It’s come to my attention that rivalries have developed between our offices in San Francisco, Austin, and Toronto. I want to make sure everyone in the organization knows I hear you and I take these concerns seriously. Managers in our fantastic San Francisco office have expressed frustrations that some of their counterparts in Austin are dim-witted Neanderthals who seem to be drunk during the work day. When I heard these allegations, I immediately stopped the conference call I was hosting, got on a plane, and personally investigated the matter. In speaking with the managers at our cutting-edge Austin office, I gathered more information on their experiences working with their counterparts in Toronto, who, according to the Austin team, are lazy, moronic dumbasses who don’t know how to use computers and wouldn’t be qualified to work at a fucking Burger King. One of my goals as CEO is to foster an environment where every employee is empowered to do their best work, and so I made it a top priority to dive deeper into these worrisome claims. I flew to our world-class office in Toronto and met with the managers there, who let me know that their counterparts in San Francisco are inbred jackasses with under-developed brains, who must have been born on some sort of nuclear swamp to be as stone-cold stupid as they are; and on top of their natural idiocy, they have zero work ethic and seem to clock in one hour a day while spending the rest of their time bitching about everyone else instead of doing any fucking work.

With all this great feedback to pore through, I cleared my calendar and reviewed each individual complaint myself. I’m proud to say that after this thorough analysis of everyone’s valid concerns, I’ve come to what I hope is a productive conclusion that will guide the future of this fantastic organization. What I learned is that every single one of you, across all three offices, is a birdbrained dunce, an incompetent dope as sluggish as you are thick-headed. Barely-functional simpletons who create far more problems than you solve. I have no idea how any of you dimwits make it to the office without dying each morning. But this finding isn’t anything to be ashamed of. It’s not just us. Everyone working at a desk in an office anywhere the world is an easily-frustrated, constantly-confused nitwit who tricked someone into employing them. This is who people are; this is what work is.

The path forward is not to streamline communication or adopt new project-management software. No, our future is all about lowering our expectations of each other. Stop setting impossible goals for your colleagues like reading more than two sentences in an email or preparing anything before showing up to a meeting they scheduled. From now on, the expectation we have for each other will be that no one knows how to read, and no one knows where they are, or why they’re here. At all times, expect your co-workers to be baffled, out of the loop, and mad. Plan ahead for your colleagues blaming you for their ineptitude. We are all overly-confident dullards who got lucky. So let’s cut each other some slack, embrace our shared incapacity, and understand that simple tasks and basic projects are going to take a very long time here, because, again, we’re all stupid and terrible at our jobs.

I look forward to working alongside you on many more frustrating projects, and to one day dying in an office fire caused by one of you making a mistake with your USB-powered mug warmer.

Tony Award-winning actress Sutton Foster sings the final notes from a verse of “I Think I Got You Beat,” during the first dress rehearsal of Broadway’s Shrek the Music, laughing. “And then,” she struggles to say over her giddy chuckles, “enter: fart machine.”

Brian d’Arcy James, her costar, laughs with her, both of them looking forward to hearing the sound effects the crew has come up with for this outrageous song, in which Shrek and Fiona bond over their traumatic pasts and an exchange of comically forceful flatulence, which the cast expects will send children in the audience into convulsive fits of laughter.

The director, Jason Moore, raises an eyebrow at his stars from his seat in the third row of the Broadway Theatre. “Keep going,” he says.

Sutton Foster says, “Are we skipping the farts?”

“What?” Jason says.

Sutton turns to Brian. A stern, confused look on his big, green face.

Jason rolls his eyes. “You two didn’t prepare?”

“We’ve nailed every note,” Brian says, growing defensive. “Every single note.” He points his plump green finger at Sutton. “She’s been flawless, and I haven’t made a mistake.”

“So continue,” Jason says. “Pass gas as the script specifies.”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking,” Sutton says. “There have got to be a hundred farts for each of us written into this song. Of course those will be part of the backing track. Right?”

“Now I can’t tell if you’re joking,” Jason says. “You two signed contracts to play these lead roles. This is Broadway. We perform live. If you want to put on a costume and dance to a backing track, I’m sure the Chuck E. Cheese in Parsippany would be happy to have you.”

