At 12:19, a scream came from the conference room hallway.
And when I stepped out of my cubicle, I saw exactly how avocado destroys careers.
The scream did not sound injured.
It sounded outraged.
People came out of cubicles and meeting rooms all at once, drawn by the magnetic force of office disaster. I stood up slowly, already knowing on some instinctive level that whatever I saw at the end of the hallway was going to answer several questions at once.
The conference room door was open.
Inside stood Melissa Kane from business development, one hand braced on the polished table, the other clutching a stack of presentation handouts she had clearly meant to distribute before things went wrong. Melissa was one of those women who moved through offices as though life had arranged itself around her convenience. She was polished, pretty, quick with names, and very, very good at sounding offended before anyone else had fully processed a problem.
At that moment, avocado was everywhere.
A green smear streaked the front of her ivory blouse. More of it clung to the corner of her mouth and one side of her jaw, where she had apparently tried to wipe it away and only spread it farther. But the real damage was on the conference table itself. Her laptop sat open beside a pile of signed merger documents, and across the top page—where two executives from a client firm were now staring in disbelief—ran a bright, greasy arc of mashed avocado, as if someone had signed the paperwork with guacamole.
Melissa looked up and saw me in the doorway.
