Accidentally Getting Off on the Tenth Floor

By Russ Bickerstaff

 

 

 

He’d exited the world by walking into the wrong office. He was supposed to get off on the floor 12. He’d gotten off on floor ten. Every floor in tat building was laid-out exactly the same way with exactly the same number of doors with exactly the same numbers on them. He would not have expected to walk into the room and see what he saw, but there it was: his office. Perfectly natural and perfectly to be expected but for the fact that it was on the tenth floor instead of the twelfth one. 

 

His intern at the front desk looked more than a little confused as he walked in. She looked at him like she wanted to say something but she did not know how. The words simply weren’t there for her. So he walked back to his office to find that he was there at the desk. Except he was there at the desk while he walked in to see him sitting there at the desk. He had made it all the way to his desk before he noticed that he was already sitting there at the desk. And it was really embarrassing running into himself, so he backed out of his office. On his way out, he distinctly remembered seeing himself sitting there doing the work that he was going to do when he’d gotten back into the office. The work appeared to have been finished. 

 

On his way past the front desk, his intern was staring at him wide-eyed and confused. He had suspected that she’d snuck in to see him standing there in front of himself. He instinctively raised an index finger to his mouth while making eye contact with her. She nodded without saying a word. Evidently he didn’t want him to know that he’d come in to see him finishing up the work for some reason. As he got back into the elevator the biggest mystery was not why it was that he had gone into an office on the tenth floor to run into a perfect copy of himself doing the same work that he was working on in his office on the twelfth floor. The real question was why he had wanted to keep it a secret from himself that he had snuck in on himself doing the work. 

 

He had gotten back to his office and saw his intern sitting there as though nothing had happened. He’d thought about possibly requesting that she go down to the office on ten to drop off some paperwork, but he figured that such an action would probably be at least a little cruel. Life was complicated enough for his intern without having to run into herself on another floor. 

 

He had returned to his desk to find that all of his work was complete. And he didn’t remember doing it, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. So he told his intern to kick off early and decided to take the rest of the day off. On his way home, he seemed to remember that there was something strange that he’d run into at work that he could not remember. He tried to remember what it was. Over dinner he would tell his wife that something strange happened at work but he couldn’t remember what it was. And she would remind him that he always said that at dinner. He would be a little nonplussed about this, but quickly put it out of his mind.