In the normal run of things, the world is governed by a set of rules, so fundamental that most of its residents don’t stop to consider them. Such as, “If you put something in a cupboard, it will still be there next time you look in the cupboard, unless someone else has taken it out.” However, when Archie Smith woke up one Wednesday morning, whoever made sure that these rules were kept had clearly gone a bit lax.

Archie was one of the few unfortunate people born after 1970 to have to suffer the indignity of bearing the far-too-dignified name of Archibald. The main problem with the word “Archibald” was that in spite its length, there was no flattering way of abbreviating it. “Archie” wasn’t much better, but “Arch”, while it got rid of the cutesy second syllable, could sound rude if mispronounced slightly. “Chi” was inappropriate for someone without a drop of Oriental blood in his body, and “Bald” was no good, especially when he could almost watch his hairline retreating.

Archie’s life, or lack thereof, was simultaneously boring and full of misfortune. And so, when he got up, he wasn’t too surprised that that his shower would only give out cold water, no matter how long he waited. It had always been good to him in the past, but these things happened, he’d talk to his landlord if the problem persisted. Nor was he too bothered that his favourite shirt had mysteriously vanished, for clothes took their leaves of absence every now and again. So he stood beneath the cold spray for as long as he could bear and put on a different shirt, before going into his kitchen.

But when he opened the cupboard where he kept his breakfast cereal, he suddenly knew how Old Mother Hubbard must have felt.

He was confused. He had bought a new packet of Cornflakes at Tesco yesterday evening, and there had still been a couple of dishes’ worth left in the old box. And there had been numerous other foodstuffs in the cupboard last time he checked. If Archie had lived with anyone, he could have suspected them of emptying the cupboard, but he didn’t, and it seemed highly unlikely that a burglar had broken in during the night and robbed him of his Cornflakes. Cereal killers he’d heard of; cereal thieves were another matter entirely.

Perhaps he’d taken to sleepwalking and sleep-eating? It was a worrying possibility (his waistline had started expanding for no obvious reason as it was), but he’d prefer that explanation to the possibility that there was no explanation. He checked the dustbin for empty packets, but the level of rubbish was just the same as it had been last night. Perhaps he’d eaten the boxes too?

Regardless of the possible midnight snack, he felt quite hungry now, so he made twice as much toast as usual, brushed his teeth, then picked up his briefcase and car keys before leaving his apartment. He lived on the upper storey of what had been a fairly small terraced house before it was divided. Downstairs lived a woman from Pakistan who had two young children. She didn’t like him very much, although he’d never worked out why.

The uncarpetted stairs clattered in the usual fashion as he walked down them. He had the same trouble opening the front door with one key-filled hand as he always did. (He sometimes wondered why he had quite so many keys when he only ever locked and unlocked three doors, but he never remembered to dispose of the rest.) It wasn’t until he left the house that puzzlement set in.

His house seemed to have moved.

It was still on the same street. On the same side, in fact. And his car was parked outside it. But while it was normally roughly in the middle of the terrace, it was now only two doors away from the final house.

He couldn’t work it out, until it occurred to him that it might not have been his house that he’d just been in. After all, they all looked the same on this street and it would explain why his cupboard had been empty. But why would he have gone into someone else’s house? Was it possible that he had been home with a woman last night, someone he’d met in Tesco, and this was where she lived? No. Archie was pretty sure he would have remembered if that had happened, as it wasn’t exactly something that occurred regularly. In fact, it had never happened. He could have been got so drunk that he didn’t recall the last night, but there were no bottles in the bin and he didn’t have a hangover. In any case, he remembered the previous evening quite well: after getting back from the supermarket, he’d microwaved a pizza and eaten it while watching TV. “Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire?” had been on; one of the contestants had phoned a friend when asked what the capital of the Republic of Ireland was, as they suspected it was Kilkenny. Needless to say, he left with only £500. Anyway, the apartment Archie had just left had looked like his, and nearly all his belongings and no strange women had been there.

And so he couldn’t understand it.

But there was no time to stand on the street puzzling about it. He had a job to get to. He unlocked the door of his car, got inside, put his briefcase on the passenger seat, and shut the door. He tried to put the key in the ignition, only to find that it wouldn’t fit.

He jiggled it a bit, then turned it upsidedown, but still it wouldn’t go in. He turned the steering wheel a bit, sometimes that helped start the engine, but the key still refused to even enter its hole. Was he using the right key? Yes, it was the one he’d just used to unlock the car door. Which removed his doubts that he was in the wrong car. So what was wrong? Had some hooligans vandalised the lock? It wasn’t a particularly good area of town . . . but how would they have got into the car in the first place? He never unlocked the other three doors, and although he might have accidentally left the boot unlocked after bringing in the shopping last night, you couldn’t get from the there to the driver’s seat with any ease. All the windows and the sunroof were intact, and he couldn’t think how someone would manage to open them from the outside.

