The heavy wooden window slammed down on my fingers with a sickening crunch, and as I stared at him through a blur of pain, he just muttered, “Rules are rules.”
All of it—the arguments, the petty sabotage, this throbbing agony in my hand—was over two degrees on a thermostat.
Arthur, the self-appointed Warden of the Windows, had declared our shared office his personal terrarium. A balmy seventy-nine degrees was his law.
My migraines and my silent desk fan were just collateral damage in his one-man war against fresh air.
He thought crushing my fingers was the end of the argument. He thought he had won.
He had no idea I was about to use his own love of petty regulations and a ten-dollar hardware store thermometer to dismantle his little kingdom, piece by bureaucratic piece.
The Tropic of Cubicles: A Looming Front of Low Pressure
The air in The Hive was thick enough to chew. It tasted of stale coffee, industrial carpet cleaner, and the faint, cloying scent of someone’s microwaved curry from two hours ago. For me, an editor wrestling with a 600-page manuscript on Byzantine tax law, it was the perfect incubator for a migraine. My temples were already sending out little warning pulses, a Morse code of impending agony. I pressed my cool water bottle against my forehead, a flimsy defense against the oppressive, 78-degree heat radiating from the vents.
Across the sprawling open-plan office, he sat. Arthur. He wasn’t a manager or an owner; he was just a guy who rented a desk, same as me. A “coworking member.” But he moved through the space with the proprietary air of a feudal lord. He wore a thick, cable-knit sweater in mid-September, his face perpetually pinched in a state of grim satisfaction. He was the reason the air was a wet blanket. He was the self-appointed Warden of the Windows, the Tyrant of the Thermostat.
I watched him get up, his orthopedic shoes squeaking softly on the polished concrete. He made his rounds, a slow, deliberate patrol. He’d pause by a window, check the latch, then move to the thermostat near the kitchenette. His fingers would hover over the digital display before nudging it up another degree, a tiny, triumphant tap.
My own fingers faltered on the keyboard. The text on my screen began to swim, the dense academic prose blurring into an indecipherable soup. The low-grade throb behind my eyes was escalating. I needed air. Not the recycled, super-heated stuff puffing from the ceiling, but actual, oxygen-rich air from the outside world. The large sash window just to my left was my only hope, a rectangle of potential salvation. It was also Arthur’s sacred territory.
The First Crack in the Seal
I waited until Arthur settled back into his ergonomic throne, his focus seemingly absorbed by a spreadsheet full of what I could only imagine were calculations of global heat loss. My heart gave a little nervous flutter, the kind you get before doing something you know is illicit but entirely necessary. It was ridiculous. I was a 47-year-old woman, a professional, a mother. I paid $400 a month for this desk. I shouldn’t have to stage a covert operation to get a lungful of fresh air.
Slowly, carefully, I reached over and pushed the heavy wooden sash up. Just an inch. Not a gale, not a gust, just a sliver of an opening. A cool, crisp tendril of autumn air snaked into the room, smelling of damp leaves and car exhaust—the most beautiful perfume I’d ever encountered. The pressure in my head eased almost instantly. I took a deep, grateful breath and turned back to my monitor, the Byzantine tax codes suddenly looking manageable again.
The peace lasted for exactly ninety-three seconds. I felt a presence loom over my shoulder. I didn’t have to look. The scent of English Breakfast tea and self-righteousness was unmistakable.
“Feeling a draft?” Arthur’s voice was reedy, with a nasal tone that seemed designed to irritate.
I turned, forcing a placid smile. “Just needed a little circulation. It’s a bit stuffy.”
He stared at the one-inch gap as if it were a gaping portal to an arctic wasteland. He gestured vaguely at the ceiling vents. “The building has a state-of-the-art HVAC system. Opening windows disrupts the delicate balance. It’s incredibly inefficient.”
“It’s also incredibly hot, Arthur,” I said, my smile tightening.
He gave a thin, pitying smirk, the kind one reserves for a child who doesn’t understand why they can’t eat cake for dinner. “Well,” he said, leaning past me with an unnerving lack of concern for my personal space, “some of us are cold-blooded.” With a decisive thump, he slammed the window shut, sealing me back inside the terrarium. He patted the frame once, a gesture of finality, and squeaked back to his desk.
