archaeology?” He fingered the paper. “Do we even still sell this stuff?”

She shook her head. “I think we stopped before I got hired, actually.”

“So as far as we know, we’ve never sold this.”

“Right.” They were leaning together, whispering conspiratorially, and she felt genuinely happy for the first time all day.

“So as I see it, we have two options.” He glanced at her, his eyebrow raised in challenge, clearly expecting her to guess what the options he saw were. Fortunately, she knew him.

“Option one is asking Dwight to reorder it, isn’t it?” He grinned at her in approval and gestured for her to go on. “And option two…tell him we have an unauthorized paper breach and need to seal the exits and look for the culprit?”

“Very nice, Beesly.” He tapped the desk. “I was going to go for ‘hide it in his desk overnight and ask him tomorrow if he got the new paper order,’ but I think yours are better.” She grinned up at him. This was just who Jim was: generous to a fault, always willing to admit when her ideas matched up to or even bested his. Their eyes met for a moment before he turned aside to grab a jellybean. “So, you excited for tonight’s main event?”

She sighed. “Can’t you see how excited I am?” She gestured at the printouts. “I only bring this out on special occasions.”

He fingered the edge of the pages she’d set aside, where the dot edge was starting to fray off the main paper. “You did bring confetti.” He popped another jellybean. “And candy, of course.”

“Of course.” They grinned at each other until Dwight chose that moment to walk out of the men’s room and bark something at Jim about “lollygagging.” Jim mouthed “how old is he?” to Pam as he made his way back to his desk.

The rest of the training went remarkably quickly after  that.

The cruise, on the other hand, felt interminable. Pam went through the motions, listening to Katy, teasing Jim mildly about her cheerleading tendencies, cringing at Michael’s inanity, but her mind was focused on making sure Roy didn’t pick a date in public, and that meant she was on edge all evening. She managed to get him to stop taking snorkel shots by the simple expedient of not going outside (she felt the loss of that little bit of time with Jim keenly, but ignored it: one had to make sacrifices for the greater good sometimes. In this case, the greater good was not having her drunken boor of a fiancé make a fool of them both in public). Instead, she grabbed the snorkel and poured orange juice into it, convincing Katy that alternating that with a bottle of champagne she found in the…what did you call a kitchen on a boat? The larder? The galley?...made a passable mimosa and then relying on the cheerleader’s good will to get the boys to play nice and stop pouring pure grain alcohol down the damn thing. When Roy belched (a side-effect of chugging champagne she hadn’t anticipated) and went wandering towards Captain Jack, she tried to follow, but Katy grabbed her instead and she lost sight of him. Apparently the mimosas had put Katy in mind of brunch, and from brunch she’d moved on to wedding breakfasts and then to engagements, which meant they were right back on track with that awful conversation about how one got engaged. Was Jim really getting engaged to Katy? She felt that awful sensation in her stomach you get when you try to run after eating Mexican food, and had to run to the bathroom. There she found Roy once again listening to Captain Jack in a weird drunken rapture. She listened to the same patter about saving people (really, Jim, the customer? Really Captain Jack, your “first” wife?) but she didn’t have the time to stop what she was worried was happening: her stomach needed her more than her heart right then.

When she slunk out of the…head?...she caught sight of Jim pacing around the cabin, but didn’t see Roy anywhere. She headed towards Jim and heard him muttering something about “saving the receptionist.” Wait, what?

Before she could entirely process what she’d just heard, there was the telltale screech of the microphone and Roy’s voice. “Hello, everybody…”

She couldn’t stand it. She ran into the room just as Roy got to “could I have your attention” and grabbed the microphone. “Pammy!” he cried as she wrestled him for it, and (thankfully) managed to get it entirely in her hands.

“Sorry, folks, I think it’s time we cut this guy off, don’t you?” Appreciative chuckles greeted her, but she could feel Roy behind her starting to get angry. She looked around, made eye contact with Michael, and felt fate touch her. “Meanwhile, ladies and gentleman, the comedy stylings of Michael! Gary! Scott!” She tossed Michael the microphone (which, in a miracle, she didn’t throw into the ceiling or someone’s face and, miracle squared, he actually caught) and dragged Roy out onto the deck with sheer willpower.

“But Pammy!” His anger had apparently passed into the sad-drunk stage. “I was gonna propose to you!”

Sad-drunk Roy wasn’t worth her anger, so she let it go with a sigh. “Roy, we’re already engaged.”

He swung a hand in front of his face like he was swatting a fly and began to slur his words. “Tha didn’t count.” Apparently mimosas made him sleepy—or maybe it was the release of all the tension he’d worked himself up to in proposing. “Gotta pick a date for itta count.” He slumped and she was lucky to be able to slide him onto one of the benches by the outside rail before he collapsed entirely. “Doan count.” He was out.

She slumped down herself. That had been close. No, not close: she had to admit, even after the last few cycles, it was still a direct hit to her feelings, if not a public humiliation in the way that being proposed to again was. She sat next to her erstwhile fiancé, tears pricking her eyes, and then shook her head. This wouldn’t do. She’d have to do better next time.

But for now…at least she’d avoided doing it in public.

Maybe next time she could figure out what Jim meant by that receptionist line. For now, though, she was too emotionally drained to deal with anything more. And anyway, it wasn’t like she didn’t have time.