This day was getting stranger and stranger. But the explanations for its mysterious events were unimportant; he was getting frustrated. He gave the key one final try, then got out of the car again. He didn’t know how to hot wire the ignition; he’d have to take the bus.

He didn’t think he’d ever taken the bus since moving here, so he wasn’t entirely sure where the nearest bus stop was in the normal run of things, never mind today. But he reached one quickly and without difficulty. Even better, there were quite a lot of people congregated there, which indicated that a bus would arrive shortly. He stood beside a girl, who was clearly a student, judging by her backpack and magenta mohican, which stood up taller than he was. She was one of the nearly extinct species of students who looked the way students were supposed to look.

Then he thought he was seeing double. Perhaps he really was hung over? He saw someone else with a pink mohican. There couldn’t be two students like that at one bus stop, when he’d never noticed any in this town before? Perhaps it was one of these trends that had literally erupted overnight?

But that wasn’t it. There was a woman with a lined face, indicating that she was at least sixty, also with a pink mohican! Archie knew that women misplaced their sense of fashion as soon as they left their fifties, but didn’t they favour hair curlers? And she wasn’t the only one! There was a man in a suit with a pink mohican! And a mother with her young son, both with pink mohicans! Everyone at the bus stop had one! It was like an entirely pink and punk version of the film “A Clockwork Orange”. He touched his own hair, to make sure he hadn’t got one too, but it was mercifully flat and covering as much of his head as it normally did. Had he been transported into a terrible sci-fi film, “The City Of The Pink Mohicans”? Or had he just gone back in time twenty years? He wondered if everyone was staring at him and his normal brown hair, but no one paid any attention to him. Was he just hallucinating?

The bus arrived and he embarked. He heard a song playing that had come out about a year ago. He tried to keep abreast of pop music so he didn’t feel too old, but it got worse and worse to the point of being unlistenable. This wasn’t too bad, though - he was pretty sure it was by Gabrielle. Did they usually have music playing on buses? It had been a long time since he’d been on one, so it might be a recent development.

He asked the driver (who, naturally, had a pink mohican, as did all the other passengers) if the bus went anywhere near his place of work. He replied, sounding surprised, that there was a stop right outside. Archie had never noticed it before, but perhaps it was just one of those posts with a little sign attach to it. But when the bus arrived, the music had changed to Gregorian chant, and there was actually a bus shelter right next to the entrance of his workplace. He was starting to get used to things being like this, though.

As he set off across the forecourt, he saw Derek walking towards the building from his car. His hairstyle was as it usually was. Perhaps it was only strangers that had pink mohicans, or people taking that bus? Derek was his best friend, not that that meant a lot. They sometimes went for a drink after work, but these were becoming fewer and further between. “Hello!” Archie called to him.

Derek looked round at him. “Awright, Archie,” he said, stopping to wait for him. “What happened to your car?”

Suddenly “I couldn’t my key to go into the ignition” sounded a bit useless. “I couldn’t get the engine started,” Archie said.

“Bummer,” said Derek. “You’ve had that car for ages, though, haven’t you?”

He had; he’d got it shortly after he left university, and it wasn’t new then. “Yeah. Can’t afford a new one, though.” He probably could, actually, but he wasn’t that bothered about flash cars, he just wanted one that went. In any case, it made sense to move up the property ladder before the vehicle one, considering the sort of people who lived near him. His apartment suited him well, though, when the shower was working.

That thought brought the entire sequence of strange events that had happened today back to him. He decided to test whether it was just him that this was happening to. “Derek?” he said, as he fell into step with him. “Have you noticed anything strange going on today?”

“No?” Derek said. “Why do you ask?”

“Well,” Archie began, and then he hesitated. Derek was the sort of bloke who never accidentally got his tie caught in the shredding machine. Strange and unfortunate things didn’t happen to him. And so it seemed ridiculous to tell him that a whole cupboard’s worth of food had disappeared overnight, his house had changed position and he’d just got off a bus full of pink-haired punks of all ages, genders and races. “It’s just been a bad day, I guess. My shower had no hot water, I couldn’t find the shirt I wanted to wear, I ran out of cereal and then there was the car trouble.”

“Not a good start, no,” Derek said, not entirely sympathetically, as they walked into the building.

The building was just as Archie had expected, until he reached the office where he worked, on the upper storey. Five other people worked there. There was Henry, who was a bit older than he was, and was only ever in there for about ten minutes at the start of each day, as the rest of the time he was out visiting clients. There was Sean, who was a few years younger and also never in, because he was always outside smoking with some of the people who worked in another department. That left Maggie, who was an old bag; Jane, who was unable to come to terms with the fact that she was forty, and acted like a teenager; and Beckie (she was very insistent about the ‘ie’ ending) who was a teenager.

