Carl frantically scrawled down every word Judy said in his notebook.

“Two weeks of paid vacation?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Judy said.

“And I can request reimbursement for relocation?”

“It’s all in the new hire packet.” Judy crisply shuffled the papers together and slid them across the table.

“Oh, okay.” Carl looked up from his notes for the first time in several minutes. His eyes were starting to cross. He put the pen down and flexed his cramped fingers.

“That’s everything for now.” Judy smiled. “No need to overwhelm you on your first day.”

“I appreciate it,” Carl said, as though he wasn’t already overwhelmed.

Judy started to leave but stopped in the doorway and turned back.

“Oh, and you get an hour for lunch,” she said.

Carl froze.

“An hour?”

“Yes.”

Carl must have misheard her. An hour? As in sixty minutes? Thirty-six hundred seconds? He couldn’t fathom how it could possibly take someone an entire hour to eat lunch. He shook his head as he finished collecting his things in the conference room. There was no use in sweating the small stuff; there were more important questions at hand, like how to do his job. Still though…an hour?

***

The rest of the morning flew by in a whirl of trainings, tours, and kiss-ass coworkers trying to impress Judy with their willingness to help Carl. A lanky redheaded fellow named Ned was demonstrating how to record customer information in a particular software when he stopped abruptly, as though an internal alarm had gone off. A bony wrist with a silver watch popped out of his sleeve.

“One o’clock already? Sorry, pal, I’m going to lunch.”

With all the confidence in the world, Ned stood up and walked straight out the door. Not entirely sure what else to do, Carl decided to take his lunch break as well. Carl was surprised by the ease with which Ned left. Carl thought it was strange and somewhat illegal to leave the office during the workday, so he ate at his desk.

It took him exactly fourteen minutes to eat his lunch: six for the turkey and provolone sandwich on rye, one for the hard-boiled egg, and four for the orange (thank God he’d left the peel on). He knew he was approaching the end of the lineup, so he slowed down on the mixed berry yogurt and managed to drag it out for three minutes. He spent the remaining forty-six minutes staring at a notch in his desk.

***

The next day, Carl put off eating for as long as possible to delay the inevitable boredom. He thought he might make it the whole day, until around three o’clock when his stomach grumbled so loudly several people at nearby desks turned to look at him. He reluctantly pulled his lunchbox out of his unisex over the-shoulder bag and resigned himself to another dreadful hour at his desk.

He finished eating even quicker this time because he’d packed a handful of cashews instead of an orange. He should have known better; what he needed was more obstacles, not fewer! Around the thirty-two-minute mark, the notion of sitting there any longer became unbearable. He could only fold and unfold his napkin into a dysfunctional paper airplane so many times.

His mind replayed the image of Ned leaving yesterday. What lunchtime possibilities awaited him beyond the doors of the building? Almost everyone left at some point or another during their lunch hours. Carl hadn’t expected this behavior from the corporate world. He was under the impression that the hours of nine to five were sacred; there was no leaving the office building during that time. And yet, everyone else in the office seemed to treat the world like their own private amusement park for an hour of the day. It baffled him.

***

On Wednesday, Carl felt as though he’d walked into the office with a grenade in his bag. It was just a letter to his brother, but it seared through the fabric like white hot evidence that he intended to carry out a non-work-related task during the workday. After two days of eating lunch in the prison of his desk chair, he’d caved. Carl was going to attempt a personal errand during lunch today.

By the time the weekly team meeting ended around 1:30, Carl was ready to eat. Eddie had droned on for an impossibly long time about the importance of using proper subject lines in email exchanges. Carl didn’t see the big deal about subject lines, since you can simply open an email to know what it’s about, but nevertheless, he’d paid attention the whole time and took diligent notes.

As the other employees dispersed, Eddie came up behind Carl and slapped a hand on his back.

“How’re you settling in, champ?” Eddie asked.

Carl didn’t love that Eddie spoke to his subordinates like an estranged father attempting to reconnect with a young son at a baseball game, but Eddie was the team manager, so Carl didn’t want to be disrespectful.

“All right,” Carl said. “I think I’m getting the hang of things.”

“I think so, too. You’ve set up more new accounts than anyone this week!”

“Really?” Carl found this a little concerning, considering he barely knew how to do his job and didn’t feel he was working particularly hard, but maybe Eddie was just being nice.

“Are you going to lunch?” Eddie asked.

“Yes. And maybe…” Carl’s throat began to close up. “Maybe an errand,” he managed to choke out. “Just a quick one.”

