Hazelnut

I am sitting at a tiny desk covered in computer equipment, in an office with four other slightly more spacious and less sharp desks, in the second story of a building at the top of a hill overlooking Hilo Bay on the Hamakua side of the Wailuku River. All this is lovely. The problem is, there are owners of each of the other four desks, and none of them are in the office today, or for the rest of the week. And so this spacious office is full of many, many machines and me. And the machines, of all sorts, keep beeping, chirping, binging, or otherwise sounding alarms at me. Every ten minutes or so, a watch will beep, a computer bing, a small unidentifiable machine chirp, and none of it with any apparent meaning. Even my computer is tinkling at me. I don't know why. I can only assume aliens are trying to communicate with each other. Or that I just consumed a very tasty soy hot chocolate with hazelnut with a lot more caffeine and sugar in it than I am used to.

Plus sometimes the phone, which is on the other side of the office, will ring once, and then my boss will decide she no longer needs to talk to me. Or she will use the speaker phone and so her voice will come out of the ether at me even though she works two floors down in another building. Which is startling.

Then there's Doug, the rogue office employee, who should not be working in a bureaucracy because he doesn't seem to like rules. He works in the office across the hall and likes to talk to me every time he walks past. He is very friendly, but he gives me the same feeling I always got in elementary school hanging out with the kids who got in trouble a lot -- the feeling that somehow, I am about to be implicated in something without even realizing it.

Also, I have a rollerball mouse which is unergonomic, and annoying.

Too much non-coffee, I think.