The Ministry of Manufactured Warmth
His window-slamming was just one part of the ritual. The other was his public stewardship of the thermostat. He treated the small, beige box on the wall like a holy relic. If anyone dared to adjust it, even by a single degree, he would materialize within minutes.
I saw it happen to a new member, a young graphic designer with pink hair and a laptop covered in stickers. She’d fanned herself dramatically, walked over, and boldly tapped the ‘down’ arrow twice. From across the room, Arthur’s head snapped up like a meerkat sensing a predator. He watched her return to her seat, his eyes narrowed. He let her enjoy her contraband 76-degree air for a few minutes, a cat playing with a mouse.
Then, he rose. He didn’t go directly to the thermostat. First, he went to the coffee machine and refilled his mug. He made a stop at the printer to collect a non-existent document. It was a power move, a slow crawl to re-establish dominance. Finally, he approached the thermostat. He sighed, a loud, put-upon sound that carried across the quiet workspace. He shook his head slowly, a mime performing a tragedy about energy waste.
Then he tapped the ‘up’ arrow. Not twice, but three times. The display blinked: 79°F. He cast a pointed glare in the pink-haired designer’s direction before returning to his desk. She wilted, pulling her cardigan tighter around her shoulders in a gesture of pure, defeated irony.
The rest of us just suffered in silence. There was Chloe, a coder who wore tank tops and athletic shorts year-round, her skin perpetually slick with a thin sheen of sweat. There was David, an accountant who had a tiny USB fan aimed at his face, a silent, whirring protest. We exchanged exhausted, knowing glances over the tops of our monitors, a silent brotherhood of the overheated, but no one ever challenged the Warden. His conviction was simply too powerful, too absolute. He wasn’t just a guy who liked it warm; he was a man on a mission.
A Domestic Ceasefire
That evening, I was venting to my husband, Mark, while chopping onions for dinner, my eyes watering from both the fumes and the frustration.
“He literally slammed it shut. Stood right over me and thump.” I brought the knife down hard on the cutting board for emphasis. “And then said, ‘Some of us are cold-blooded.’ Like I’m some kind of defective, heat-hoarding lizard.”
Mark, ever the pragmatist, stirred the bolognese sauce. “Did you talk to the floor manager? What’s his name, Liam?”
“What is Liam going to do? He’s twenty-four and his primary job is to make sure the kegerator doesn’t run out of cold brew. He’s terrified of confrontation. The one time the Wi-Fi went out, I thought he was going to cry.”
“Well, you can’t keep working in a sauna, Dana. Your migraines…” he trailed off, his concern genuine. He’d seen me through enough of them to know they weren’t just headaches. They were debilitating, day-long events that left me drained and nauseous.
“I know,” I sighed, scraping the onions into the pan. They sizzled aggressively. “It’s just… it’s the sheer audacity of it. He’s just another member. He has no authority. But he’s created this atmosphere where everyone is afraid to touch a window. He’s like a petty dictator of a tiny, overheated nation-state.”
My daughter, Sophie, wandered into the kitchen, scrolling on her phone. “Is this about the office Sweat Lord again?” she asked, not looking up.
“Don’t call him that,” I said, though it was a perfect descriptor.
“Just open the window and when he comes over, cough directly in his face,” she suggested. “Tell him you think you have that new Norwegian variant.”
Mark shot her a look. “Don’t give your mother ideas.”
I laughed, a little of the tension leaving my shoulders. It was absurd. All of it. But as I stood there, stirring the sauce in my own perfectly temperate kitchen, the memory of the stuffy office and Arthur’s smug face made my jaw clench. The headache, which had receded, began to throb again, a faint but persistent promise of another battle tomorrow.
The Cold War Heats Up: The Laminated Edict
The next morning, I arrived armed with a new resolve and an extra-large iced coffee. I was going to open that window, and if Arthur had a problem with it, he could wrap himself in one of the communal blankets provided by The Hive for people exactly like him. But when I got to my desk, my plan was preemptively thwarted.