“Sounds cool, bud. Have fun.” Eddie sauntered away.

Carl shivered. He really admitted he was going to leave!

After finishing his lunch in the usual amount of time, Carl took a deep breath, picked up his bag, and started toward the door. He felt the sort of anxiety he imagined prisoners attempting a jailbreak might feel, but he made it to the door without being stopped. In fact, no one even looked up as he passed their desks, as though what he was doing wasn’t strange at all.

Carl stepped out onto the street and immediately wanted to turn back, but he was determined to see this through. He trudged on, his confidence growing with every step as he looked around at all the other people dressed in business casual out in the middle of the day. He felt like a child playing hooky from school. There he was at 1:37pm on a Wednesday, running a personal errand! It was truly an intoxicating sensation, to have a little bit of control over his day. He felt utterly giddy by the time he arrived at the post office and practically twirled up to the counter.

The teenager working greeted him with an absent nod. His USPS hat was plopped crookedly on his head and bits of dried acne cream flaked around his lips.

Carl beamed at him.

“Can I help you?” the kid asked.

“I’m on my lunch break!”

“Cool.”

“I get an entire hour!” Carl told him. “Can you believe that?”

“You should enjoy it. I barely get fifteen minutes.”

Barely fifteen minutes? What if this boy needed to run a quick errand to an establishment only open during his very same working hours? Carl truly had a gift, and he’d been wasting it.

“You’re right, I should enjoy it…”

“You okay?”

Carl shook himself out of his trance. A line had begun to form behind him. He quickly slapped his letter down on the counter.

“I need to mail this. Thank you. Goodbye.”

He turned back to the boy on his way out. “Fifteen minutes for lunch is a disgrace! You should quit your job!”

“Not everyone can just quit—” Carl had already scurried out of the post office before the boy finished his sentence. He vowed to never waste another lunch break again.

***

Over the next few days, Carl took care of several pesky tasks he’d been putting off. On Thursday, he returned a library book. Friday, he finally got that suspicious mole on his lower back checked out (not to worry, it was benign). He spent the weekend composing a list of other potential errands he could handle during lunch. On Monday, he auditioned for a community theater production of Little Women, which he had no intention of being a part of.

He was undoubtedly pushing the limits of what qualified as a reasonable lunch break errand, yet he was met with seemingly no consequences. On Tuesday, after returning from a forty-five-minute full body massage, he felt almost drunk with power. He chuckled to himself in a bathroom stall.

“An hour for lunch. Who needs an hour for lunch?”

Reflecting on all he’d accomplished in the past few days, he began to laugh harder, more hungrily.

“An hour! Sixty minutes! Thirty-six hundred seconds! With that amount of time, I could go out and get a whole new job. Hell, I could even work a shift!”

A realization, a flash of light, a eureka moment so divine it was almost orgasmic. He could go to work during work.

***

Carl came into the office the next day with a pep in his step. He made a point to wish everyone he passed a Happy Wednesday! He told Jim his new haircut was sharp, even though it made his forehead look four times larger than before. His good mood was palpable.

During a casual workplace chat by the water cooler, Judy threw a minor wrench into his plan: the CEO of the company was coming by for lunch this afternoon.

“Today?” Carl asked.

Judy nodded. “I thought I put it on the company calendar.”

“Oh, yes, you did,” Carl backtracked. “I guess it just slipped my mind!”

Judy smiled. “That’s okay. You’re in for a treat! Mitch always orders food for the office when he comes to visit.”

Carl’s hands began to twitch. “What time?”

“Around two.”

“Well, seeing as I usually eat closer to one o’clock, I might pop out to grab a quick snack.”

Judy waved her hand permissively. “Oh, yes, of course. But try to be back by two. I know Mitch is really excited to meet our new hire!”

Carl nodded and smiled and laughed, doing all he could to match her enthusiasm about a statement that was almost certainly a lie. After wrapping up his conversation with Judy, he made his exit as nonchalantly as possible. Once he was out of view, he sprinted down the street, his tie flapping in the wind behind him. He blazed through the door of the first restaurant with a “help wanted” sign  — a sandwich shop called Dough The Right Thing. He bypassed the line and went straight up to the register.

“I need to speak to the manager.”

The girl at the counter was immediately taken aback by Carl’s intensity. Her eyes blinked rapidly and she began fervently twisting a strand of hair between two fingers.

“I’m sorry, sir, but there’s a line—”

“There isn’t much time, Vikki!”

Her eyes filled with tears. “How do you know my name?”

“YOU’RE WEARING A NAMETAG!” Carl shouted.