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Brian barks. “Where’s the sound designer?”

Jason spins in his seat and points a stern finger at the man at the mixing board. “No,” he shouts. He turns back to his stars. “It’s an Equity thing. It’s against union rules to give scripted lines that belong to actors to the computer.”

“These aren’t lines,” Brian says.

“They’re treated as lines in the script and you have to perform them, live, from your body, with no mechanical help, in order to preserve acting jobs.”

“What if I don’t want this job,” Brian whispers.

“What was that?” Jason shouts. “Say it so the whole class can hear.”

Sutton’s head sinks. She squeezes her eyes shut, crinkles her nose into a mousy pinch. “Did you hear that?”

“Sutton, don’t indulge him,” Brian says.

“She farted?” Jason says.

“Why are you asking me?”

“Yes, I farted,” Sutton says.

“I heard nothing. This is theatre, not a movie. There are no close-ups. You have to project to the back row.”

“This isn’t physically possible,” Brian says. “You’re asking us to pass gas loud enough for seventeen hundred people to hear, hundreds of times in a row, eight shows a week.”

“I’m sorry,” Jason sneers, “is that not your signature at the bottom of this lucrative contract?”

Brian rubs his bald, green head, the thick prosthetics glued on tight.

“I had faith you two would have prepared,” Jason says. “But I always plan ahead.” He mutters into a walkie-talkie and two young stagehands each push out rolling carts holding 20-gallon metal pots. “Stale sardine soup with old beef broth and cauliflower. Eat it in large, gasping bites, swallowing air with every nasty sardine.”

Brian folds his arms, glares at Jason. But he knows no one takes a hunger striker seriously from a man in a bulbous green nose and burlap sack dress.

Sutton thanks the stagehand for handing her a ladle and bowl. She scoops out a small serving and holds a plastic spoon to it. “Theatre is a team sport,” she says, wincing as she swallows the bite. A loud squeal from her cramping stomach screams out towards the rafters.

“Good!” Jason says, applauding. “Come on, Brian, do you really want a reputation as a diva who makes a show all about him? Have some soup. Eat up.”

Sutton turns to him while scraping out her second helping. “It’s not so bad once you get used to the acid.” She coughs.

Brian stands still, weighing the future of his career.

Sutton huffs in mouthfuls of air between bites, swallowing them down, and motions to the cast and crew that she’s about to do something. She leans to one side, lifts the hem of her green dress, and unvalves a full-bodied zipper that sings, taking full advantage of the acoustics of the 1924 Italian Renaissance theatre. The stagehand beside Sutton vomits into her hands.

Jason applauds. “Good, Sutton. Good. Brian? Are you a professional member of this team? Or are you a tempestuous child?”

Sutton smiles at Brian, her lips shining with yellow sardine oil, while she lay on the stage in the fetal position, swallowing more air. “It’s okay,” she tell him as her cramping stomach moans. “It’s our job to respect the integrity of the playwright’s words. We’re in this together.”

Brian knows his career will be ruined by quitting, but it will also be ruined by participating in this grotesque carnival act. He is trapped, suffocating under the green prosthetics.

But Sutton’s can-do spirit is infectious, and he does not want to let her down.

Brian serves himself a sloppy bowl of sardine soup, gags it down, and lifts his leg to birth a deep, flappy groaner that rumbles a package of Twizzlers off the concession stand shelf.

Jason rises to his feet, applauding madly. “Good, Brian. Good. Now ninety-nine more from each of you.”

Sutton and Brian wolf down gallons of soup and air — each bite fouler than the last as the theatre’s atmosphere grows thick and brown. They have accepted their careers will end in this smoldering embarrassment. But they’re being paid handsomely, and they will go down with the repulsive ship together.

*

Four months later, Sutton and Brian receive Tony Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Actor in a musical. Jason Moore does not receive a nomination for Best Director.

At the end of that evening’s show — Sutton and Brian’s underwear blown-out and burnt like battlefield flags, their stomachs shredded from all that rotten fish — the lead performers approach Jason backstage and thank him for pushing them out of their comfort zone. They tell him he deserved a Tony nomination, that their success is due to his leadership.