Taped to the inside of the window pane, precisely at eye level, was a sign. It wasn’t a handwritten Post-it. It was a professionally laminated sheet of paper, the corners clipped to a perfect, non-threatening roundness.
In a calm, corporate-friendly font, it read:
A FRIENDLY REMINDER:
To ensure the comfort of ALL members and the optimal performance of our building’s climate control system, please keep all windows closed.
Thank you for your cooperation!
– Management
The lie was so blatant, so insulting. Management. Liam, the floor manager, couldn’t even manage to order the right kind of coffee pods. He didn’t have the forethought or the spine to laminate anything. This had Arthur’s fingerprints all over it. He had weaponized bureaucracy. He’d created a piece of fake, official-looking propaganda and used it to claim the territory as his own.
I stared at the sign, my coffee turning lukewarm in my hand. He hadn’t just closed the window; he had annexed it. He’d built a wall of plastic and Helvetica and dared me to cross it. The audacity was breathtaking. It was a declaration of war, and he had fired the first, perfectly laminated shot. I felt a surge of rage so pure it almost made me dizzy. This wasn’t about the temperature anymore. It was about the principle.
A Whispered Alliance at the Water Cooler
Defeated for the moment, I retreated to the kitchenette to refill my water bottle, my head buzzing with fury. As I was screwing the cap back on, Chloe, the perpetually warm coder, sidled up next to me.
“See the new sign?” she muttered, keeping her voice low as she pretended to inspect the selection of herbal teas.
“Hard to miss,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m surprised it’s not notarized.”
Chloe let out a quiet snort of laughter. “He totally made that himself. I saw him at the laminating machine yesterday afternoon. He was acting all official, like he was classifying state secrets.” She shook her head, her multi-colored bracelets jangling softly. “He calls himself the ‘Thermal Comfort Monitor.’ He told one of the interns that. Seriously.”
The ‘Thermal Comfort Monitor.’ It was so perfectly, pompously Arthur. He’d given himself a title. He had a whole mythology built around his own discomfort.
“Why does everyone let him get away with it?” I asked, my voice a frustrated whisper. “We all pay to be here.”
Chloe shrugged, her shoulders slumping. “I don’t know. He’s just so… relentless. It’s easier to just wear shorts and sweat. I’ve got a deadline on a new app build, and I just don’t have the energy to fight a G-D thermostat war every day.”
She had a point. We were all here to work, to be productive. We were freelancers, consultants, remote workers. Our time was literally our money. And Arthur was an energy vampire, sucking the will to fight out of the room with his oppressive heat and his laminated decrees.
“Well, I’m running out of energy to not fight,” I said, more to myself than to her.
She gave me a sympathetic look. “Good luck,” she whispered, grabbing a peppermint tea bag. “My money’s on you.” It wasn’t a promise of backup, but it was something. It was the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one suffocating.
The Doctrine of the Draft
Later that day, emboldened by my chat with Chloe and fueled by the injustice of the laminated sign, I decided to push back. The sign said, “Please keep all windows closed.” “Please” is a request, not a command. I peeled the sign off the glass. The tape left a sticky residue, which I found grimly satisfying. Then, I opened the window. Two full inches this time.
The sweet, glorious air rushed in. I felt like a revolutionary.
It took him less than a minute. The squeak of his shoes was faster this time, more purposeful. He appeared at my side, his face a mask of disappointment, as if I had personally betrayed him.
“Dana,” he said, his voice dripping with condescension. “We’ve been over this.”
“Actually, we haven’t, Arthur,” I said, turning to face him fully. “You made a comment and slammed my window. That’s not a conversation.”
He seemed taken aback by the directness. He gestured at the window. “There was a sign from management.”
“No, there was a sign you made at the laminator yesterday. I’m management, you’re management, we’re all just members here. And this member needs some fresh air to avoid a debilitating migraine that will prevent her from working at all.”
He blinked, regrouping. He was shifting from petty tyrant to amateur scientist. “You don’t understand,” he began, his tone shifting to that of a patient teacher explaining a complex concept to a struggling student. “This is a positive pressure system. The HVAC pumps conditioned air in. When you open a window, you create negative pressure. It pulls in unconditioned, unfiltered air from the outside—pollen, pollution, humidity. It completely defeats the purpose of the multi-million dollar system this building has installed. You’re not just making it cold; you’re making the air dirty.”
