Randall Samuels and the Sacred Candy Bar
By:
Jason Sinkhorn
“Somewhere in all this crap there has got to be at least one friggin’ nickel,” complained Randall as he searched through the entire building for the five cents that, when added to his fifty cents, would make enough to buy him a candy bar to hold him over until breakfast. Randall was working an overnight shift, and as the only one in the entire complex, he couldn’t ask anyone to loan it to him. He searched the coin returns first. Hoping that someone who was just in it for the candy had left his or her spare nickel or dime in the chute. Sadly this wasn’t to be. It’s funny what no sleep and a candy bar mocking you behind glass will do to a man.
“I’ll check all their desk drawers. Surely someone has a nickel!”
Now Randall wasn’t the kind of guy who usually went through others’ things, but he was pass out hungry. He went around each little cubicle in his desperate scavenger hunt. The only things he could find were pennies.
“Who keeps pennies? They are useless. Why can’t machines take pennies? They’re friggin’ American currency aren’t they?! Dammit, just because some idiot vendor doesn’t like to count by ones I have to sit here with stomach cramps. DAMN YOU VENDOR MAN!,” he shouted.
Another thing happens when you work overnights by yourself. You begin to talk to yourself. You’ve heard that talking to yourself is okay as long as you don’t answer your own questions, right? Well good news, Randall had hit that point. He would sit and have clever dialogues with himself and his pretend other characters. It’s like split personalities, but you know it’s all just pretend and you are bored. When he had completed an entire dialogue or scene he’d wish that he had wrote it down, but he didn’t, so he didn’t have anything to read. So he just began another scene.
He couldn’t buy a soda and candy bar, so he decided to go make a pot of coffee. He hoped by the time that the pot was done making that he’d found a nickel. He went to the break room to make coffee, and added six extra scoops to the mix. He had a lot of hours to go, and he could feel the grogginess coming on already. He needed some strong coffee. The coffee dripped slowly into the coffee pot.
“Why is it that everything seems to mock me while I’m here? I don’t know. I guess I’ll keep looking for a nickel. Hey good strategy Napoleon. Shut up you.” He debated with himself.
It had got to a point where he made friends with himself. He went into his boss’s cubicle. He thought of how fired he’d be if he was caught here. As he opened the drawer he saw a picture of his boss getting trashed at the last company party and the stripper who was on her lap…that’s right HER lap. A female stripper on her lap.
“Oh, if her husband got a hold of this,” he thought.
I know what you’re thinking. Some husbands would call the stripper over to have dinner and then entertain them both after, but not her husband. He was a very devout religious man. He knew that his wife didn’t share some of his beliefs, but this was stretching it quite a bit.
“Where’s a scanner when you need it. Why did she have that picture on top of everything? Can I have a copy. No…didn’t I tell you to shut up?”
Now Randall didn’t tear through these people’s desks. He simply opened the top drawer where the coin holders are and saw if they had a nickel. He was even going to put it back later. But now, he had the picture, and more curiosity. What had the rest of the employees been doing? Overnight syndrome and boredom had kicked in almost to full now. He tried to keep from it, but he couldn’t. He had worked here for three years and hadn’t got a decent promotion, ever. He decided that the only way left was blackmail. He’d find stuff out about people and use it against them to get promoted, but right now he was just really hungry.
He kept searching for that nickel that would be his ticket to sanity. The stomach cramps were hurting more now. So much so in fact that he had gotten very irritable. He started searching everywhere. He even searched the broom closet, hoping that the cleaning girl had swept up something and it had got stuck in the bristles. He was desperate. He couldn’t find anything so he went to the engineer’s little room in the back of the building. The engineer had so much junk in his section of the building that if he couldn’t find a nickel, he could at least find something to use as a slug or something to jimmy the lock. This time however he couldn’t. The engineer had just resigned that day and had taken all of his junk out. When he opened the door, it was clean inside. Randall
screamed for a solid thirty seconds.
“WHY! COME ON! I’M FRIGGIN’ HUNGRY, DAMMIT! WHAT THE HELL!”
He had snapped. He searched his wallet for the twentieth time. He saw two ten-dollar bills there. Mocking him. The machine will only take ones and the occasional five-dollar bill when business had been good. Of course he’d get back $4.45 in change, but at least he’d have food and a nickel for next time.
His coffee had finished about five minutes ago and he decided to just go ahead and load up on caffeine. He went to get his coffee cup from the rack. It was gone.
“SON OF A-. Calm down. Just improvise.”
So he took the whole pot of coffee back to his little hole in the wall part of the building. Solitary confinement is so much better when you have a pot of coffee and can play your music as loud as you want and no one would complain. So that’s what he did. He popped in a CD he had made at home and began to play it as loud as the speakers would allow. He started to feel a little bit better. A little. He was still hungry though. Music didn’t fill his stomach. He sat there reading his book, drinking coffee, and listening to loud music.
Now you may be wondering what job Randall has where he can just sit around and pretty much do anything he wants. There aren’t many jobs like it but he has one of them. He works for a communications company. He’s the on-site technician in case anything goes wrong overnight in the building. Nothing ever does though so he just sits, reads, walks around, or makes up stupid games for one. One game he had was seeing how far down the hallway he could walk on his hands. He always made it t least halfway down. Sometimes he’d play this game he called “Randall’s Rips.” This game was to see how many CDs he could burn overnight before his co-workers got there in the morning. He was pretty good at this game. He could have a collection in one overnight recording session that would make a DJ at the local bars cower in fear. At his apartment he had a cavalcade of crap CDs that he’d made. Half of them were unlabeled so he had no clue what was one them. This got annoying to him quite a bit, but he couldn’t really do anything about it. He’d just put them in some kind of order so he’d know where they were next to the labeled ones. All of his favorite CDs were in his travel case anyway, so he could take them to work.
