It had been an awful day, frankly. Jim had started out on the wrong foot—quite literally, in a sense, because Michael had dropped a whole box of bagged coffee beans on Jim’s foot when they were unloading the truck that morning—and only gone downhill from there. They’d had a bunch of new customers, which was theoretically a good thing, except that every single one of these people seemed to be the categorical definition of the worst: insanely detailed orders spewed at twice-normal speed and including ingredients they didn’t even have on the menu; new customers whom, therefore, he had definitionally never met before refusing to give their names even at the surprising height of the morning rush because ‘if you were a good barista you’d know me and my order’; irreconcilable demands that the customers were certain were the height of reason, leading to an increasingly bizarre argument in which Jim was forced to draw on all of his philosophy and debate experience to remember that he theoretically enjoyed a free-flowing exchange of ideas through words, even if those ideas in this case consisted of the question of whether it was possible to make a dairy-free drink with only whole milk (‘no, not soy, not coconut, not almond, not oat, you idiot, regular milk, how dumb do you have to be?’); Dwight.

God, it was a bad day when Dwight was the best thing that happened to him.

Seriously, though, Dwight being Dwight actually managed to clear out the line by loudly insisting on his beet coffee, and his spitting out of ‘do you work here?’ and ‘wait in line for your drink, queueing is what separates civilized men from beasts’ actually made Jim’s life easier for once.

It was confusing.

Worse, Pam hadn’t come in. He’d actually convinced Michael that since someone had drunk all six types of the ‘fancy experimental tea’ that he’d bought, they should invest in more of it, and the supplier had been willing to toss an extra box onto their delivery, and so they actually had tea, and then Pam didn’t come in.

He wasn’t sure what to do with himself, which was ironic since everyone else in the coffee shop seemed to have a very specific, if frequently contradictory, idea of what he ought to be doing at all times.

He went through his tasks, now that Dwight had beaten off the worst of the worst, with a mechanical automation that, had he been in his best spirits and clearest mind, would have directly reminded him of Marx’s theories about the alienation of labor by capital. Since he was not, it just made him sad. That was probably for the best, he would reflect later, since if he had thought of it he’d just have wished he could have mentioned it to Pam, and that in turn would have made him sadder.

His phone buzzed—somehow Dwight heard it over the normal sounds of the coffee shop and yelled something about unprofessional behavior that Jim decided he was too un/professional (choose whichever worked for you, he mentally shrugged) to have noticed—and he glanced down out at it of a combination of instinct and a sense that even if it was a stupid spam text it wasn’t going to be any worse to read than the rest of his day had been to live.

Hey!

Well, that was informative, unidentified number. Spam text it was, then. He swiped to archive the conversation—no point in having a spam text at the top of his recent texts—then swore as another text from the same number returned it to his recents, prompting another minilecture from Dwight that he equally quickly ignored.

Sorry I’m not there today!

His breath caught. Was this Pam? He couldn’t think of anyone else who wasn’t there, or who would expect him to notice that. Except he couldn’t afford to get his hopes up, not after this day had been so shitty .Maybe this was just a wrong number.

Tell Dwight hi!

Not a wrong number then, or if so then a very suspicious coincidence.

He thought about what to write back, assuming it was Pam—or whether he should just write back “is this Pam”—when Dwight rang the bell at the front (a new innovation Michael was trying, Jim suspected precisely because Michael was rarely the one who had to answer it) and he rolled his eyes.

He had almost put the phone into his pocket again when the last text came through.

this is Pam, btw