Archie often found himself watching and listening to Beckie. Not because he fancied her - he was, in fact, completely repulsed by her - but because after five months here, she didn’t seem to have done even a minute of work. She was always gossiping to Jane and Maggie (who gossiped about her, when she went out for lunch, and her lunch breaks tended to last closer to two hours rather than the permitted one) or making personal calls on the telephone. Occasionally, she’d file her nails, or move the paper on her desk around a bit, but he’d never seen her lift a pen, never mind type anything. He couldn’t work out how she hadn’t been fired yet.

The only coworkers Archie ever said anything more than “hello” to were Henry and Jane, and he got the feeling that Jane only spoke to him so she could gossip about him when he went out to buy a sandwich at lunchtime. However, he was used to them. After university, he’d trained as an accountant, and had been working here as a sub-accountant ever since. He was a sub-accountant in the sense that the company brought in a proper accountant who they paid vast sums of money to do all the important accounting, but he had to get the books to more or less balance before that. Since he never ran out of book balancing to do, he often wondered if the rest of the company did everything in their power to mess up the accounts, but he had never found out for certain. In spite of this, he quite liked his job as he found it easy and it didn’t require much thought, and got the feeling he’d keep it until he retired, as the others here seemed to be doing. Maggie, Henry and Jane had been here when he began, and Sean had arrived shortly afterwards. And Beckie hadn’t replaced anyone that had retired; she was just an addition. Perhaps that was why she never had any work to do? Archie had toyed with the idea that she was the boss’s daughter and was just here for the heck of it, but why would an eighteen-year-old choose to spend all her days in an office?

Today, however, something was fundamentally different about the personnel. Three of them were present and correct, Beckie hadn’t arrived yet, but at Maggie’s desk was a beautiful woman - so beautiful and glamorous she looked like she should be famous - in her late twenties.

Archie wasn’t going to take this change lying down. (Well, he would, given the opportunity, but that was another matter.) He went over to Henry’s desk. Henry was standing at it, rapidly gathering papers and putting them in his briefcase. “Hello,” said Archie.

Henry looked up. “Oh, hello Archie,” he said, then turned his attention back to his papers.

“Henry,” Archie said. “Who’s that woman over there?” He pointed to what used to be Maggie’s desk.

Henry stopped shuffling and gazed at Archie for a number of seconds. “Who? You mean Carol?”

Carol. “What happened to Maggie?”

“Maggie?” Henry said, sounding totally baffled.

“Yes. Woman in her fifties, who’s worked at that desk for at least the last seven years?”

“What are you talking about?” Henry asked.

It would appear that not only had the present fundamentally altered, but the past too. “Never mind,” Archie said. “I’m having a strange day.” He walked back to his desk, and when he sat down, he noticed that Henry was still staring at him.

He turned his attention to his computer. He watched it go through its initialising procedure, then typed in the password. But instead of Windows gradually kicking in, the screen that came up was black with a little bit of white text in the top left on corner.

It was a screen he recognised, but hadn’t seen in a very long time. It was that of a BBC Master, a computer he had seen the last of when he was a teenager.

He looked again at the computer’s exterior. It looked the same as usual. The keyboard was off white and designed for maximum comfort, although he found it a bit awkward and was always accidentally leaning on the space bar while looking through written records. The hard disk was inside the tower, and the disk drive took 3.5 inch discs, not the genuinely floppy sort.

He typed “*.”, the first command that came to mind. The * was a large one, as big as a capital letter, rather than the small flying sort that PCs produced. He pressed “Enter” and the computer whirred for a bit, making the same sound that old BBC disc drives made. Then a message came up on the screen saying, “Drive empty”.

He heard laughter and looked around. He saw Henry standing beside Jane. Both of them were looking at him and giggling. Then he realised what had happened. One of Jane’s favourite jokes was to delete everyone’s icons and replace their background with something that confused them. She regularly did it to Beckie, Sean and Henry (she was a bit scared of Maggie’s temper), but she left Archie alone.

But if it was only a background, why was he able to able to type things into it, and why did the computer respond? From what he’d learned, Jane wasn’t skilled enough with computers to make them do things like this. Or had she downloaded the background from the Internet?

Oh well, it was easy enough to fix. All he had to do was right-click on the screen, go to Active Desktop, then . . . then he realised there was no mouse pointer on the screen, as befitted a BBC. He shuffled the mouse a bit, but no pointer appeared. He right-clicked, but no menu appeared.

“Jane,” he said, looking up. “What have you done to my computer?”

“What?” she said. “I haven’t done anything to it.”

She sounded honest and surprised enough, but she was very good at keeping a straight face at times like these. “Come over here,” he said.

She walked over to his computer, and he turned back to it, but his usual Windows screen was visible. A couple of columns of icons, his background picture of the universe which he’d got off the Internet, a white mouse pointer, a start button and a task bar.

