It was a ludicrous request but one that drew his attention

“You want us to do what?” he said.

He had quite happily been sitting there, minding his own business, lost in his own little world of procrastination, typing random words into Wikipedia, instead of getting on with the mundane work that he should have been doing, when he heard the request. Well, he didn’t hear it as such, as he never listened and due to deafness in one ear, rarely heard anything unless he concentrated on listening and tilted his head and pointed his good ear in the right direction.

It was a ludicrous request but one that drew his attention, and it penetrated his deafness and general aloofness due to the absolute absurdness of it, which is why he piped up and asked for it to be repeated. Well, he had heard correctly, despite his dodgy right ear and general lack of concentration, and it was indeed a very daft thing to ask anybody to do, let alone a whole department, especially as each one of them was as lazy and lackadaisical as the other.

Everybody stopped what they were doing and looked at each other in disbelief, heads turning this way and that, as they searched each other’s blank expressions hoping to make some sense of the preposterous request by scanning the faces of those nearest to them, each waiting for someone else to make the first move, either too scared or too selfish to take the lead.

Well, someone had to go first, and as he was the only one to open his mouth and say something, all eyes eventually turned to him. He could feel his ears turning red under the scrutiny of twenty co-workers, one goldfish, and a poster of Shawaddywaddy that had been glued to the wall by an unknown prankster the Christmas before last (nobody really cared who had done it), staring at him.

Slowly, he rose from his chair and stepped away from his desk, looked nervously around him, then with growing confidence headed towards the open space in the middle of the office, one by one, the rest of them stood up and started to follow him.

Just then the fire alarm went off and they all calmly made their way outside to stand in the pouring rain and watch the building burn instead.

Prompted by this page