Randall had almost finished listening to the first CD when he decided he couldn’t take it anymore. He had to have something to eat. He went to the upstairs break room where all the higher up people’s offices were. They were on top for two reasons. It symbolized their position in the company, and if the building ever collapsed the lower level workers would break there fall. When he arrived upstairs he noticed four things. Number one. All the desk drawers were locked. He had a funny image of the drawers containing golden paper clips and platinum staples, and that’s why they were locked. Actually they were locked for the reason that the higher ups could lock them…with a real key. Number two. Everything seemed to be nicer. There were bigger cubicles and offices, and even motivational art on the wall. Number three. He found an announcement in one of the memo boxes of one of the higher ups that talked about the company Christmas party that was coming up. But the thing is that the higher ups apparently had two parties. One with the lowers to say that they still care about the other side of the company, and one for the special people at an expensive resort with champagne and roses instead of beer and ice chests. Number four. A break room. Not just any break room though. It had a water bottle with spring water, instead of making them pay a dollar for bottled water downstairs. They had comfortable chairs, not metal folding chairs from Mart-Mart. They had a full kitchen for making whatever their stiff cold hearts could desire. They had a candy machine too. But it had the same prices amazingly. Apparently no one can escape the wrath of the vendor, not even higher ups. Then he saw it. Over in the corner on the counter there was a box. In this box there were donuts from the previous morning. They had donuts brought in. Not just donuts though. There were stale blueberry muffins too. Hey, stale or not they are still sustenance enough for holding over until he could get a candy bar. So he grabbed up a donut and a muffin and ran downstairs for fear that they may have a camera or alarm system or a secret security service that came in when a lower had breached the upper sector. Randall could just imagine this.
“We have a lower in the holy upper sector. Protect our way of life. He knows our secrets. Take him out. Rip out his tongue and cut off his fingers so he can’t use sign language!”
He could just hear that announcement coming over their high quality upstairs sound system.
After returning to his normal building depth he realized how much crappier he felt. He had a plan though. Would anyone really notice if he tipped the machine upside down and jiggled a candy bar out? I mean sure all the candy would be in the chute, but he just wanted one candy bar. That’s all. He’d put in his fifty cents, unplug the machine, tip it over sideways, raise it back up just upside down, shake it a bit, put the machine back to normal, and everything that had come loose would fall into the chute to get, and he wouldn’t feel bad because he had paid fifty cents for the candy bar which is more than the forty-five cents he paid at Mart-Mart the previous day.
“Hmmm, this could work. All I have to do is make sure it looks normal when I get done. But how can I do that if everything is in the chute? I know. What? Take all the stuff that falls, put it in the bottom of the food drive barrel and then the vendor can write it off on his taxes as charity. Win-win situation. I’ve had my doubts about you brain, but you do come in handy sometimes, you know that? I know.”
So you want to know what he did. After coming with this win-win foolproof plan, he went to his hole in the wall and ate the stale muffin, threw away the donut because it tasted worse than army issued hard tack, finished off his pot of coffee, and didn’t do a single thing he had thought of. Why not you ask. Well, you see, Randall was very creative, but he hardly ever carried out any clever plans he had. He tried to enjoy the muffin. It was difficult, but he did it. Then he just went about his merry little night.
Not a whole lot else happened for quite awhile. He just listened to music and read some of his book. He thought the crappy part of his day was over. It wasn’t.
His replacement got to the building about five o’clock that morning.
“Hey Kenny, how’s it going?” Randall said.
“It’s going. Mornings you know how it goes. You seem extra chipper this morning.” Kenny replied.
“No. I just downed three healthy pots of coffee. I’m a little wired, buzzed, that’s all. Is it cold outside?” he rambled.
“Well in a word, hell yes.” Kenny smarted.
“That’s two words there buddy.”
”Yeah well kiss it pal. Hey take it easy today. Have a good one,” Kenny said as Randall grabbed his coat.
“You too. See ya tomorrow, Ken. Oh and don’t ever go upstairs. Ever. Bye.”
Randall put on his long coat and went outside to get in his car and drive home on the icy road. When he got to his car he had to scrape the windows. So he did. He got in and realized that he still could not see a single thing. His car was a piece of crap, so it’s heater and defroster didn’t work. This meant he had to somehow remedy the problem before he took off. He figured it out. He had to scrape the inside window as well. It too was coated in thin ice. Not frost. Ice. Not a lot of people have to scrape the inner part of their windows, but Randall did. After all this was done he turned the key and the car miraculously started. He started on his way home when he ran into the thickest sleet fog he’d ever seen. It was fog but it left ice on his windshield. Sleet fog. He had to get out his car four times on the way home just to re-scrape his windows. It was cold too. Randall had just about had enough of this day when he finally pulled into his driveway. He felt he had won a victory against fate by turning off his car and getting out at home. He got out of the car.
“How do you like that fate? Made it home in my piece o’ crap car and there’s nothing you can do about it now.” Randall taunted the powers that be.
He started up the front walk. There was a thin sheet of ice on the sidewalk. He noticed it though, and in a coffee buzzed state he pretended to ice skate to the door. He started up the stairs to his apartment. He opened his door. Took off his coat. He went in his room and began to change clothes so he could finally get some sleep. He took his wallet from his back pocket and put it on his dresser. He took his fifty cents from his right pocket, and put it in his coin tray. He reached in his left pocket and pulled out his work keys to hang them on the wall. Just as he did this, a nickel fell out of his keys. There was a long silence between Randall and his brain.
The neighbors say he went nuts that day. He went to the grocery store and purchased every candy bar they had. Claimed that they were sacred. Anyone entering his house that day forward had to agree to not even look at his candy bar cabinet. If they did they owed him a nickel.