The birthday celebration was fun while it lasted - but it didn't last all day, and after thirty or forty minutes people started to drift away, like an ice floe breaking piece by piece. When Sacha returned to her desk and sat down to resume work she found, maddeningly, that her train of thought had been thoroughly disrupted, and she couldn't for the life of her remember what she'd been working on before being beckoned away by her supervisor, so intensely of the moment had her work been. The birthday cake and joke presents for Melanie - who Sacha now knew, at least by sight - and the numerous laughs (vicarious for Sacha - she hadn't been there long enough to understand most of the jokes) had been fun - but they'd set her back perhaps several hours.

When lunchtime rolled around she was still quite full from the cake and other food, so she decided to stay at her desk and work through her lunch-break instead. In the public service this wouldn't have been allowed, at least not officially, but here there appeared to be no such restriction. In fact, her supervisor was more likely to be delighted than appalled to see her doing it - if he'd been around to see it.
However by mid-afternoon Sacha was hungry, but it was too late: there was no flexi-time here that she could borrow against to go out and get food, so she had to content herself with a snack from the snack-room. There were only chocolate bars - by this late stage of the week most of the snacks had been eaten - so that's what she had to eat, even though she felt like eating something savoury. At least by now she'd been working here long enough to have scoped out some of the late-opening bakeries nearby: she assured herself that she'd try to find something in one of them when she left work.

This was how she got through the rest of the day: on snacks and promises, working on the database while the air-conditioning struggled against the five-dozen computers punching heat into the confined space of the office. When the working day finally finished - when her supervisor walked past once again and said "Goodness, Sacha, haven't you gone home yet?" - she switched off her computer, hovering in a half-crouch above her chair waiting to make sure it switched off properly (sometimes it didn't, and she'd come into the office the next day to find it still on and an error message waiting, patiently, for her instruction to proceed) and when the screen finally turned blank, she stretched her legs, picked up her second-hand briefcase, and walked out of the office, past the cleaners already moving in through the unlocked door with industrial vacuum-cleaners strapped to their backs like oxygen tanks.

She was no longer hungry, it came and went in cycles, so she walked down the street towards the tram stop - how strange that the trams of Melbourne, once so alien, were now such second-nature to her - when her 'phone rang, clattering in agitation against the keys in her briefcase. Glancing down the road to see if there was a tram on the horizon, she unzipped her case just a hand-width and pulled the 'phone out, not looking at its display as she pressed the large green button to answer it.

"Hello?"

"Hi, sis!"