At 8:03 a.m., Harriet’s boss called for a private meeting. He popped by her cubicle and told her to take her time, to grab her morning coffee and meet him in his office at 8:30.

The jig was up. Surely, someone had caught her stealing the boxes of coffee pods, and now they would bring the hammer of justice down upon her with a short, sharp swing.

So, awaiting her demise, Harriet sat at her cubicle and meditated upon the office’s air conditioning system. Central air just smelled so much better than the chemically-cooled, rancid city air that her window units jettisoned into her loft—the same way that mass-produced sandwiches from Pret tasted better than homemade ones, and the same way that the office coffee really did taste like hazelnuts.

She wondered what she’d have for lunch, and then she remembered that she wouldn’t be here for lunch. She’d be fired. She’d be unemployed and free. Maybe she’d be on a bus, taking a spontaneous trip to Jersey to stand on some pier and contemplate her life’s choices. The air would smell like salt and ice cream and garbage, and really, it’d be like she never left work, because the building overlooked the Hudson and there was a gelato kiosk in the lobby.

A flash of auburn hair startled Harriet into alertness. It belonged to Marianne, the stylish temp-turned-secretary.

Marianne asked, “Harriet, wanna walk with me to David’s office?”

Why would Marianne be there? Was beautiful Marianne to bear witness to her flagellation?

To add insult to injury, Marianne was holding a mug of coffee—oh, the coffee! It was just so good, and Harriet had been spending so much on the burnt, disgusting garbage from the store, and really, what were a few boxes of coffee pods to a big company, and—

“Harriet?”

“Of course,” Harriet said. “Let’s go together.”

They walked to David’s office. Their boss, David, Executive Lead Vice President of Digital Marketing, gestured for them to close the door.

“So, I just got word that the Board is bringing in Seltian to oversee our data center migration,” David sighed.

Harriet stared at him.

“You know, Seltian? The consulting firm?” David said.

“…That’s all?”

“Harriet, every time Seltian goes anywhere, they bleed the place dry and then they lay off every single person they can.”

“Layoffs,” Harriet repeated.

“Yeah. Now, listen. I know you’re both amazing employees. We’d die without you. But these consultants will use any excuse they can to cut jobs. Marianne, they’ll cut you because they don’t think this department needs an assistant. Harriet, they’ll cut you because they’ll say they can outsource your job. The moment these fools show up, I want you to impress the shit out of them. Marianne, if they even suggest holding a meeting, I want you setting it up before they’re even done talking. Harriet, every time we do a department huddle, I want you mentioning every single email campaign you’re working on.”

Marianne shivered with fear. “Yes, sir!”

“We can’t afford to lose either of you,” David sighed. “I’ll do whatever I can to keep you both safe. You’re the best damn workers on this floor.”

“Thank you, David,” Harriet said. She wasn’t sure if she should cackle or sob.

#

Real New Yorkers were survivors, and survivors stole and cheated to win. Ten hard-scrabble years Harriet had survived in this city, and she still couldn’t shake the Minnesotan “Ope!” she uttered when people jostled her on the subway. Ten years of decency and courtesy, and what did she have to show for it? She shared her laundry room with twenty other people. Her kitchen stove could only accommodate one pan at a time.

In two weeks, Harriet’s mother would show up with her Chanel bag, drop by Harriet’s apartment just to chastise it, and then would breeze off to her room at the Waldorf Astoria, just like she did the last time she visited.

This time, Harriet wanted to beat her to the punch. She wanted to meet her in the Waldorf Astoria lobby with a luxury bag of her own, tell her mother about how wonderful it was to live at the heart of everything, and invite her to a matinee show on Broadway and pretend that she knew someone who worked on it.

So she survived. She scrounged for spare change. She slunk around Chinatown looking for very convincing fakes. She found a used Louis Vuitton tote bag in a pawn shop for only three hundred dollars, but she didn’t have three hundred dollars.

She could cut three hundred dollars from her annual budget, though, if she was frugal with her coffee and home goods. She would be practical. Resourceful. If she could drink all the coffee she wanted while she was at the office, and she lived and breathed work, wasn’t the whole world her office—even her own kitchen?

And there were other things, too, excess items just sitting in supply closets and empty spare cubicles. Paper towels. Headsets and mice. Wet wipes and hand sanitizer. They belonged to the company, yes, but so did Harriet, in a way, so weren’t they hers to utilize?

#

The Seltian consultants descended: a horde of fresh grads with plastic smiles and dead eyes. When they reached the marketing floor, David shepherded them from cubicle to cubicle. Harriet felt like livestock in a pen at the county fair.

“What did you major in?” one of the Seltian drones asked her.

College? College was over a decade ago!

“Technical theater,” Harriet answered.

The drone narrowed his eyes. “Not computer science? Not web design?”

“I attended on a full-ride scholarship for my lighting design,” she said.

“And how does that inform your current position?”

