This recent short story made the top cut for consideration at Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, but was eventually released back to me (with some glowing comments from the readers). However, I decided not to pursue this little piece of aburdity with other publications; very few magazines have a place for this sort of “slipstream” humorous fantasy. I wrote it because, well, the idea of obsession with fonts just caught my interest. Hope it catches yours.
One afternoon at work, Maxwell Muggins’s non-proportional font got out of control and took over the office.
Maxwell Muggins worked as a copyeditor for a large, dull, conventional woman’s magazine. Maxwell understood no more about women than did any middle-age man, and that meant he understood less than nothing about what appeared in the pages of the magazine on which he worked. But he didn’t need to, since his job was making sure that the all the writers followed the laws of noun-verb agreement, obeyed the structures of ‘that-which’ (such a delicate distinction), and kowtowed the importance of ‘it’s’ and ‘its’ (not a delicate distinction, and why did it seem that most writers had napped during that basic part of freshman comps?). Maxwell also had a sideline job at the rag, and that was to hammer out stylistic guideline sheets for the new writers and updated ones for the crones who had written for the magazine since Ladybird Johnson was in the White House. These style sheets were bland and to-the-point reminders to the writers to please, please use serial commas and place punctuation inside the quotation marks when quoting a single word at the end of a sentence. Maxwell enjoyed typing these memos, because they were the only long documents he got to write. The rest of his work consisted of nothing more than red-pen marks and marginalia.
However, Maxwell’s boss, Tammy Tyrant, had sapped some of the joy out of his occasional style sheets. Rumor claimed that Tammy Tyrant’s last name was actually Tyrone, but the nickname had glommed onto her during Ladybird Johnson’s White House tenure and it stuck. She knew about the name and didn’t care so long as the employees spoke it out of her hearing. Fortunately, most of her hearing died around the same time that Ladybird Johnson did, so gossiping about the vulturine hag was never a problem. Avoiding her shouted harangues hurled across the office at Led Zeppelin concert decibels, however, was a problem.
“MUGGINS!” she screeched. “WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT THE FONTS ON THESE MEMOS?”
Maxwell slid from his desk and hunched down as he made the shameful slink to the Tyrant’s office. She never could come quietly to your desk. She never picked up the telephone. She shouted and screamed like the Caesar she thought she was. Maxwell noticed a few eyes peek over computer terminals to watch him in sympathy. They had all made the walk before and dreaded it. They knew it must feel extra embarrassing for Maxwell, since he was one of only three men in the office.
“What did I tell you about the fonts on these memos?” the Tyrant repeated in a softer screech when she had him cornered in her office.
“I’m sorry, I thought it looked more attractive that way,” Maxwell said. He felt as small and unwanted as the last lima bean on a finicky child’s plate.
“My magazine is attractive because the layout people make it attractive!” Spit flecked on her designer mauve lipstick. “I don’t need my writers making their copy attractive. And I certainly don’t need my goddamn proofreader—”
“Copyeditor,” Maxwell corrected. Thankfully she didn’t hear.
“—trying to make inter-office memos attractive. I want legible documents. I want those non-proportional fonts that look just like they came off a typewriter. I want a unified office, not one where people express their individuality through cute curley-cue fonts!”
“But ma’am, I wrote it in Times New Roman. That’s a regular serif font, just like what you see in the New York Times.”
The Tyrant’s fist hit the desk and her journalism awards leaped into the air. “THIS ISN’T THE NEW YORK TIMES! THIS IS MY WOMAN’S MAGAZINE AND WE DO IT MY WAY!” The pool of writers outside the windows mouthed the words along with her.
The Tyrant shredded the memo and tossed the confetti back at Maxwell. “If one person breaks the rules, especially in an all-office memo, then everybody thinks they can break the rules. I won’t stand for that, is that clear?”
Maxwell gave a curt, almost Japanese bow, and started rummaging up the bits of paper on the office floor. He stared straight at the Tyrant’s alligator shoes and thanked whatever patron saint looked over abused copyeditors that she didn’t expect him to kiss her feet. “It won’t happen again. I’ll run back right away and put the memo into Courier font.”
“Is that a non-proportional font?”
“Yes, looks just like a typewriter, like you said.”
She fingered her upper lip, touching the slight trace of a moustache. “All right, Muggins. Get back to work. I’m not paying you to be the janitor.” But she did expect him to pick up every scrap of the executed memo before he left.
