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the last upper cabinet and would have jumped up and down if her back hadn’t been killing her. She still had all the lower 27
    Victoria Michaels
    cabinets, which were jam packed full of supplies, to go through. She ran up to the vending machine in the lounge to buy a candy bar and a soda.
    Very nutritious dinner there, Lexi , she chastised herself.
    Without wasting time, she went back into the supply room and found that in the three minutes she had been gone, someone had come into the workroom and rummaged through cabinet number eighteen.
    “Oh, come on, people!” Lexi slammed her soda on the counter, sending bubbles cascading out of the can and onto the work surface. “Damn it,” Lexi muttered as she found some paper towels under the sink and soaked up the sticky mess.
    She blew a stray clump of hair out of her face, rolled up her sleeves, and bent over the counter to search her papers for the sheet where she’d listed the contents of cabinet eighteen. When she found the correct sheet of paper, she climbed up the ladder and re-counted the stock.
    “Red pens? What’s wrong with everyone around here?” she grumbled when she found out what the thief had stolen from her sealed cabinet. “There’s a whole drawer of them.” She flung open a nearby drawer and waved her hand over the pile.
    A while later, Lexi found herself in the back of the room sprawled out on the floor, her papers scattered on the carpet as she counted boxes of legal envelopes that were so dusty they had probably been there since the early nineties. As she emptied the next drawer in the stack, she heard a loud banging noise, followed by some colorful cursing.
    “Stupid, worthless copy machine! I have a deadline, you know. The least you could do is cooperate, you little bastard,” a female voice snarled.
    Lexi peeked her head over the counter and found an older woman with long brown hair slightly streaked with gray shaking the copy machine violently. After she gave Bertha a swift kick and then winced in pain, Lexi cleared her throat.
    “Can I help you with something?” Lexi walked over and leaned against the refrigerator, smiling. “I might have a hammer you can use on it. Your foot, however, seems to be taking a real beating.”
    The woman grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, dear. I didn’t know anyone else was in here to witness my brutal assault on the office equipment. Why in the world are you still here at this hour on a Friday night?”
    Lexi shrugged. “The joys of inventory.” She pointed to the flash drive in the woman’s hand. “What were you trying to do before you decided to annihilate the copier?”
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    Trust in Advertising
    “My assistant brought me this PowerPoint presentation for a late dinner meeting I have this evening, and I need to print out the pages to make the final presentation packet, but the copier won’t recognize the flash drive, and then the paper jammed when I pulled the tray out while it was making copies …”
    her voice trailed off in shame. “Okay, I admit some of that was probably my fault, but … well, the copier started it.” She laughed at the absurdity of her own behavior, and then threw up her hands in resignation. “Help me, please, before I do something I’ll regret to this no good hunk of junk.”
    “Let me mess around with this for a second.” Lexi pressed different buttons on the keypad, and then started opening drawers and doors on the copier until she pulled a snarled piece of paper from between the rollers of the copier. “Okay, that was the easy part.” She laughed, tossing the blackened paper into the trashcan.
    “I don’t mean to dump this on you, dear,” the woman sat down on a nearby chair and ran her fingers through her hair in frustration, “but I’m on deadline.”
    “Trust me, it’s fine. If I count one more box of pens or package of tape, I’ll scream. This is actually a welcome distraction.” Lexi slipped the flash drive into the slot and again went to work on the