A Bad Morning

Waking up early in a cold Johannesburg winter almost made Kenneth miss prison. 

The only cure for a winter morning was a hot shower. But he had been robbed of having any for the last six months. His landlord’s promises to fix the building’s geyser were proving to be worth less than sand in the desert. Still, every day since summer, he had woken with the naïve hope that it would no longer be an issue. 

Every day, disappointment greeted him.

After almost a year on parole, employment opportunities had proven hard to come by without a criminal record. With one, it was close to impossible. Yet by some miracle, he found a job. 

Kenneth's boss, Handre Smith, was a man whose son was struggling with a drug addiction.  This made him sympathetic to Kenneth’s circumstances—enough to offer him a job. But it meant early mornings for the commute to work. And it also meant Smith was all but forcing Kenneth to listen to tales about the failures and troubles regarding his son’s affliction. 

It was more often than not tiresome.

It puts money in the bank, Kenneth thought, closing the so-called “hot water” tap until only a single drop of cold disappointment dripped out.

It was only six hours into the morning, and already a bad day.

Kenneth picked out the clothes he would wear to work and plugged in the iron. It was just as the iron began heating that the electricity went out. It was just as the machines began heating that the electricity went out. He prayed it was just the tripped switch in his apartment, and was answered by the emergency generator in the building next door growling.

No elevator today, huh?

His apartment was on the 15th floor of the building.

With only cold bread and peanut butter in his belly, instead of the eggs and bacon he planned for breakfast, he descended too many stairs to count. 

Whilst on the last few steps of the final flight of stairs, Kenneth noticed a man beginning to ascend them as well. The man held a cup of coffee and was fixated on his phone. Before Kenneth could say excuse me, the man slipped on something, and his coffee spilled all over Kenneth’s white work shirt—Kenneth screamed at the burning liquid on his chest. 

It was just hot enough to hurt, yet cool enough not to scar him. It did stain Kenneth’s shirt, though. He made the mistake of wearing an undershirt instead of a jacket. The brown stain on the substantial part of his white button-up shirt would do a great job advertising that mistake to the entire world.  

The clumsy man apologized profusely, offering to buy him a new shirt and a million other empty gestures. But all Kenneth could think of was how long it would take to climb back up and all those stairs and change his shirt.

Not when the bus leaves in 8 minutes.

When Kenneth managed to escape that blunderer’s apologies with insincere reassurances, he hurried himself to the bus, cursing under his breath all the way.

It was a horrible day.

The trip to work had always felt more like a commute and a half. The stares from passengers boarding the bus made it feel longer somehow. Eventually, something else caught the passengers' eyes, and their attentions were fixed on that.

Up the road, there was a motor vehicle collision. Far off in the distance, the smoke from a burning, collapsed truck filled the air as the truck itself filled the road. There was no driving around it, even without the police vehicles and ambulances on the road. The bus driver announced that they would have to change routes. 

The commute was now thirty minutes longer.

Kenneth had the quietest tantrum possible. That would be the third time he was late in the last two weeks and the second time this week, and it was only Wednesday.

It was a terrible day.

Just before he entered the building where the offices of Smithy’s and Co were located, Kenneth took a moment to calm himself.

“It was just a bad morning. It doesn’t have to be a bad day,” Kenneth muttered. 

It was almost a prayer. 

A prayer one could justify even an atheist making, as this morning felt like it was punctuating a terrible month. Stress had its hands around his neck, and it squeezed a lot harder today. 

“I’m not a coffee expert,” a voice beside him remarked, “but I’m fairly sure the goal is to get it into your mouth.”

The voice belonged to Thandi, his co-worker, and the best thing about working at Smithy’s.

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time someone pours it all over me,” he managed.

It was hard not to stare at her sometimes. 

He had forgotten to respond when she spoke more than once when they first met, and God alone could judge him for it with her looking like that.

 She wore her classic pencil skirt and coloured button-up shirt combination. The beads on the ends of her shoulder-length box braids clinked with every motion. They always announced the coming of a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face and a beautiful smile. 

“If you’re gonna be late, you should at least have taken the time to change your shirt or at least put a jacket over it,” she said, poking the stained part of his shirt.

“Yeah, wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the fashion whilst being on parole and all.”

That drew a laugh from her, but the hope it stirred in him died with the reminder that she’s engaged. Her diamond engagement ring caught the light as she tried to stifle her laughter with her left hand. The fact that she was comfortable enough around him to find humour in Kenneth being an ex-con was more than a win. 

Everyone at work knew that Kenneth was a former prisoner. His boss had made a point of letting everyone know. On his first day, Smith basically introduced him as "Kenneth the Ex-convict" to everyone in his department. 

"Everybody makes mistakes as a young man," Smith had said on Kenneth's orientation day. "You just got to make sure you don't make them work for me." 

Kenneth was able to force a laugh to chorus his office mates' own forced laughter, but none of them were nearly as loud as Mr. Smith. 

