Per aspera

I don’t usually write about work, because that’s my real name up there, and writing about work on the web is a fantastic way to lose your job.  For that reason, I’ll try to be deliberately hazy with any identifying details.  But I must speak, for this may be my last communication with the outside world.

My immediate superiors have decided to get some machine for the reception area that pisses out fragrance into the air.  It’s basically an industrial-strength Glade plug-in, because your business is growing, and you need next-level choke-the-air-with-perfume solutions.

The miasma now looming over my desk, like the threat of devourment by an unnamable Great Old One dressed in tapered khakis and a pink Newport News twinset, is named, I’m told, “Fresh Air.”  I imagine one develops a sense of vicious irony, working for a company that makes fragrance-pissing machines.

But now my breathing grows labored, my sight grows dim, and I fear I can type no more.  Blasphemous magenta flower-print patterns dance at the edges of my vision, and beneath it all, across the nose-withering gulfs of time, I can hear the music of the insane pipers who dance endlessly around the throne of the blind idiot-god of olfactory chaos: “Potpurri-ri!  Potpurri-ri!”