“My position involves a lot of design. The HTML is the easy part. It’s the graphic design, brand cohesion, and marketing skills that take years to hone.”

Harriet’s boss nodded his approval.

“I see,” said the drone, and then the group buzzed away.

Harriet was shaking in her pumps. This was bad. She knew her degree made her a target. She didn’t regret it—she loved every minute she spent in a theater—but it hadn’t panned out. She hadn’t been Broadway-level. That was fine. There was nothing to be done now, and she had survived in New York City anyway, and that was close enough, right?

She went to the bathroom to compose herself, and there, to her dismay, she found another problem: pink soap.

The pink antibacterial soap was greasy and filmy. It smelled like her doctor parents. Everyone on floor twenty-eight hated it. But the women of floor thirty-six were blessed with hand soap that smelled like spiced vanilla crème. Floor thirty-six was sales, and they were more important than marketing, so they got to smell like autumn and luxury.

Harriet washed her hands, left the bathroom, and took the elevator up to thirty-six. She went to their supply closet. This wasn’t for herself—this was for the good of the people. She would be like Robin Hood to the women of floor twenty-eight. They would throw parades in her honor and name their children after her for generations.

On her way out of the supply closet, jug of vanilla soap in hand, she ran into the same Seltian drone from earlier.

“What are you doing up here?” he asked.

“We’re out of soap on twenty-eight.”

“Shouldn’t you put in a work order or something?”

Harriet felt the spirits of a thousand women with pink-smelling hands lift her up as their champion. “Are we to walk around with unwashed hands for hours while we wait for the ticket to be addressed? I know where the extra soap is. I am a problem solver. I get things done.”

“…Okay,” said the drone. “Just make sure the custodian team knows you dipped into their inventory.”

“Will do,” Harriet said.

Back on her floor, as she dumped out the pink-filled soap dispensers and refilled them with her spoils, she laughed. The custodians didn’t track their inventory. Otherwise, she’d have been caught weeks ago.

#

A few days later, Harriet asked to borrow a label maker from Marianne.

“Aren’t there some in the supply closet?” Marianne said.

There had been one, but Harriet had already taken it home. “It wasn’t there,” Harriet said.

Marianne retrieved hers from the bottom drawer of her desk with a smile. When she leaned down, she lowered herself into a crouch in the way that pretty girls do so that nobody ogles their behinds.

Harriet recognized the move, but she had never needed to learn it herself. Faintly, she recalled a time in college when she and her fellow stagehands had learned the “bend and snap” alongside the pretty performers rehearsing for Legally Blonde.

Marianne could’ve played one of those sorority girls, Harriet thought, but she was too nice to be an actress. Actresses were divas. Everyone in theater was a diva. Perhaps if Harriet had been better, more cutthroat, she could’ve earned the right to be a diva, too.

“Use it for as long as you’d like,” Marianne told her. “But please don’t lose it. It’s my personal one.”

Harriet remembered asking to borrow a UV flashlight from a classmate on a college production of The Tempest when her batteries died. The classmate had told her that Harriet’s failure to prepare signaled a lack of skill and ambition.

At least I like my coworkers, Harriet thought.

Harriet had the label maker back in Marianne’s desk by the end of the day.

#

The next day, on her lunch break, Harriet went to the pawn shop and bought the bag. When she returned to the office, riding high and feeling beautiful, she learned that Marianne had been let go.

Harriet held her when she cried and helped her pack her desk. Afterwards, David pulled Harriet into his office.

“All this to save less than three thousand dollars a month,” he growled. “They showed leadership the metrics. Apparently, marketing and sales have a combined eight thousand in office expenses. We spend hundreds just on coffee, but they’d rather cut her than cut coffee or catered lunches. And I know they’re going to turn around and show this to the Board and say, ‘Look how much money we saved!’” He put his head in his hands.

“…You said they want to offset eight thousand,” Harriet said.

“Yeah?”

“They only just cleared up three.”

The writing was on the wall. Harriet, a little over thirty dollars an hour. Harriet up next. Harriet to bring their savings to a nice, even eight thousand to offset the cost of doing business.

“Don’t panic,” David said. “One of the drones likes you. Says you’re a problem solver.”

“But Marianne’s a problem solver, too.”

“They didn’t see half the problems she fixed.” He sighed and shook his head. “Harriet, this is so out of my hands it’s not even funny. I tried. We tried. Now, we just have to keep a low profile and hope we survive.”

It was survival, wasn’t it?

When Harriet left David’s office, she went to the copy room. She had intended to slip a ream of copy paper into her tote bag, but instead, she looked at the copier. It was new. Fancy. Industrial. Five thousand dollars it had cost.

She couldn’t steal something that big. What would she even do with it?

Instead, she opened the cabinet above the copier. She took a box containing an industrial-sized replacement toner cartridge and slid it into her enormous bag.

It was survival. It was retribution. 

It was a start.