a whole twenty minutes to spare. She worked in a small team, which dealt with late invoices. The only break from the unrelenting tedium of doing the same thing every day was her mate Alex. He had a sense of humour, which made him infinitely more likeable than anyone else in the office.
‘Blimey, did they put the clocks back?’ asked Alex, pulling his coffee from the cardboard tray Regan offered him, then picking up the sugar sachets and a stirrer.
‘Your stand-up routine needs work,’ said Regan, taking her seat and switching on her computer. ‘I need to leave early tonight.’
‘What, because of the extra eighteen minutes you’ve put in this morning?’
‘No, because I left in a hurry and basically trashed the place.’ She needed to make it back to the flat, or ‘apartment’, as Jarvis liked to call it, to have a quick tidy-up before Jarvis got in.
‘Jarvis won’t like that.’ Alex tutted in an uncannily Jarvis-like manner.
‘Precisely why I need to get home before him.’
‘Why so early if you were in a rush?’ Alex was screwing up his face.
‘I dropped my friend Cleo at the airport.’
‘Artist. Posh sort?’
‘Yep, that’s the one. She’s jetting off for two months to Dubai, Japan and some other awesome places.’ Regan flopped back in her seat. ‘I wish I was going with her. She has the best life.’ She turned her head towards Alex. ‘Would you like to travel?’
‘I do travel.’ He looked affronted. ‘I go to Skegness every year.’
‘Hmm. Not quite the same.’
Alex gave a twitch. ‘Japan may have the edge on Skeggy.’ They both sighed together.
‘Ooh,’ said Regan, pulling her purse from her bag. ‘Look what I got.’ She held up the lottery ticket and gave it a wave. ‘It’s a rollover on Saturday. Ten million quid. Think what you could do with that.’
They both paused for a moment, lost in thought, until their boss, Nigel, tapped on his glass office door and they both quickly got back to work.
Regan liked Alex. There was no romantic pull on her part, but she knew he was quite fond of her thanks to some slurred words after too much tequila at the Christmas party. In any case, he made the day go quicker: they kept the tedium at bay by winding each other up on a regular basis. Nothing major; just the usual office pranks like hiding each other’s mouse, changing chair adjustments and unplugging equipment. It was quite childish, but it made work marginally more entertaining.
Most of the day was uneventful. In the afternoon, Regan found herself dozing off in a very dull meeting about discounting and promotions. Alex gave her a nudge and she turned what she feared was a snore into a cough. A few heads spun in her direction.
‘Terrible hay fever,’ she muttered, pulling a tissue from her pocket. Alex shook his head at her.
She could see he was furiously scribbling things down on his pad; she eyed him with suspicion. Alex was like her in a lot of ways; neither of them usually put in any particular effort at work, although Alex still fancied himself for a promotion. Regan couldn’t really see the point. She’d get paid very little extra at the end of the month, but have a load more responsibility. No, she was all right just doing what she needed to and no more. She understood why sales people worked harder for a bonus, or people who ran their own company, but it totally foxed her why an ordinary employee would do any more than the minimum required.
She leaned over and tapped a finger on Alex’s pad. He tilted it for her to see. The title at the top jumped out at her: ‘Lottery Rollover – What I’d do if I won’.
‘You don’t even have a ticket,’ she whispered.
He shrugged. ‘I’ve got loads of time to get one.’
She pulled the notepad from his grasp and had a read. It was fairly standard stuff. She handed it back and began jotting down her own. Regan chewed the end of her pen and made some crossings out as her imagination soared.
Live in a big huge awesome home
Help Dad out
Get a pedigree puppy
Save the tiger whale some important animal
Run my own successful company
Bask on a deserted island and drink cocktails served to me by bare-chested waiters
Go out and enjoy myself
She had another scan of Alex’s list. He’d put down ‘Hook up with celebrity females’. Regan snorted and Alex turned his pad away. She studied her own list. Where did Jarvis feature? After how he’d annoyed her that morning, did he feature in her lottery fantasy life? She added an extra item to the list. It was only a laugh after all.
Get new hot boyfriend who doesn’t nag or wear button-up pyjamas
‘Regan?’ asked Nigel, their manager, who was standing at the front, his expression one of knotted puzzlement. Alex gave Regan a nudge and knocked her pen from her hand, making her jolt upright.
‘Er, yes. Sorry. I was concentrating on my notes,’ she said, reaching down and scrabbling on the floor for her wayward pen. Alex kicked it and it disappeared. She glared at him.
‘How many queries do we get relating to errors in discounting?’ Nigel repeated.
‘Um,’ she scratched her head, ‘Alex?’ She looked pleadingly at him.
He grinned. ‘Regan is the data guru on this.’
Thanks for nothing, she thought. She’d definitely get him back later. ‘A couple a week. Maybe.’ She didn’t really record them like she was supposed to, so it was a complete guess.
‘When I last checked the figures, they were much higher than that,’ said Nigel.
Regan wondered if that was the column on the end that she added lots of ticks to at the end of the week. ‘It’s quite variable,’ she said. ‘Peaks and troughs.’ Nigel nodded and she relaxed. She needed to pay more attention, but it was hard when meetings were this boring.
Back at their desks, Alex was still tittering about Regan’s questioning in the meeting. Regan started plotting her revenge. It needed to be something hilarious. She zoned out trying to come up with a suitable penance for Alex while she did some data input. When he went off to a meeting she put a sticky note over the sensor of his mouse so it wouldn’t work and flipped his login screen upside down. They were only temporary measures, but they would at least put him off the scent that she was planning something bigger.
Regan paperclipped her lottery ticket to the wish list she’d drawn up.
‘Predictable,’ said Alex, returning to his desk and flipping his screen back. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, nodding at
