The office in which I work
- Bob works with some pretty colorful people. There's a Green, a Red, a White, and so on. Yeah, those are really the names he gives us. Work with us here, okay?
- All of the people in the office are afraid of all the other people in the office, making for a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person. Everyone is afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found and build the company.
- We never learn the name of the company, nor what they do precisely, but we have a feeling it's some kind of ad agency like Don Draper's.
- The company boasts twenty-nine offices in the U.S., Canada, and Latin America and averages three suicides a year, usually in the mid-executive level or by a girl with pills (you know, typical stuff).
- Before we learn how people in the company generally live well but are susceptible to nervous breakdowns, Slocum takes us back in time to his first job as a seventeen-year-old worker at an automobile casualty insurance company.
- Meet Virginia, a twenty-one-year-old voluptuous flirt Slocum has a big fat crush on. We'll learn more about her later, but in the meantime…
- Back to the present. Slocum's job is unstimulating, boring, and predictable, and he bides his time avoiding the people he fears and who fear him.
- Slocum elaborates upon office dynamics and articulates the different roles in the Sales Department. Apparently, unmarried men are not wanted in that department because it is difficult and dangerous for them to mix socially with prominent executives. So nobody's up for a game of Twister?
- Martha, a typist in Slocum's department, chats to herself and is slowly going crazy. In fact, every department always has at least one person going crazy.
- Getting paid with machine-processed checks is routine, and Slocum entertains a brief fantasy of what would happen if he deliberately disobeyed the rules of the company. Dreams of rebellion shattered: nothing. Nothing would happen.
- Slocum lists off all of the deaths and illnesses that have occurred in the company, but it's really no matter, because everyone forgets them after a while.
- The apple of Slocum's eye this fiscal period is Jane, a new hire in the Art Department. She isn't Slocum's first flirt, for he admits that he engages regularly in extramarital affairs.
- Jack Green is Slocum's boss, whom he fears, and Andy Kagle is head of the Sales Department. Slocum despises Green because he does not let him speak at the company conventions.
- They're all convinced that at least one other person is after the other's job. It's like Mean Girls out there, each person clawing to be Miss (umm Mister) Popular.
- After a visit with Arthur Baron, the head of the division, Slocum learns that he will be promoted to Kagle's job. He then lies to Kagle about his meeting and claims that everything is fine. So the two leave work to go mingle with some prostitutes. Yup, you read that correctly.
- Slocum feels that he is being groomed for Kagle's job, and he finds that he really wants it.