It was 6/6/06 and Betty had decided to celebrate the portentous date with her sinfully good butternut brownies.
Everyone would love them. Just last week, there was practically a riot when she brought her insanely delicious zucchini cake.
Bob, the loud-talking, halitosis sufferer, had barely been able to keep his nicotine-stained fingers off them. “Somebody should really tell Bob about that breath problem,” Betty thought as she walked into the Super-Happy Gigantic Office Complex.
Birds were singing, and a clear blue sky belied the devilish nature of the day’s date. She had her annual performance review scheduled for later in the morning, but she wasn’t worried about that either.
She walked through the doors to the cubicle farm — about twenty minutes late, but no later than usual for her — and announced: “I have bakies!”
A collective groan emanated from the veal-fattening pens. Her co-workers were such kidders!
“I’m putting them in the break room!” she threatened.
Nobody moved, and Betty said, with more of an edge than she intended: “They’re sinfully good butternut brownies, and I spent several hours making enough for everyone.”
Pallid office-workers prairie-dogged over the tops of their cubicles, and looked at one another. An unspoken agreement. They trooped off to the break room, where Betty was already slicing up the brownies.
“They’re sinful,” she said. “Sinful, get it? It’s 666 today!” She giggled insanely.
Bob, who in addition to suffering from halitosis and nicotine-stained fingers, had destroyed his sense of taste from smoking too much, was the first to try one. He kept it down.
Wendy, the office ingénue, ventured a lascivious look at the new associate, Brent, and tried to eat a brownie with as much sensuality as she could muster, knowing it would probably taste like baked vomit. Surprisingly, it was good.
“Wow Betty,” she said, “that’s actually…” she didn’t finish her sentence, but grabbed a second brownie. The rest of the workers looked shocked. Were they edible? Soon, everyone had one, and a murmur of conversation filled the break room. The brownies were good!
“These are great,” Steve the Creepy-Guy-Who-Never-Said-Anything volunteered.
They were indeed, great. They were made out of chocolate, sugar and a dangerous amount of butter. Oh, and her neighbour’s entire supply of peyote buttons. (It had taken quite a while to get the recipe right, but Dr. Tundra had been very nice about trying all the versions.)
They drugs kicked in about two hours later, while Wendy and Brent made inappropriate use of the office supplies closet, and Bob was in his performance review with the Boss. An intense, angry man, the Boss was not really prepared to spend his day acting as a “trip sitter” for an office full of proles whacked-out on peyote brownies, suffering from full-on synaesthesia. If he’d been willing to mediate their hallucinations, perhaps the death-toll would have been lower.
Instead, he decided to take Betty to the nearby forest to conduct her annual performance review, where he informed her that, because of many an office faux pas, she did not meet expectations.
Original photo by belgianchocolate.