“What?” she said, when she saw it.

“It just looked really strange for a minute there,” he said, and turned aware from her bemused expression.

It was possible that it was a backdrop that only lasted a minute, but today had been too strange for that. Was he hallucinating? He tried to remember what he’d consumed in the last day. Cornflakes, toast, orange juice, a sandwich, a Snickers bar, a rich tea biscuit, coffee and tea that he’d made himself and a pizza. Nothing particularly nutritious, but nothing out of the ordinary either.

Was he dreaming? He didn’t know how pinching yourself helped you decide whether you were or not, but he did it anyway. He didn’t wake up. Anyway, the day had been far too detailed, chaotic and complete to be a dream.

Was Carol a mirage too? He looked towards her desk, but no, she was still sitting there, already hard at work.

He watched her for a while, then realised that a number of minutes had passed, so he forced himself to turn back to sub-accounting. It had been a long time since he had been seriously transfixed by a woman. She was the first to have that effect on him since Gemma who was on his course at university, in fact. Because despite her glamour, there was an air of pleasantness about her too. He didn’t know this - but the thing was, with her working here, he could find out. He had no idea how to start a conversation with her, but since his coworkers appeared to believe she’d been working here for ages, perhaps they would talk to her. But Jane didn’t speak to her, and Beckie only said “Hiya” when she arrived, twenty eight minutes late, and no one from another department came to the office to see her.

Archie tried to get on with his work, but it was difficult to concentrate for two reasons: Carol, and the fact that the accounts were ten times as messy as usual. Huge bits of them were missing and they were impossible to manipulate. He would type a number, and a second later it would have disappeared, or moved to a different part of the screen. He started to think that they - and everything else he’d encountered today - were bewitched. It was just the sort of thing an annoying charm from the Harry Potter world would do. He eventually gave up and tried to surf the Internet (no one ever checked up on how he was spending his time), but Internet Explorer wouldn’t open a window when he clicked on it. He tried Solitaire and Minesweep and Paint and even Microsoft Word, but no programs would open, except Opera and Excel, those he was supposed to be using, and the least easy ones to use for entertainment purposes, so he tried to continue with his work. He began to wonder if some power up there was playing a cruel joke on him.

Other than that, the morning was quite uneventful, except for being brought coffee by a jester, or someone who was dressed as a jester at any rate. Officially, the five regular occupants of the office were supposed to make coffee one day a week. However, since Wednesday was Sean’s day and he was hardly ever around, the first person to remember usually did it. This Wednesday, it was a jester. He didn’t say or do anything except say, “Here you are, Sir” as he placed Archie’s cup on the desk. When he had brought everyone coffee, he left the room. None of the other workers looked surprised at all.

Archie began his lunch break as soon as the clock turned twelve, the earliest time at which you could begin one. He went to the shop across the road, where he usually bought his sandwiches, but today, it only pornographic items. Not magazines, and the stuff he’d expect to find in a sex shop (he wouldn’t know), but mugs, ring binders, tea towels and the like with pornographic images printed on them. There were pencils and erasers shaped like various parts of the anatomy. He left quickly, but noticed that the cashier was a penguin just before he did.

Oh well. He didn’t mind going for a bit of a walk in order to buy lunch today. He usually spent his lunch hour working or surfing the Internet, but today he could do neither, so he was glad of an excuse to kill some time. It occurred to him that Carol was in the office, but then he noticed her in a red car that was pulling out of the car park. She was going out for lunch too.

He walked to the town centre and decided to go to McDonalds. Now that was food he couldn’t trust, but perhaps it would put things back to normal. But things weren’t normal before eating (all the coins in his pocket had doubled in size, but the boy at the till accepted them) or after (there were brightly coloured flowers growing in the middle of the road).

He was beginning to get used to this world, though. A lot of its features were annoying, but life was more interesting when hardly anything was the way he expected it to be.

When he got back to the office, however, things took a turn for the worse. Just as he was sitting down, the boss walked in. This was perhaps the oddest thing that had happened all day. Archie had only seen the boss once, at his interview. The boss always arrived long before anyone else and left long after everyone else had gone home, and if she ever deigned to talk to her inferiors, it wasn’t those that resided in this office. He had no idea if the dazzling jade suit she wore was her normal attire or not.

“Archie,” she said, briskly. “I need you to fill in this form and return it to my office immediately.” She shoved a piece of paper into his hand, turned on her heel and left the room.

He examined the form. It didn’t seem to be asking much, just for some personal details. It didn’t say what it was for though. He assumed it couldn’t be too bad - he probably wasn’t selling his soul to the company - but he thought it best to check anyway. He wasn’t going to ask the boss, so he turned to Jane, who was the only person in the office and putting on her coat in preparation to leave. “Did you get a form like this?” he asked.

