Office

The man in a blue necktie turned to his deskmate.

“There was a moment yesterday where the room fell completely silent, all at once,” he said. His deskmate wore a bowtie that day, yellow with polka dots. He typed on an identical typewriter to the one in front of the man with the necktie. “There was no typing, no humming, not even breathing for a few seconds.”

The man with the bowtie kept on typing. There was something wrong with his “C” key. Every time he pressed it, the man in the necktie would know without having to look because of the clicking sound it made. It came across as hollow and strained; the metallic clang felt incomplete compared to the clangs of other keyboards in the room.

“Can you believe that? Everyone in the room just stopped, like they all had to finish a thought or take a breath at the same time,” the man in the necktie continued. The man in the bowtie looked around the room, rows and rows of men all typing at once. He had to assume they were all typing, as it was too dark to see past the twentieth, maybe thirtieth row, where two men with no neckties or bowties typed.

“And I got this feeling, only for a second, that everyone else had been frozen still,” Necktie continued.

“How is that possible, friend?”

“It's not. But nothing else made sense! I can’t be the only one who managed to notice, right?” His deskmate shrugged lightly and the polka dots bounced around his bowtie, trying to escape.

“It was scary at first, just thinking about it.‘Oh God, what if they all froze? What if everyone in the room and everything in the world froze and only I could move?’” Necktie could hear the clicks of his deskmate's typewriter at the same volume as his own. The sounds of keys from many rows away reached him as well, though not nearly as loud as the one next to him. He had a theory that the dimly-lit room heightened his hearing at the expense of his sight. Senses did that sometimes, he decided.
“And then I kept thinking. Even when the sound came back I just kept thinking what it would be like if everyone stayed frozen. I mean, what would I even do?”

“I don’t know. Stop typing maybe. Or get ahead of everyone with more typing.”

Within that sentence, Necktie heard his deskmate type “C” three times, two of them consecutively. What are the chances, he thought. Accent? Hiccups? Bocce, like the yard game with the brightly colored balls? He saw no reason for those words to be typed, as fun as the speculation was.

“I think I would work ahead on my typing. I know that's what you would do.”

“I suppose.”
“But typing wouldn’t matter anymore if everyone was frozen. No one would care. I could do something else.”

“You could. But I wouldn’t.”

“It would be impossible to fall behind, though. No one else could type.”

Bowtie typed another “C”, his first one in a while. Necktie thought to himself, as no one else was listening, what he would really do if the world came to a standstill. He knew it was an absurd, distracting thought.

The two fell quiet, aside from the clicking of their keyboards. Necktie waited for his perfect moment of silence again. Bowtie was right about it being impossible, as there were so many men and so many keyboards in that room. But he still wanted everyone to stop. How nice would it be, he thought, for everyone to finish their sentences at the very same time, sharing a celebratory pause after the final period.

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