4. Comedic Relief

Monday morning, Julia woke up grateful to herself for having gone easy on the booze that weekend. She switched her alarm off and got ready.

Coffee and a brown paper bag in one hand, she reached into the deep pocket of her beige and red coat. To her surprise, the first thing she felt wasn’t her ID badge. She pulled out a fortune cookie and wondered whether it was a remainder of Saturday night’s Chinese (again) after clubbing. However, she hadn’t worn this coat in a while, much less this weekend.

She placed her breakfast on a nearby table and opened the fortune cookie: Comedic relief. Julia immediately had the image of herself in a clown costume in mind. Despite the vivid image, this cookie felt more cryptic than the last. What could this mean for her day? She had a meeting in the afternoon, but since it included personnel decisions, it wouldn’t be a laughing matter.

Looking from the piece of paper to her breakfast, Julia now imagined spilling her coffee all over herself while walking. As a countermeasure, she quickly ate her breakfast, checked her face for crumbs in the nearest bathroom and walked up to her office, only her ID-badge in hand. Her workday went on smoothly; no spilt drinks, no stumbling over her own feet, not even typos or technical errors. The atmosphere in the office, however, was sombre. Last month, they hired two new junior project managers, but when one big client didn’t sign a contract, it became evident that they would only have enough budget to retain one.

Julia was now sitting in the meeting that would decide who had to go. There was a lot of beating around the bush before Tom finally said what everybody knew: “We have to let Ophelia go.”

Ophelia had begged to be part of a project for a Danish company specialising in interior design. They had tasked her to prepare a presentation on Danish culture and which aspects they might want to highlight when taking on the client for a different market. When the deadline came, however, they suddenly received a doctor’s note instead of the presentation.
Others had to do overtime and start from scratch since nobody had access to the presentation she may or may not have prepared.

In the meantime, Julia was stuck in her head. She only met Ophelia a few times and was on holiday when this incident went down. Her mind was on her fortune cookie. Why am I even taking this so seriously? I don’t even believe in horoscopes and this is a two-word fortune cookie that came out of nowhere!

Suddenly, the pen she had been fidgeting with became unscrewed. The lower half of it flew across the table, landing with a splash in her co-worker’s water. It was absurd, but the suffocating tension was suddenly lifted and laughter broke out.
“So, is this your way of volunteering to be the bearer of bad news?”, Tom asked hopefully when they calmed down. Nobody wanted to do it, but Julia knew that it would be easier for her to do it than for any of them.