“No,” she said, and left.

Oh well, he didn’t have time to waste. He looked around his cluttered desk for a pen, but couldn’t find one. That was no surprise, so he opened his top desk drawer, where he knew he had a few extra biros.

On top of a pile of ledgers was a coiled snake. Upon seeing light, it instantly raised its head and extended its tongue in the direction of Archie’s hand. He let loose a scream and slammed the drawer shut. The snake’s tongue got caught in it, and it flicked back and forth viciously. Archie pushed his spinning chair back away from the desk as quickly as he could. His heart started pounding. He hadn’t thought he was especially scared of snakes until now, but then, this was the first time he’d encountered one. He didn’t know if it was dangerous or not, but he was going to assume it was without testing this theory.

But if there was one thing more frightening than the snake in his drawer, it was the boss. He’d heard that her temper was legendary. So he stood up, carefully picked up the form, and took it over to Jane’s desk. He sat in her chair, and reached out for the desk tidy and was about to lift out a pen when an invisible hand slapped his. “Naughty,” a quiet voice said.

He recoiled and stared closely at the desk tidy. But it just stared back redly and plastically. He tried to pick up a different pen, but again he felt the hand smack his and the voice say, “Now now, what did I tell you?”

So now he was hearing voices with no owners. He had known there was a snake in his drawer, but didn’t realise he was dealing with Monty Python here. Still, he wouldn’t let this madness defeat him. There was another route to pens: the stationery cupboard.

He stood up and walked over to it, and opened its double doors. Unfortunately, it was full of clothes instead of stationery. Weird clothes at that: a fur coat, a tutu, a red-sequinned pair of trousers, a space suit, among other things. Oh well, he had another plan: he could buy a terribly rude pen from the shop across the road. He was about to turn away from the cupboard, when its doors snapped shut, pushing him into its dark interior.

The fur coat tickled his nose a bit and he sneezed. He tried to push the doors open them again, but they wouldn’t budge. However, when he pushed in the opposite direction, through the clothes, he felt a space behind them. So he forced his way through them and then another row of clothes and then another. He wouldn’t be surprised if he came out in Narnia. It occurred to him that he had quite a broad knowledge of literature and film.

But as with everything event today that had indicated that he was trapped in a work of fiction, the outcome was original. He did see light ahead, but when he reached it, he found himself in the toilet. Mercifully, it was otherwise unoccupied. He looked behind him, but the wall was solid. He tried to press his way back into it, but it was firm behind his back.

The door squeaked open, and Gemma, the girl he’d fancied at university, walked in.

“Gemma!” he cried, no longer too surprised by her putting in an appearance. Whatever power was controlling today’s events, it couldn’t be entirely evil, if it was putting not one but two beautiful women in the place where he worked, unless his not being able to obtain them was going to torture him.

She locked the door behind her. This was not a situation he’d ever imagined he’d be in, locked in a small room with the girl of his dreams. It wasn’t the most romantic of locations, but never mind. He noticed that she still looked twenty one, the age she’d been when he last saw her.

“Peter,” she said, sternly.

“My name is Archie,” Archie protested. This wasn’t the best start, but he’d always known that she didn’t even know his name.

“Archie,” she spat in disgust. “You are incredibly resourceful and not easily defeated. But you’ve got to learn that you don’t have to put up with everything the world throws at you. All your life, you’ve let people call you by a name you dislike greatly, and your behaviour has been exactly the same with every other facet of your existence. You fancied me, but you thought I’d never like you back, so you didn’t even make an effort to talk to me. You hate your job, but because you believe it’s all that’s keeping you alive, you stick with it without protest. You know your colleagues are nasty to you, but you let them be. Even when the entire world turns to chaos, you ignore your problems so you can get on with your mundane existence. You’ve got to start tackling them, rather than working around them.”

Archie’s head was buzzing with thoughts. How did Gemma know he’d fancied her? Was this an explanation of all the weird things that had happened today? If so, was Gemma responsible for them all, or was she just a messenger from a higher power? He’d always thought she was an angel.

But here she was, criticising his entire persona. He thought about what she’d just said, then replied, “Ok, so what was I meant to do about the shower? Try and fix it, and be late for work? And the shirt - torn apart my room until I found it? And the Cornflakes - nip down to Spar and buy another box? And what about the house - was I supposed to pick it up and put it in its rightful place?’ And-”

“Look, you’ve been creative enough at getting around problems. Now be creative at confronting them.” Gemma walked over to the window, pushed it open, and climbed out. “See ya.”

He stared out of the window after her. She quickly and effortlessly climbed down the side of the building, although there were no obvious hand and foot holds. She reached the ground, walked across the forecourt and away down the street. A cold draft of wind blew in his face. He tried to shut the window, but it wouldn’t budge.