A silver-haired woman with frighteningly proper posture flew out of a door from behind the counter.

“What’s going on?” She spoke with a vaguely French accent, but Carl might’ve been imagining it.

“Interview me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why should I?”

Carl reached into his bag to swiftly produce a crisp resume printed on 90 lb. ivory cover stock and slid it across the counter.

“Because I’m highly overqualified and can start right now.”

Carl quickly found himself in a green apron and a baseball hat crusted with what he could only hope was mayonnaise. He slapped slices of turkey and cheese on toasted bread while Vikki silently chopped lettuce beside him.

“I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot,” Carl said. “It was just really important that I get this job today.”

“Have you been unemployed for a while?” Vikki asked.

“No. Exactly the opposite.”

Vikki didn’t ask him to elaborate. They carried on in silence.

The possibly French manager returned again from the back and threw a piece of paper down in front of Carl.

“Catering order,” she said and quickly disappeared again.

Vikki picked up the paper and gasped.

“What?” Carl asked.

Vikki handed him the order. “They want fifty sandwiches ready for pickup in thirty minutes. That’s not possible!”

“Maybe it wasn’t possible yesterday. But today, you have Carl.”

Feeling like a superhero dealt his mission, Carl sprang into action and set up an assembly line type situation for himself and Vikki. It was unclear if the complicated nature of their tag- teaming the toppings was more efficient or actually just made the task look cooler, but regardless, they fell into a groove. The order was almost finished when Vikki began to crack.

“We’re not going to make it!”

“Goddammit, Vikki, we can do it!” Carl just had to finish the sandwich in his hand. It needed ham, which was stored in a fridge on Vikki’s side of the counter.

“I need another tray of ham!”

She had begun to sob into her plastic gloves. “It’s no use, we failed!”

“VIKKI, GET THE HAM!” Carl’s impassioned tone evidently jarred her into action. As Vikki shuffled through the contents of the fridge, two people approached the door.

“Vikki, I need it now!”

“One second, the tray is heavy!”

The bell on the door jingled.

“JUST THROW IT!”

Two pieces of ham cut through the air like frisbees. Just as they contacted Carl’s cheek, he looked up to find the catering customer had arrived at the counter.

“Hello, Judy.”

“Hello, Carl.” Judy gestured to the man standing next to her. “This is Mitch. Mitch, this is Carl, our new hire.”

Carl removed the ham from his cheek and held out a hand crusted with what he could only hope was mayonnaise. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

Mitch respectfully declined Carl’s handshake.

It’s hard to know what to say when you’re caught making sandwiches at Dough The Right Thing by your boss and CEO, but Carl went with, “That’ll be 298.54.”

Mitch stuck his card into the machine in silence, staring at Carl with a puzzled expression. Judy tucked the bag of sandwiches in the crook of her arm. “Let’s have a chat back at the office,” she said.

Mitch dropped a quarter in the tip jar. They left.

“I’m so fired,” Carl said.

The probably not French woman appeared behind him, picking up the ham from the floor. “You sure are,” she said.

“I was actually talking about my other job.”

“Now you definitely are.”

Shamefully, Carl untied his apron, folded it up, and set it on the counter. He hugged Vikki goodbye. They hadn’t known each other long, but they’d certainly been through a lot together. She asked him what was going on, but he just shook his head. He tried to hug the definitely not French woman, but she dismissed him with a wave. It was a solemn march back to the office.

***

Later that afternoon, Carl faced Judy and Mitch in the conference room. He was prepared to be ridiculed, told off, humiliated, and fired, but neither of them seemed particularly angry. Maybe their delicious lunch had put them in a good mood.

“Carl,” Judy started.

“Let me just jump right in and say that I am so sorry, and if you let me stay, I will absolutely make it up to you—”

“We’re not going to fire you,” Mitch interrupted.

“What?”

Mitch sighed. “Frankly, we’d be crazy to.” He leafed through a packet of charts and graphs. “You’ve made more sales in your first week than some of these guys have in months.”

“However,” Judy said. “You will no longer have an hour for lunch.”

“But you will be getting a raise,” Mitch added.

Carl’s mouth fell open.

“Just a little something to incentivize you to stay focused,” Judy said.

She went on about the details of the raise and how it might involve him taking on some additional responsibilities, but Carl wasn’t listening. His mind was too busy reeling from the day’s events and how it had somehow resulted in managerial praise and more money.

At the end of the meeting, Judy handed Carl a sandwich.

“We saved you one,” she said.

Carl unwrapped it and took a bite. It was missing the ham.