His argument was so detailed, so full of technical-sounding jargon, that it was almost impressive. He had constructed an entire scientific doctrine to justify his personal preference. He wasn’t just a crank; he was a true believer. He’d wrapped his desire in the respectable cloak of engineering and public health. It was the most infuriating thing I had ever heard.
“Arthur,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “It’s 79 degrees in here. I’m getting dirty air one way or another.”
His face tightened. Without another word, he reached over, slammed the window shut with even more force than before, and squeaked away.
The Unavoidable Fog
The confrontation left me shaking with adrenaline and rage. The recycled air felt even more suffocating than before. My carefully managed, low-grade headache, which had receded with the fresh air, came roaring back with a vengeance.
It started with the aura. A shimmering, jagged crescent of light appeared in the corner of my vision, like I’d stared at a camera flash for too long. I tried to focus on my manuscript, but the words began to warp and disappear behind the spreading blind spot. My stomach churned. A wave of nausea washed over me.
This was it. The point of no return.
I knew I had about twenty minutes before the crushing pain would descend, rendering me incapable of looking at a screen, holding a conversation, or even being upright. I quickly saved my document, my fingers feeling clumsy and disconnected from my brain. I jammed my laptop into my bag, my movements jerky and uncoordinated.
Chloe looked over, her brow furrowed with concern. “You okay, Dana?”
“Migraine,” I managed to mumble, the word feeling thick and foreign in my mouth. “His stupid, hot, un-circulated air finally did it.”
Her face fell. “Oh, no. That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”
I gave her a weak wave and made my escape, stumbling through the office like a fugitive. As I passed Arthur’s desk, he didn’t look up, his eyes fixed on his monitor with an intensity that I knew was feigned. He had won. He had successfully made the environment so hostile to my basic biology that I had been driven out. I felt a hot flash of shame mixed with my anger. He had made me sick. He had cost me a half-day of work, income I needed, on a project with a tight deadline.
The walk to the subway was a blur of shimmering lights and rising nausea. By the time I fumbled with the keys to my apartment, the first wave of pain hit, a sharp, drilling sensation behind my right eye. I collapsed onto the couch in the dark living room, the battle lost, the war suddenly feeling unwinnable.
The Breaking Point: A Small, Whirring Rebellion
After losing an entire afternoon of work to the migraine, I spent the evening plotting. I couldn’t afford to let Arthur’s atmospheric terrorism dictate my work schedule. Mark suggested I work from home, but the Byzantine tax manuscript required access to a specific set of reference books I kept at the office. Besides, the idea of letting him drive me out of a space I paid for felt like a complete surrender.
So I devised a new strategy, a localized solution. I dug out a small, six-inch desk fan from the back of our closet. It was sleek and black and, most importantly, nearly silent. It wasn’t a window. It wouldn’t disrupt his precious “positive pressure system.” It was a tiny bubble of personal climate control, a temperate micro-zone just for me. It was a compromise. It was reasonable.
The next morning, I set it up on the corner of my desk, plugged it into my power strip, and aimed its gentle breeze at my face. It was wonderful. The quiet hum was barely audible over the clatter of keyboards, and the cool air was just enough to keep the stuffiness at bay, to keep the blood vessels in my temples from staging another coup. I felt a small sense of triumph. I had found a loophole in his thermal dictatorship. I could work. I could focus. For the first time in a week, I felt a sense of calm productivity settle over me. Arthur glanced over once, his eyes lingering on the fan, but he didn’t say anything. A truce, I thought. A grudging, silent truce.
The Sabotage
I worked peacefully for nearly three hours, making significant headway on a chapter about ecclesiastical land grants. I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice the fan had stopped until the familiar feeling of stale, warm air began to settle on my skin. I reached over to check the switch, but it was already in the ‘on’ position. I followed the cord with my eyes. It snaked behind my monitor and down to the power strip on the floor.
The plug was lying on the carpet, its metal prongs glinting in the fluorescent light.