Ok, this was a problem. How was he supposed to deal with it? Brute force? Telling the boss? Hang on, was this, strictly speaking, his problem? He didn’t have to stay in here any longer.

The easiest way out was through the door, but when he looked at it, the lock had vanished. He pushed the door, but it went nowhere.

Now what? He wasn’t agile enough to climb out of the window. He’d probably fall and break his neck. At the same time, he definitely lacked the strength to break the heavy door down.

Perhaps he could open the door from the other side? It would be a bit difficult - he’d have to have some sort of implement that would reach under the door and up quite some distance to the handle. There wasn’t anything particularly useful in here: toilet roll would go under and not up, and in any case, it wasn’t strong enough. He emptied his pockets: they contained some normal sized coins, a pen (how annoying, he’d had one all along!) and a metal tape measure. The last item was a bit bizarre, since he’d never known he owned one, never mind realised he kept one in his trouser pocket. It was the right firmness, but again, wouldn’t go upwards on its own accord.

Ok, there had to be some other way. He examined the objects at his disposal, and wondered if he could combine their uses somehow. Aha! If he wrote a message to his coworkers on the toilet roll and fed it under the door, they’d come and rescue him! The trouble was, it was necessary to turn a few corners to reach the office - how could he make the toilet roll go round them? He could really do with an Andrex puppy waiting outside the door to help him.

All his coworkers were out to lunch anyway. But hang on a minute - when they came back, sooner or later someone was going to need the toilet!

He put his possessions back in his pockets, closed the toilet lid, and sat down, satisfied with himself. He was missing work time now, but since he couldn’t do his work anyway, it didn’t really matter. He was bored though, and wished he had something to read. Besides, he was supposed to have handed in the form by now. He looked at his watch; it was 1.10. How long would it be before someone needed the loo? He sincerely hoped the door would still be openable from the other side. Gemma had locked the door, so was it still locked, even though the lock had vanished? If it was, he could shout for help, but would anyone believe him if he said the inside lock had disappeared?

Did you actually have to use the handle on the other side to get into the toilet? He had been so many times that he couldn’t instantly decide whether you had to or not. But no, he remembered now, all you had to do was push.

Wait a second. If the door was unlocked, all you’d need to do from this side was pull! He leapt to his feet, and wondered how he could get leverage on the door. There was nothing to hold onto, and the gaps below and to its side were too narrow to get his fingers through. But what about the little bit at the end of the tape measure that stuck out at right angles to the rest of the metal? He got it out of his pocket, poked the end through the gap so that it hooked round the door, and pulled.

The door swung open!

He returned the tape measure to his pocket, and returned to the office, a spring in his step, feeling happier than he had done for a long time.

There was still no one there. He went over to Jane’s desk to get the form, but it had mysteriously vanished. He shifted the other papers on the desk - no one protested about that - but it was nowhere to be seen, and it wasn’t on the floor either. Had he put it somewhere else when he went over to the cupboard? He hadn’t accidentally dropped it in the cupboard, had he?

This he could do without. What was he supposed to do with objects that vanished? Well, not handing in the form hadn’t got him into any trouble yet. If the boss came asking for him, he’d just ask for another one, and why he had to fill it in, while he was at it, although this was a very scary prospect. But as he got up from Jane’s desk, he noticed there was a swirling message as the screensaver on her computer.

He read it. “It’s in your top desk drawer,” it said.

Oh, great, how had it got in there? He checked his desk, to see if the snake had vanished as a reward for his victorious escape from the bathroom, but no, it was still there, lashing its tongue back and forth. It looked even more vicious than before.

How could he deal with it? He supposed he could give it an inanimate object to sting while he killed it, but firstly, he’d have very little time before it noticed his trick, and secondly, he wasn’t quite sure how to kill it. If the office had contained an old fashioned guillotine, the choppy kind they’d had at his primary school which the kids were never, ever allowed to touch, he’d have known what to do, but of course there was only a slidy one, suitable only for cutting paper.

What else could he use as a weapon? There were several things he could hit the snake with, but how much damage would they do? His eyes kept being drawn back to a pair of scissors in Jane’s desk tidy, even though he knew full well that he couldn’t cut the snake in half with them. Did snakes have eyes? He could stab it in the eye with the blades, which would-

No! All he had to do was cut the snake’s tongue out! Then, as long as it didn’t decide to wrap itself round him, he’d be fine. He reached for the scissors, forgetting what would happen. “Oi!” the voice hissed, with a slap. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

Ok, how was he going to deal with this? Did anyone else have any scissors? He expected attempted theft from anyone else’s desk would be equally difficult, and he didn’t have any himself. He didn’t see much point in checking the stationery cupboard again.