Maxwell spent ten minutes reformatting the memo with the proportional font. Changing the typeface meant more than just highlighting the whole document and picking ‘Courier’ from the pulldown menu. The Tyrant wanted the formatting to match the font so it looked fresh off an old Underwood typewriter. Maxwell made the margins wider, double-spaced the text, fixed the tabs at .5” instead of .25”. He changed each italic into an underline. Most time-consuming of all, he had to add an extra space after each period. Proportional fonts needed two spaces between sentences or the words didn’t look correct on the page. That’s what the Tyrant had told him, at least. Maybe it hurt her eyes.
Maxwell finished the memo and printed it. He saw from his desk clock that he still had ten minutes to lunch. Leaving early was punishable by a screaming fit from the Tyrant, so Maxwell found a productive way to spend the last sliver of work. He started up a new style sheet about non-proportional fonts: how to use them and why. If he distributed the memo to the whole office, maybe the Tyrant would feel more forgiving toward him and give him a symbolic “get out of a screaming fit free” card. He hashed out the style-sheet in eight minutes, saved it to the hard drive, and then slipped out of the office to grab a turkey sandwich and cup of minestrone soup in the building’s commissary. He left the computer on and the screen and active. He usually put the screen on ‘sleep’ mode, but he still felt flustered from the stripping-down the Tyrant gave him, so he tore off with taking the extra step.
When he returned half an hour later on the nose, he found that an extremely wide letter ‘I’ lay across the entranceway to the office pool. Maxwell at first mistook it for a folded conference room table or possibly a girder from the ceiling. Had the maintenance people removed it to get to the roof? The last time they needed to do that was because a rat had died in the floorboards, and the smell in the office caused widespread nausea and vomiting that almost delayed the Fall Fashion Fling issue. Maxwell braced himself for the awful stench when he walked back into the office pool.
Instead, he found the room cluttered with gigantic letters of the alphabet and a smattering of punctuation marks, numbers, and mathematical symbols. A tremendous circle took up the center of the office pool; it had crushed the desk of the Assistant Fashion Editor. Maxwell realized it was a period when he noted a semi-colon leaning against the desk. The Assistant Fashion Editor was trying to remove the semi-colon before taking on the full stop that had smashed her computer flat and, even worse, prevented her from getting to her Summer Swimwear overview notes. Maxwell had always favored semi-colons because of the clean way they linked independent clauses without breaking up the flow of ideas, but he empathized with the Assistant Fashion Editor’s struggle to remove that monster from her workspace.
She had it easier than some of the others. The numeral ‘1,’ which in proportional fonts takes up nearly no space at all, had fallen on the Quiz Writer and killed her with its obnoxiously large flat bottom. Maxwell never understood why the numeral ‘1’ needed that platform bottom. If the reason was to distinguish it from the lowercase ‘L,’ wasn’t the hook on the top enough? Besides, how often does the letter ‘l’ stand on its own, or the number ‘1’ end up in the middle of words like “relax?” Now that useless bottom of the ‘1’ had killed a member of the staff. One the friendlier and cute ones, too. Maxwell had asked her out once, and instead of laughing in his face (as every other woman had done), she had politely said ‘no’ and offered a plausible excuse about her cousin coming into town. And now that stupid non-proportional Courier ‘1’ had killed her. Goddammit, he hated that font!
To get to his own desk he had to climb over a lowercase ‘g,’ the kind made out of two connected circles with an odd prong at the top. The prong caught on his coattails and he got hung up on the ‘g’ for a moment before he could slip his arms out of the sleeves and fall to the floor. He immediately noticed that his computer screen was swimming with repeated gibberish in the courier font: aHf s9yu98 (yto3=gJKhjgf Hjk ]}f kjfsj. He couldn’t make any sense of it until he noticed that his empty coffee cup had fallen off the top of his screen and landed on the keyboard. It had hit some of the keys, and the force must have damaged the board so it was typing out an endless stream of meaningless symbols. They had overloaded the computer’s memory and the overflow must have gushed into the office.
Maxwell stared over the office with a sheepish, embarrassed look. The chaos everywhere was his fault. He couldn’t blame the font, annoying as it was. He had let his carelessness and misplaced anger wreck the office. Now one woman was dead. Others couldn’t work because tremendous letters of the alphabet had smashed their desks. Even the water cooler had been destroyed, cracked apart under the pressure of the letter ‘O.’ (Or maybe it was a zero? Hard to tell at this angle.) The Summer Swimsuit Preview would be late, and the issue wouldn’t even have a quiz in it for readers to find out if their husbands were planning to leave them for their private secretaries. It was all Maxwell’s fault.
He reached down and unplugged the computer, and the screen went dead. But he had already done the damage. He could hear the moans and the shouts and the terrified screams of “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS ASTERISK DOING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING WALKWAY?” He didn’t know if the office had a clue yet who the culprit was, but the Tyrant certainly would know whom to blame. She would make the connection between their argument an hour ago and this sudden invasion of ugly, size-hogging characters. The Tyrant would fire him and he would be out on the pavement so fast that his ears would pop from the sudden altitude change. Maxwell hung his head, scrambled over the lowercase ‘g,’ and made his second shameful walk to the Tyrant’s office to take his punishment.