It hadn’t just been turned off. It had been physically unplugged.
My head snapped up and I scanned the room. And there was Arthur, at his desk, staring intently at his screen. But he wasn’t typing. He was perfectly still. As I watched, the barest hint of a smirk touched the corner of his mouth before vanishing. He knew I was looking. He had waited until I went to the restroom, snuck over to my desk, and disconnected my fan.
It was such a petty, childish, invasive act. He had entered my personal workspace, my four-foot bubble of rented territory, and tampered with my property. The rage I felt was no longer a slow simmer; it was a flash fire. The “friendly reminders,” the pseudo-scientific lectures—that was one thing. This was another. This was a direct, physical act of sabotage. My hands were shaking. I plugged the fan back in, the satisfying click of the plug entering the socket doing nothing to quell the inferno in my chest. The blades began to spin again, but the cool air felt mocking. The truce was over. There was no compromise with a person like this.
The Snap
The fan wasn’t enough anymore. My anger was making me hot, a furnace of indignation burning inside me. The air felt thick, heavy, unbreathable. I was suffocating in a room with a twenty-foot ceiling and a wall of windows. The sheer, idiotic irony of it was overwhelming.
I stood up. My chair scraped back with a loud screech that made a few people look up. I didn’t care. I walked directly to the window, my movements stiff with fury. I wasn’t going to just crack it this time. I was going to open it wide, to let the entire glorious, polluted, 65-degree atmosphere of the city pour into this hermetically sealed container of resentment.
I put both hands on the wooden sash and heaved it upward. It slid open with a satisfying groan. A gust of wind blew in, scattering a few papers on my desk. It felt like a baptism.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Arthur’s voice cut through the air, sharp and panicked.
I heard his squeaking shoes approaching at a near-run. I turned to face him as he arrived at my desk, his face blotchy and red. “I’m opening a window, Arthur,” I said, my voice low and trembling with a rage I could barely contain.
“I told you, the rules about the HVAC system—”
“I don’t give a damn about your imaginary rules!” The words erupted out of me, louder than I intended. A hush fell over our section of the office. Everyone was looking now.
His face hardened into a mask of cold fury. He saw the audience, and instead of backing down, he doubled down. He needed to win. He needed to enforce his rule.
“The sign says closed,” he spat. He reached past me, grabbing the top of the window sash with both hands.
My hand was still resting on the frame, my fingers curled over the top edge of the lower pane. I saw him grab the sash, but my brain didn’t process the speed of his motion, the sheer violence of it.
With a furious grunt, he yanked the window down.
CRUNCH.
A bolt of sharp, incandescent pain shot up my arm. The heavy wooden frame had slammed down directly onto the first two fingers of my right hand. I gasped, a strangled, high-pitched sound, and snatched my hand back.
He didn’t even flinch. He didn’t look at me, didn’t look at my hand. He just gave the now-locked window a final, firm push to make sure it was sealed. He looked at the stunned faces around us, then back at me, my eyes wide with shock and pain.
He leaned in close, his voice a low, vicious mutter meant only for me. “Rules are rules.”
The Sound of Silence
The world seemed to slow down. The quiet hum of the office—the keyboards, the low conversations, the distant whir of the coffee grinder—all of it faded into a dull, roaring silence in my ears. The only thing I could feel was the throbbing, crushing agony in my fingers.
I cradled my right hand to my chest. I could already see the skin under my nails turning a dark, ugly purple. The shock was wearing off, replaced by a wave of nausea and a white-hot, blinding rage that eclipsed everything I had felt before. He had hurt me. He had physically injured me to win an argument about the temperature.
Everyone was staring. Chloe was standing up, her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. David the accountant had taken his headphones off, his jaw slack. Even the pink-haired designer was looking over her monitor, her face pale. No one said a word. They were frozen, witnesses to something that had suddenly, shockingly crossed a line from office squabble to actual assault.
Arthur stood there for a moment, his chest puffed out, a bizarre look of righteous triumph on his face. He seemed to expect me to say something, to argue more. But I was speechless. I just stared at him, my vision blurring with tears of pain and fury. The sight of my face, of the silent, accusatory stares from everyone else, finally seemed to penetrate his bubble of self-justification. A flicker of something—not remorse, maybe panic—crossed his face. He turned abruptly and retreated to his desk, refusing to make eye contact with anyone.