Then he thought: why am I letting little slaps from an imaginary person that don’t even hurt stop me from taking the scissors? He reached out again determined to get them, but this time the slap turned to a firm grip on his wrist, and he couldn’t move it. “Oh no you don’t,” said the voice.

“Why not?” asked Archie in frustration.

“Don’t you know how sinful it is to steal your coworker’s possessions?” it asked, in a slightly sing-song voice.

“I’m not stealing them, I just want to borrow them for a little while.”

“Still, borrowing without permission is bad. You should ask if you want to borrow.”

That was an idea. If the boss didn’t mind the form being a bit late, all he had to do was wait a while. In fact, when Jane got back, there’d be no snake. All he’d have to say was, “Jane, look at this snake” and it wouldn’t be there.

He sat back in her chair and spun it round. There wasn’t much he could do until then, since he wasn’t going near his own desk until he was armed.

Hang on, this wasn’t facing his problem! He wasn’t going to let someone who didn’t even exist get him into trouble with the boss! “Look,” he said. “She won’t mind at all. They’re not even her scissors, they belong to the company. And if she does mind, then you can do whatever you want to me, all right?”

“Ok!” said the voice, to his surprise, and there was a strange computer-game-like sound from behind Jane’s desk tidy. He reached over, and took the scissors with ease. Again, a feeling of intense satisfaction overcame him.

Before he attacked the snake, he had to work out how he was going to dispose of it. He considered throwing it out of the window, but this would mean carrying it for longer than he was strictly comfortable with. He couldn’t just take the drawer entirely out of his desk, as it was fixed in. He thought for a long time before the answer came to him: to shred the snake. He wasn’t entirely sure if it would work - he knew that snakes shed their skin, but could you shred it? But it was the only thing he could think of. The shredding machine was as far from his desk as the window was, but unlike the window, it was moveable. He unplugged it, and with a lot of effort, shoved it over to his desk, and plugged it into a different socket.

He rested for while, then turned the shredder on. Then he took a deep breath and cut off the snake’s tongue. Even above the roar of the machine, it dropped to the floor with a sickening snip. Then, before he lost the nerve, he opened the drawer, grabbed the snake with both hands, and threw it in the shredder.

Suddenly, the entire office was being sprayed by snake’s blood. The noise too, was terrible. But eventually it ceased and the snake was gone.

Archie didn’t feel relief yet. He pushed the shredder back to its normal location, but what was he to do about the mess? Would anyone else be able to see it? The snake would have vanished if his coworkers tried to see it, but would its blood do the same? Actually, the mess wasn’t as bad as it had initially appeared, and his desk had taken most of the damage, to which no one else would pay much attention. He went to the kitchen to get a damp jay cloth, with which he cleared up most of the mess, before throwing it away. He filled the washing up bowl with soapy water to deal with the mess on the carpet. He would claim he had spilt coffee if anyone asked about the damp patch. He kicked the snake’s tongue under his desk. He still didn’t want to touch that.

Finally, he was able to fill in the form. He was careful not to sign it, though; he’d do that when he knew what it was for. Then he set off for the boss’s office, mercifully remembering to replace Jane’s scissors in her desk tidy on the way there.

He knocked on the door of the boss’s office in trepidation. “Come in!” she barked. He pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

“You took your time,” she snapped, when she saw him. She stood up, reached over her desk and snatched the form out of his hand. She scanned one side and then the other. “You haven’t signed it, you fool.”

“N-n-n-no,” Archie stammered. “I w-w-want to kn-n-now w-w-what I’m s-s-s-signing first.”

The boss gazed at him for a few seconds. Then said, “How long have you been with this company?”

For a moment Archie thought he was going to get fired. “S-s-s-seven years,” he said.

“In that case, you are clearly suffering from what I call the seven year itch,” the boss said. “You will spend the rest of the afternoon watching videos.”

This was just as unexpected as everything else that had happened today, but didn’t sound too bad either, unless this was the return of “A Clockwork Orange” and he was about to be brainwashed.

The boss reached into her desk drawer (he bet she never had to deal with snakes) and took out two videos. “Come with me,” she said, and led him out of her office, down a corridor, and into a small room he had never been inside before. There was nothing there except a television and video and a few comfortable chairs. “Sit down,” she said, and put a video into the machine as Archie did so. “You will not stop this video. I expect it to have reached an end by the time I come back. And don’t think about pressing fast forward, because it doesn’t work,” she said. She pressed PLAY and the screen filled with copyright information. “I will return in two hours and put the other video on then,” she said, as she left the room.

The first video droned on about the importance and benefits of co-operation, teamwork, company loyalty and the like; things that meant nothing to him, since he had seen little evidence of them in his working life. He doubted they even existed outside videos and books like this. He’d certainly never gone away for an activity weekend or played in a six-hundred-piece samba band as the happy, healthy looking workers/actors were doing in this video.