Jason shakes his head. “I’m merely a steward of the story and the characters.” He lays down sideways on the dirty floor and curls his knees up into his stomach, huffing in air. “It’s all about maintaining the integrity of live theatre.” He rolls onto his back and pulls both legs into the air, rips off firecracker snaps of tight, hot gas, as Sutton and Brian watch sloppy brown dots stain the seat of his white linen pants like stars in the night sky. “It’s not about awards for me,” he says, standing and jumping up and down to shake the hard pieces of feces down his pant legs. “It’s about dignity.”

“How much would you charge to wash every window in New York City?”

“This is one of those famous abstract questions, to see how I work through a problem.”

“You’ve done your homework.”

“Great. Let’s say there are about eight million people in New York City. I’ll estimate for each one, there are four windows at home and four windows at work. So eight times eight million is sixty-four million. Charge five dollars a window, and I’m at three hundred twenty million dollars, which seems like plenty of revenue to operate a window washing business.”

“Very good. Who is the man behind you?”

“We’re on the HR floor at Google. He looks disheveled, unkempt. So my bet is he’s not part of the HR staff, and is a programmer here for an interview.”

“Why is he waving a gun?”

“Considering how unprofessional that would be in any office setting, particularly a job interview, I would surmise he is a permitted and responsible firearm owner who bonded over an interest in ballistics with his interviewer, and he is letting him or her have a look.”

“He’s yelling at everyone. He’s making them all get down on the floor. Jesus Christ.”

“Perhaps yoga has come up as a shared interest during the interview, and he’s demonstrating his leadership skills by showing the team the child’s pose.”

“I’m serious. Turn around.”

“I read online you’re not supposed to fall for any attempts to distract you during these tech interviews. I am laser-focused, sir. You, and the Google codebase, have my full attention.”

“For god’s sake, lock the door. Why is he marching towards the office?”

“I’d say he wants something or someone who is inside.”

The man with the gun kicks in the door, pushes the interviewer into the wall, holds a pistol to his chin. “Tell me your admin password or I’ll blow your fucking brain out.”

The interviewer cries. The gunman fires a round into the ceiling. You notice the interviewer rip a USB key from his belt loop, stuff it in his pocket.

“What is the password, dammit?” He turns to you, aims the gun into your face. “How do I access the source code?”

“My educated guess is that Google has more security than a simple password. He just hid a USB thumb drive in his pocket. I’ll go ahead and surmise that that’s a physical key needed to log into the server.”

The gunman shoves the interviewer over the table, digs into his pocket, removes the USB drive. He stomps back into the shrieking huddle of employees on the floor. One of them makes a break for the door; the gunman shoots him in the back. He sits at a computer, inserts the USB drive, and logs into the database.

He plugs in another USB hard drive.

“How do I copy the code?”

“This is one thorough interview,” you say, walking to his side. “Obviously, I haven’t been hired yet. But based on my previous experience, I’d expect there to be an admin portal you need to access, and then have a supervisor approve. That woman over there, hiding behind the sofa. I believe the color on her badge indicates she is a VP, and her fingerprint on the keyboard’s sensor will unlock full data-transfer privileges.”

He fires a bullet just over the woman’s head, and she crawls over, weeping. The gunman slaps her finger onto the sensor, unlocking access. He copies large amounts of code onto his hard drive while pacing the room aiming his gun at everyone.

“I had high expectations, but I’m impressed,” you say as the staff weep and hold each other. “So, what are we talking in terms of vacation days?”

When the files have transferred, he ejects his drive, fires once more into the ceiling, then disappears down a stairwell. As the door closes, you notice a Microsoft Bing logo embroidered on the back of his ski mask.

The interviewer limps towards you. “You gave that thief terabytes of trade secrets. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Wrong? So I don’t have the job yet?”

“Surely you know why we wouldn’t hire you.”

“Well, from your perspective… I suppose the reason might be that in my estimation of the numbers of windows in New York City, I assumed eight million people, an estimate of the population. But, of course, that fails to account for tourists and the large number of hotel windows. I apologize for my mistake.”

The police enter, shove you against the wall, handcuff you.

“Thank you all for the opportunity. It was great to meet everyone, and I look forward to our paths crossing again sometime.”