Finally, Liam, the young manager, scurried over, his face a mess of anxiety. “Dana? Oh my god, are you—is your hand—what happened?”
I couldn’t answer. I just held up my throbbing, discolored fingers. The sight of them seemed to short-circuit his brain. He just stood there, wringing his hands, looking from my fingers to Arthur’s back and back again, utterly, completely useless.
In that moment, watching him dither, watching Arthur pretend to work, a cold, crystalline certainty settled over me. The pain in my hand was a clarion call. This was no longer a war of attrition. This was going to be a methodical, public, and deeply satisfying execution.
The Thermometer of Justice: The Blueprint for a Coup
I spent the rest of the day at an urgent care clinic, my hand wrapped in an ice pack. The diagnosis was two severely bruised fingers and a subungual hematoma under my index fingernail—a fancy term for a blood blister that made my finger look like a swollen purple grape. The doctor offered to drain it with a heated needle, an offer I politely, and queasily, declined. He gave me some heavy-duty ibuprofen and told me to take it easy for a few days.
But I had no intention of taking it easy. I went home, set up a bowl of ice water for my hand, and opened my laptop with my left. Mark was appalled when he got home, his pragmatism replaced by a protective fury. “That’s it, we’re calling them. We’re filing a complaint. That’s assault, Dana.”
“Shh, I’m working,” I said, my eyes glued to the screen.
I wasn’t working on Byzantine tax law. I was working on the downfall of Arthur.
My first stop was the website for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA. I clicked through the dense regulations until I found what I was looking for: “Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs.” There it was, in black and white. Section 2, Worker Participation. And better yet, a whole section on indoor air quality. It recommended temperature ranges for workplaces: 68-76°F. It talked about proper ventilation. It was all a bit vague, full of words like “should” and “recommend,” but it was official. It was a federal agency. It had weight. I printed the page.
Next, I pulled up The Hive’s membership agreement, the long, tedious document I had skimmed and signed months ago. I used the search function. “Disputes.” “Conduct.” “Safety.” I found the clause: “Members are expected to contribute to a safe, respectful, and productive environment for all. Any behavior deemed unsafe or disruptive to the community may result in a review of membership.”
It was perfect. He hadn’t just been annoying; he’d been unsafe and disruptive. And he had violated the core principle of a shared workspace.
Mark watched me, a slow grin spreading across his face. “You’re not just going to get him in trouble, are you?”
“Getting him in trouble is temporary,” I said, my fingers flying across the keyboard. “I’m going to make his position completely, structurally, and democratically untenable. He loves rules. So I’m going to give him some.”
My last stop was the website for a local hardware store. I found what I needed in the gardening section. A simple, ten-dollar, analog wall thermometer with a big, easy-to-read dial. I added it to my cart for in-store pickup. The plan was complete. I had my evidence, my legal framework, and my secret weapon.
The Arsenal of Reason
The next morning, I walked into The Hive with a large tote bag. My bandaged fingers throbbed with a dull ache, a constant reminder of my mission. Arthur was already there, of course, ensconced at his desk. He pointedly refused to look at me as I passed. The ambient temperature was already creeping toward the mid-seventies.
I didn’t go to my desk. I went straight to Liam, who was standing by the coffee machine looking young and overwhelmed.
“Liam,” I said, my voice calm and firm. He flinched when he saw my bandaged hand.
“Dana, I am so, so sorry about yesterday. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do. I have to write an incident report…”
I held up my good hand to stop him. “I’m not here to talk about an incident report. I’m here to offer you a permanent solution to an ongoing HR and safety problem that is affecting the entire community.”
His eyes widened. I had his attention. I had used his corporate-speak.
I laid my printed OSHA sheet on the counter. “This is the federally recommended temperature range for a productive office environment. It is currently almost 80 degrees in here. This is not a matter of preference; it’s a matter of professional standards.”