The second video had more impact on him. It talked about how terrible unemployment was, and how hard it was to get jobs these days. He didn’t believe all the figures, since they varied from those he’d heard on the news, and in any case, he was well-qualified. The only worrying thing that the video pointed out was that it wasn’t wise to leave your workplace on bad terms, as the boss would be writing you a reference.

But as the video came to an end, he realised that it was just trying to scare him into submission. Perhaps the threats were real, but people left their jobs every day. Why shouldn’t he, if he wanted to?

He wouldn’t ask about better wages and for the other workers to be more careful with their finances just yet. He’d work out the exact terms he wanted, and then do so tomorrow. He tried not to look too excited as the boss let home out of the room at the end of the day, but he felt satisfied with himself for the third time.

He collected his possessions and set off towards the door. He noticed Carol getting ready to go too. Even ducking under her desk to get her handbag, she was gorgeous. He wished he had the courage to talk to her - well, why didn’t he? He waited for her to get up, and said, “So, how was your day?”

She looked a bit surprised to hear him speak to her, but answered, “Oh, God, it’s been a nightmare. I’m just in the middle of a very messy separation from my husband.”

“Sorry to hear about that,” Archie said. Perhaps his day hadn’t been so bad after all - at least he didn’t have a husband to worry about.

“Oh, I’ll get by. But listen, are you doing anything tonight?”

“No?” said Archie. His heart started beating faster.

“Well, would you mind going to Tesco’s with me? It’s just ever so darned lonely shopping on my own.”

“Urm, ok,” said Archie. It wasn’t the usual location for a first date, but since he’d never been on a date in his life, he would have gone to jail if anyone had been asking. “I need to get some Cornflakes, anyway. But could you possibly give me a lift home? I couldn’t get my car started this morning.” Archie felt proud of himself - he couldn’t remember the last time he’d asked anyone a favour.

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll take you home.” In her voice lay a suggestion that she wasn’t necessarily planning to take him to his own home. He could barely believe his luck. “Come on, let’s go.”


Carol, despite being strikingly beautiful, was a little bit odd. All around the supermarket and on the way back to her house, she moaned about her husband in great detail, as if she’d known Archie all her life. She moaned a bit to the cashier too. Archie didn’t know if he and Carol would make a good couple, if there was ever a chance of them becoming one. She was everything he wasn’t - loud, forceful, talkative and, of course, beautiful. Still, it definitely wasn’t a bad end to a very strange day, although ever since he’d met Carol, the strangeness has ceased. The shelves in Tesco were one of the few things in the world that you expected to change places when you weren’t looking, but they found everything they wanted with great ease.

He helped Carol get her shopping into the house. Then she told him to sit down, and poured him a glass of wine. She poured herself one too. This didn’t bode well, if she was planning to drive him home, but he was hoping she wasn’t.

“Sorry about all that nattering,” she said. “It’s been a strange day for me. How was yours?”

“So strange you wouldn’t believe it,” he said.

“Oh, come on. Try me!”

“Ok, well it all started when my shower wouldn’t give out any hot water. It’s usually very well behaved, you see. But I didn’t think that was particularly strange, and when I couldn’t find my favourite shirt, I didn’t think anything of it either. But when I went into the kitchen and-“

“Oh, shut up and kiss me,” she said.

He complied.


When he woke up the next morning, he found himself lying alone in his own bed. What was going on? Had he gone back to his own place last night and forgotten about doing so in tiredness? Or had it all never happened at all? As quickly as he could, he investigated all the things that had been amiss yesterday. Yes, the shower now functioned properly. His favourite shirt was amid his other shirts, and he put it on. His cupboard was as fully stocked as is should be, and when he left the house, it was back in the middle of the street again.

With a growing sense of dread, he got into his car. The key slid into the ignition first try. He set off and took a detour via the bus stop he’d used yesterday. There were a number of people standing there, but not one of them had a mohican, pink or otherwise. There was no bus shelter outside work, and aaagh! Just as he feared, when he entered the office, Maggie was sitting at her desk and Carol was nowhere to be seen.

He switched on his computer, and his desktop had its normal appearance. He double clicked on the clock in the bottom right-hand corner, and the window that appeared informed him that the date was the same as it had been the previous day.

He slumped back in his chair. So had his weird and wonderful day never occurred? Had it been a dream, or had time repeated itself, as in “Groundhog Day” and “12.01”? Did Carol actually exist or not? As he didn’t know her surname, he had no way of finding out.

Oh well. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad. He’d had his reward for everything he’d gone through and everything was back to normal now. And now, he was ready to make a few changes to his life. He opened his top drawer (which was still devoid of snake) and took out a piece of paper. He found a pen and began to make a list.

1. Get in touch with Gemma and ask her to go for a drink.
2. Ask boss for higher salary and quit if I don’t get it.
3. Find out how to change my name . . .