He sat down in a chair and looked at his boss’s milk-curdling scowl between the peaks of an upside-down ‘W’ sitting in front of her executive desk. He fidgeted and tried to sit comfortably, but he had to push a leaning parentheses off his shoulder, and his feet rested awkwardly on a question mark lying flat on the floor. He waited for the Tyrant to speak, but she continued to stare at him with vein-riddled eyes and made her hairy brows arch into an imitation of the letter ‘W’ that lay between them.
He finally spoke. “I guess I owe the office an, uhm, apology.”
The ‘W’ of her brows flipped over into an ‘M,’ although with a slight gentling effect that reminded Maxwell of Times New Roman instead of Courier. “You—guess? That’s all you have to say, Muggins? You guess?”
“Okay. I know. I know I owe the office an—”
The Tyrant leaped up. She literally leaped; her alligator shoes slammed onto the top of the desk. The ‘W’ shook and the parentheses toppled back onto Maxwell’s shoulder. “You owe our readers an apology! No, no, more than that. You owe them a whole issue of our magazine. Because of this little disaster, our mostly eagerly anticipated issue of the season will be delayed. Not only that, but it will most likely not have a quiz in it because the Quiz Writer now lies dead beneath the bottom of a letter ‘L’ that you loosed on this office.”
“It’s actually the numeral one.”
“Shut up! You don’t get to correct me when you’ve just caused our magazine to break a covenant with its subscribers!” She kicked the ‘W’ down onto Maxwell’s lap, and he had to pull back quickly before the edge crushed his foot. “You’re fired, Muggins. I want you out of here today.”
Maxwell stood up shakily. He rubbed his damp palms against his slacks. “I’ll pack up my desk and be out of here—”
“Not so fast. I’m not finished. You will not only pack up your desk, you also will pack up all these bloody non-proportional fonts and take them with you, or I will have the police here to arrest you. Understand, Muggins? All this, gone by five o’clock, or I’ll press charges against you.”
Maxwell felt a tingling heat sensation on his face, and a tightness in his muscles. The word ‘non-proportional’ had struck something in him, and against every sense of servile office duty he had in his body, he opened his mouth. “If you had let me use proportional fonts, none of this would have happened.”
The Tyrant’s eyebrows twitched. “What did you say?”
Maxwell raised his head and voice and looked her straight in the eye. “I said: if you had let me use proportional fonts, none of this would have happened.”
“Oh, so I’m the villain now? I’m the one who killed the Quiz Writer, is that it?”
Maxwell’s fury, until then just a hotness in his face, exploded at the mention of the dead girl. “You bitch! You horrible, awful, frigid bitch! If I had used a proportional font, the number ‘1’ wouldn’t have had such a wide base. That girl would still be alive. I would have smaller, thinner letters to pick up. It’s all your goddamn fault!”
Suddenly, he held the dot end of a question mark in his hands. Without thinking he had kicked it up from the floor and grasped it in a menacing, barbarian warrior pose.
But the Tyrant was ready. She reached for the parentheses and swung it up in time to block the descending blow of the hooked end of the question mark. “You’re insane, Muggins. I’ll skewer you right here if that’s the way you want it!”
“Not with that parentheses, you won’t!” Maxwell danced to one side and ducked her thrust with her punctuation weapon of choice. She moved fast for someone her age, and Maxwell had a few extra pounds from early morning doughnuts. But his question mark had better reach and a deadlier end. He sliced it through the air, and the scythe-end caught the Tyrant’s neck. She croaked once and flipped over the mahogany desk, disappearing behind it.
Markus jumped onto the desk to follow after her and make her scream for mercy at the end of his deadly piece of punctuation, but the struggle had ended. The Tyrant had fallen onto a lowercase ‘p’ that she had leaned on its side behind her swivel chair to get it out of the way. It was the sort of typewritten ‘p’ with a large flat bottom on it. The edge of one of the bottoms had thrust through two layers of pantsuit and the Tyrant’s heart as she had fallen on it.
Markus stared down on the unmoving remains of the nastiest boss he had ever known. He felt not one shred of pity. She had only herself to blame: if she had let him use a proportional font, that ‘p’ wouldn’t have had such sharp edges, and she would still be alive. It was her own damn fault.
Maxwell tossed down the question mark and walked back into the office pool. He needed to type a new style sheet about the dangers of non-proportional fonts before he got back to work on the Summer Swimwear Preview.
The End