I then pointed to the clause in the membership agreement I had highlighted. “This is our community’s code of conduct. The constant, unilateral control of the thermostat and windows by a single member, culminating in a physical injury, is a clear violation of the safety and respect clause.”
Finally, I reached into my tote bag and pulled out the secret weapon: the analog thermometer. “And this,” I said, placing it on the counter, “is a tool for objective truth.”
Liam stared at the items—the official-looking document, the contract, the simple thermometer—as if I had just laid out the holy trinity of conflict resolution. He was speechless.
“I have a proposal,” I said. “It’s fair, it’s democratic, and it takes the burden of enforcement off of you.”
The Referendum
Five minutes later, Liam stood on a chair near the center of the office, clapping his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Uh, hey guys? Hive members? Can I have your attention for just a second?”
The room quieted. People took off their headphones. I stood beside Liam, my arms crossed, my tote bag at my feet. Across the room, Arthur looked up from his monitor, his face a thundercloud of suspicion. He saw me standing with Liam and knew this was about him.
“So,” Liam began, his voice shaky but growing stronger as he read from the notes I’d helped him prepare. “It’s become clear that we have an ongoing issue with the office climate, both literally and figuratively.” A few people chuckled nervously. “It’s affecting productivity and, as of yesterday, it has become a safety concern.” He didn’t look at me or Arthur, but everyone knew what he meant.
“To resolve this once and for all,” he continued, holding up my printout, “we’re going to align with OSHA recommendations. They suggest a temperature range of 68 to 76 degrees for workplaces.” He paused. “I’m proposing we hold an immediate, on-the-spot vote. The new house rule will be to maintain a temperature between 70 and 72 degrees. Windows can be cracked for fresh air as needed, as long as it doesn’t create a major draft for your immediate neighbors.”
A murmur of approval went through the room. Chloe was grinning from ear to ear. David gave me a subtle thumbs-up.
“All in favor of this new policy, please raise your hand,” Liam called out.
A forest of hands shot up. I counted at least twenty.
“All opposed?”
One hand went up. Arthur’s. He held it high, a lone pillar of defiance, his jaw set, his eyes burning with outrage. He stared around the room, at all the hands that had been raised against him, as if he couldn’t comprehend the mutiny. He had been so sure of his righteousness, so certain that his comfort was the default, the correct state of being. Now, he was seeing the truth. He wasn’t the Warden; he was the outlier.
The Tyrant’s Glass Cage
“The motion passes,” Liam announced, looking relieved. “The new rule is effective immediately.” He hopped down from the chair and, with a new sense of purpose, walked to the wall by the thermostat. He took a thumbtack from a nearby corkboard and pinned my OSHA sheet to the wall. Then, he took the brand-new thermometer out of its plastic packaging and hung it on a nail right next to the thermostat’s digital display. The bright red needle pointed accusingly at 78.
“I’ll adjust this now to 71,” Liam said, tapping the button. The air conditioning kicked on with a satisfying rumble.
But he wasn’t done. He pulled out his phone. “And to prevent any further… disagreements, I’m enabling the remote keypad lockout on the system. From now on, if an adjustment needs to be made, you can ask me, or one of the two other designated members I’m granting access to.” He scrolled through his phone. “That will be Chloe from the dev team, and David from accounting.”
It was the final, perfect checkmate. Not only had Arthur’s power been stripped away, it had been redistributed to the very people who had suffered most under his reign. His face, which had been red with anger, went pale. He looked utterly, completely defeated.
Without a word, he began to pack his things. He unplugged his monitor, bundled his cables, and slid his laptop into its case. For a moment, I thought he was leaving for good. But he didn’t head for the exit. He walked over to the row of small, glass-walled phone booths at the far end of the office—the tiny, unventilated boxes people used for private calls.
He went into one, closed the door, and set up his workstation on the tiny shelf. He sat there, stewing in his self-imposed, sweater-friendly hotbox, a deposed king in his glass castle of exile.
I walked back to my desk. I sat down in my chair, the cool air from the vents washing over me like a benediction. I reached over, my bruised fingers aching slightly, and I pushed the window open. A clean, crisp breeze filled my workspace, smelling of freedom. I took a deep breath, opened my manuscript, and got back to work.
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