There was a palpable sense of tension when Sacha pushed open the door of the magazine's office the next week and ascended the staircase. She was once again facing off against the deadline for her weekly column; yet the tension in the room when she climbed out of the dark stairwell and into the spilling light of the office above it was something else: something external.

Where normally there would be a hushed buzz in the room, occasionally broken by somebody's raised voice, now there was only the hush: the quiet tapping of computer keys and the humming of the machines themselves. Sacha scanned the room for Rona: she didn't yet know anybody else there well enough to approach them unannounced. She saw Rona hunched behind a laptop near the centre of the room.

"What's up?" she asked.

"I'm still pissed off about that dickhead for standing me up last week" explained Rona.

"Oh, I see." It wasn't actually a response to the question Sacha thought she was asking, but now she realised why everybody else there was so quiet: Rona had them all under the thumb at the best of times, so now that she was in a bad mood it must have been enough to make some of the magazine's regular writers almost fear for their safety. Sacha glanced around the room again, to confirm this, but nobody met her eye: those few people who were in the office had their heads down, buried in their work. She supposed that was confirmation enough.

She tactfully left Rona alone and walked over to a table near the doorway where the booking sheets for the computers were kept: the next free slot was in half an hour; she put her name down and then sat down on an old sofa that somebody had scavenged during hard-rubbish week long before Sacha had arrived at the magazine. The sofa was angular and uncomfortable, with too many soft spots in some areas and not enough in others; but it was all there was, so she couldn't really afford to be picky.

Likewise with how she entertained herself while she waited for the computer to become free: Rona clearly wasn't in a mood to be conversed with, so Sacha resigned herself to picking distastefully through the old magazines stacked up on the table in front of the sofa. It was like being in a doctor's waiting-room - and she made a mental note to herself that that was yet another thing she had to do now that she was no longer living at home: find a good doctor.

As she leafed through the glossy magazine, which was more ads than content, she took an obstinate pride in the fact that she didn't know who any of the people mentioned in it were. This was no exaggeration either: literally none of the names were familiar. She would be the first to admit that her celebrity knowledge was low to non-existent, but even so she thought she should at least be able to recognise some of the names. But the magazine she was half-heartedly glancing at was strangely devoid of any of the "big names". It mystified her: perhaps they hadn't been doing anything interesting in the past month. But when did they ever?

She noticed that somebody had gone through the magazine with a black biro and written neatly at the bottom of a number of the photos the word "Photoshopped." She squinted at the photos, but even with her glasses her eyes weren't trained enough to recognise which images had been altered and which hadn't. At least now she knew what was meant by the piece of graffiti on the bathroom wall which read: "Who is the Photoshop bandit?" Or she thought she knew, but she couldn't really be sure. Sometimes she got the feeling - and writing a column about blogs, of all things, only reinforced it - that great swathes of contemporary popular culture had passed her by. But then, when she flicked through the magazine, she realised that this wasn't something she felt especially concerned about.

She dropped the magazine wearily back on the table. Just reading it was enough to make her feel like she had some kind of parasite in her brain. But there was nothing else to look at: it was still twenty minutes until the computer was due to be hers, and that was assuming the written schedule would be adhered to. Gazing with boredom at the stack of magazine in front of her she noticed a corner of paper sticking out from beneath the pile. With curiosity she moved aside the magazines - they were surprisingly heavy - to reveal the paper. It was an A4 sheet, marked by at least half a dozen different pens and hands, and across the top, in neat block capitals, was written: "WORD ON THE STREET: STAFF BIRTHDAYS." She looked at it with surprise: nobody had told her about this list, and it looked like it had been buried beneath the magazines for some time. At the top of the sheet was the date of Rona's birthday.