Eventually, the word about him spread through the office, and with it, curiosity. He had managed to brush off everyone who asked him what landed him in prison. Everyone but Thandi, whose persistent questioning led to his only work friendship. 

Kenneth had told her it was reckless driving, and that was true to some extent. He did not plan to let anyone at work know any more than that, especially her.

Kenneth walked Thandi to the accounting department, where she worked, on his way to his own workspace in the filing department. She told him about her wedding plans on the way, and Kenneth pretended to care. After a promise to speak at lunch, Kenneth headed to the filing room. 

The workload was pretty severe during this time of year. He was already behind on work, so it felt like he was behind by a whole week’s worth of work. On top of that, two other members of their department had been absent the entire week, so today it had only been him and Victor in the department, and they had to pick up their slack.

No lunch break again today.

He had grown accustomed to working through lunch. Though the smells of Indian food coming from the computer engineering department threatened to distract him, he managed to push away the temptation to take a break. Eventually, a bigger distraction came waltzing into his department’s door, one that betrayed his nature to ignore.

Thandi sat at Kenneth’s desk, facing him, and placed the Chinese takeout she had with her on the only part of the desk not covered in papers, files, or other stationery. She must have noticed that he was busy, so she kept to herself. However, her own nature eventually betrayed her discipline.

“Do you have social media?” she asked, opening her lunch. The smell of beef and fried noodles filled the air.

“…Uh, no. Well, actually, I do, but I don’t really use them mostly.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to give me more than that, Ken.”

“It’s like…” Kenneth shuffled a file to the side and faced her. “It makes me feel like I’m in prison all over again. It makes me feel like we live in a surveillance state, but it's voluntary, so nobody seems to notice, and no one seems to be able to escape it, whether you are online or not. Everyone’s being judged for everything they do, what they like, and who they follow. It’s like we’ve copied all the worst aspects of East Asian Confucian society but without all the benefits-”

“Whoa, okay. Save it for your pep talk. Sheesh. I just wanted to show some videos I came across recently.”

Kenneth sighed, already exhausted by the suggestion. His focus went back to his work. Well, at least most of it. He could not help but humour Thandi a bit.

“Is this going to be one of those unfunny videos that coworkers show you where you feel pressured to laugh just to be polite?” he asked, eventually.

“I am that type of coworker to you, Kenneth?”

“Don’t know. Haven’t decided yet.”

“Ok, what if I could guarantee that you will at least find it interesting?”

“Is it a picture of Megan Fox in Fenty lingerie?”

“No.”

“Then I wouldn’t make that guarantee if I were you.”

A silence held between them whilst she chewed her chow mien, but was broken again after she swallowed.

“Ok, what if I threaten to tell HR that you sexually harassed me during lunch, and that watching this was the only way to get me not to report you. Would you watch it then?”

That actually got Kenneth to put down his work for a moment and look Thandi in the eye. They held their usual playful glint.

“Okay, I’ll bite. When did I do that?”

“Just now.”

“Be more specific.”

“Ken, you asked me to show pictures of half-naked women on my phone. Do you think that’s appropriate workplace behaviour? You heard him say that, right, Victor? You’ll be my witness, right?”

Victor only grunted in response.

“Huh, you got me there, Thandi.”

“Oh, please, like that’s actually hard to do.”

Thandi pulled out her phone, and after a few seconds of scrolling, she faced the screen at him. Her Instagram had a video of a frustrated Kenneth with a coffee on his chest, grumbling to himself as he walked out of his apartment building.

“Wait, there’s more.”

She showed him another two videos of him throwing a fit. 

One where he was in the bus. Another was Kenneth outside this building, trying to collect himself when she approached him. 

In all the videos, he looked frantic and ridiculous. What was more ridiculous was the number of likes on each post. The third video had the fewest likes. However, it still had over two hundred thousand likes. 

A hashtag was being repeated in the most popular comments under each video.

#MiserableMorningMan.

“Told ya it would interest you.”

The chair screeched as she rose from it. “Lunch’s over, I’ll have to see you later.”

He could only muster a weak goodbye as his phone sucked him in and held him for the rest of the day. Even on the bus home, all he could do was scroll through comments. He was going viral everywhere. Twitter. TikTok. Facebook. Everyone was talking about Miserable Morning Man in every language he could find. One Japanese post on Twitter had fifty thousand likes. Kenneth’s curiosity compelled him to press the translate button.

“This guy is so funny when he’s upset. I wish he would always have a bad day, and someone recorded it lol.”

The post alone made him uneasy, but the replies were much worse. People were inventing scenarios about how they could provoke him to anger. One person suggested putting laxatives in his food if he went to his restaurant. Another suggested posing as a barber and cutting off Kenneth's dreadlocks.  

Someone even claimed they knew which suburb he lived in based on the bus he had taken…

Climbing fifteen flights of stairs was enough to make Kenneth collapse the moment he saw his bed. It gave him more comfort than anything else had that day...

Hopefully, they’ll all forget about me tomorrow.

The morning brought more disappointments than just cold water.