When Josh first mentions that he doesn’t smile enough, Jim kind of wants to pack up the three personal items on his new desk and walk out the door. It’s not the observation so much as the delivery: “Jim, it’s something you have to work at sometimes, but it’s worth it. At first, you smile from the outside in, but you do that often enough, and pretty soon you’re smiling from the inside out. Try it. It works. Your customers will thank you with great big supply contracts.” Josh smiles, as if to prove his point, and Jim imagines it’s from the inside out.

Still, Josh is a successful guy and much more credible than Michael, and Jim finds himself wanting to listen to him, to buy into the smile technique. He takes a post-it pad from his desk drawer and writes “Smile!” on the paper. He sticks it to the side of his monitor. He smiles. It doesn’t quite make it inside.

When Andy starts calling him “Big Tuna” and just…doesn’t stop, Jim finds himself looking at the post-it often. Andy looks confused when Jim just smiles at every exchange. This in itself is kind of worth it. The smiles sit stubbornly on the surface, and the post-it begins to lift slightly away from the monitor at one edge, but he is smiling. That has to be something.

He sees and doesn’t see the post-it; it’s always there, and he’s still trying—especially when he’s on the phone with clients—and something is helping him make a lot of sales. Talent, determination, forced smiles, escapism. Something is working, and he doesn’t want to know what. He just wants to forget, to smile and mean it, or to not smile and have no one notice. The person who’d notice his missing smile and try to bring it back is…not here. He looks at the note. He keeps practicing.

He pranks Andy and is reminded—as though he could ever forget—that we’re not in Scranton anymore, Toto. He has a post-it directive and memories of smiles, but they are in different universes and they don’t play well together. His smile has formed an alliance with Scranton, one it is reluctant to break, but maybe it can be bought, because Scranton is never far away in his mind, and there’s that thing about mind over matter.

It’s harder on Mondays and a bit easier on Fridays, and some days he can go the whole day without looking at the note. Some days he can smile without the note, and some of those smiles reach a little bit inside of him. Some of them make it to the epidermis or maybe a hair follicle. He looks out the window a lot, and the view is lovely and it helps a little. Sometimes the corner of his mouth quirks up of its own volition. Maybe that’s coming from the inside.

Then there is a phone call. It’s strange to be talking to Kelly on the phone, but she claims to be unable to read Jim’s writing on an old contract and she has hot celebrity gossip and Jim supposes Ryan didn’t nod vigorously enough when she told him, so he listens. “Oh yeah?” he says, feigning interest. “Wow, who’d have imagined that? I really thought those two crazy kids would make it.” She chatters on and on, and Jim forgets whether the contract issue has been clarified or not, but the conversation (if one could call it that) is therapeutic, and he is smiling. And then there is one more piece of news.

“She…oh, she didn’t?” Jim responds when he can speak. “That’s…huh. Wow. And she’s—is she okay? Uh huh. Yeah, I guess you never know. Hey, thanks for calling, Kelly. Yeah, you too. Bye.”

He leans forward in his chair and blinks and takes a long breath. He takes the post-it note off his monitor and drops it, watching as it flutters into the wastebasket. It is obsolete before it hits the bottom.

- - - - - - - -

Here's a screen cap of the post-it note on Jim’s monitor, around which the story was based:

http://time-enough.net/screencaps/the_office/301/Gay_Witch_Hunt_0764.jpg