The Chocolate Cake Incident

Oliver could feel the glare of the lights that riveted the ceiling burning into his skin. There was no escape - the walls were painted a scalding white, and everywhere you looked the light glowered back at you. When he left the room — hopefully soon, but probably not — he would be blinking away silhouettes for at least half an hour.

It was by far the worst meeting room he had ever experienced, and he had the misfortune of having experienced quite a few. The high-efficiency bulbs apparently produced no heat, so the scratchy dry fever infecting the room was presumably either a bizarre trick of the building's climate control systems, or a deliberate decision by whichever middle-management Mussolini had the power over that sort of thing.

Oliver was currently in Slow Cooker Mode. Slow Cooker Mode was the art of looking useful but uninteresting; helpful but harmless. No one ever humble-bragged to their neighbours about the slow cooker like it was an air-fryer or sous-vide machine or some other buyer's remorse of the month. But it was reliable, easy to maintain, and no one could ever quite be bothered getting rid of it.

Slow Cooker Mode was an ability he had discovered about three years into his career, after he ruffled a coworker's feathers by doing his job competently. The coworker in question had decided to take a more nuanced approach by doing less work to a poorer standard, but getting bitter every time Oliver was promoted over him.

Luckily for that coworker, Oliver didn't have any grand ambitions or overarching desire for a private office to jerk himself off in — he just wanted to do his own job and be left alone. When his boss had started sounding him out for a management position and an exceedingly nominal raise, he had balked. The idea of moving away from actual interesting work to herding idiot cats like his coworker was repulsive. And so he developed Slow-Cooker Mode.

He clocked in at 9, out at 5:30, and steadfastly refused to provide colleagues with the contact details required to interrupt him outside of those hours. He submitted time-in-lieu leave requests whenever he was required to work overtime, but he was understanding and generous; whenever his bosses questioned him about it, he offered to submit invoices for his time instead.

During work hours, he worked diligently and produced good results. His performance reviews were always complementary, and always ended with a small pay rise and a few suggestions on how his next pay rise could be very slightly bigger if he dropped his silly resistance to exploitation. Oliver nodded understandingly, agreed this was the quickest way up the ladder, and then walked out the door and continued doing exactly the same thing he had always done.

Remarkably, overtime was quickly required of him less and less often. At some point his boss had finally taken the hint and stamped his employee record with the words "Not a Team Player" and given his coworker the management position. He had spent two weeks gloating and preening around Oliver's desk before retreating to his fancy new private office. Oliver waved goodbye to him every day at 5:30. After the third week, his coworker had looked a lot less enamoured with his new role. By the fourth he had started ignoring Oliver completely.

Oliver had since moved on from that particular company and now worked at a mid-sized firm specialising in engineering services and worker dissatisfaction. The CEO was such a big fan of competition that he promoted it between the company's various departments. As a result it was an organisation with eight directors and no leaders, as each department tried it's best to undermine and out-perform the others.

The current meeting was very important. All eight departments had recently pulled together, worked diligently, and together managed to ensure they lost a very big tender. This was the after-action debrief meeting, where the CEO and all eight department heads gathered to determine who was to blame. Why they had lost the tender was well-known, and also surprisingly irrelevant.

Oliver hadn't had anything to do with the tender, but he was nevertheless brought in to bolster the numbers of one director or another. There were probably another dozen like him seated around the table. He had been urged to bring a notebook, and so he had brought one and left it closed face-down on the table in front of him. His plan had been to simmer quietly in Slow Cooker Mode, wait for a particularly contentious moment in the debate, then slip out to go and do some real work.

There had been such a moment early on in the meeting — several, in fact. Yet Oliver had felt compelled to stay. The problem sat in the middle of the table, next to a neat stack of paper plates — a genuine Greg from Legal Chocolate Mudcake.

Greg from Legal was a rare gem in the company. He worked hard, met deadlines, and was surprisingly affable for a lawyer. Greg also liked to bake whenever he was stressed and, in a rare show of support, the company had subsidised his training by ensuring he was always as stressed as possible. Last time Oliver had checked, Greg had absorbed the roles of three different coworkers who had been retrenched and was in a never-ending series of discussions with his department head about whether his position at the company was tenable.

Greg's specialty was his chocolate mudcake and, perhaps knowing what a shitshow the day's meeting was going to be, he had brought it today. The CEO introduced it during the meeting's commencement monologue as "a treat for the end of the meeting", neglecting to mention Greg. At first it had been sitting regally atop a short porcelain stand and under a glass dome to keep it moist, but around the two hour mark the CEO had picked up a knife, began a nice wrap-up speech, and started hacking the cake into chunks.

Unfortunately, partway through the process he realised that no one had yet been blamed. He put down the knife, asked a question that had been answered several times during the meeting, and kick-started a second wave of chest-puffing and finger-pointing. Now about a dozen pieces of poorly-cut cake sat wilting on paper plates in the middle of the table, with the other half of the cake sitting uncovered on the cake stand.

Oliver felt the Slow Cooker Mode stuttering. The meeting room was as hot and bright as ever. A dull throb had started behind his eyes, his lower back was beginning to ache, and the only worthwhile part of the meeting was beginning to harden and crumble. Staring at the cake, Oliver suddenly decided that the next time everyone was distracted, he was going to reach over and claim a piece.

Blessedly, Cufflinks did not make him wait long.

Cufflinks was the newest member of the management team. In lieu of ability, Cufflinks had risen through the ranks via his masterful strategy of sitting next to a capable female colleague during meetings and repeating whatever she said verbatim in a slightly deeper and louder voice. Unfortunately, now that he was management and all his colleagues had the same anatomy that had seen him promoted so rapidly, Cufflinks was at a bit of a loss.

The current trick he was in the process of trialling was to begin a rambling monologue while leaning back in his chair with his arms behind his head. Then, as he began approaching whatever shoreline he decided to beach himself on, he would sit straight and flail his arms theatrically, before leaning forward, bringing his hands down quickly onto the table, and asking the most inane question he could think of.

Most of the time, the performance had the effect of stunning the audience dumb, which Cufflinks chose to interpret as a success. This time, as he brought his hands down and demanded imperiously "So what is the real problem?", he was staring directly across the table. Instead of flummoxing the room, it instead gave everyone the impression he was directing the question specifically at Oliver. Oliver sat, leaning back slightly in his chair with his freshly-plundered cake in one hand, as the CEO, eight directors, and a dozen various subordinates turned to look at him.

In that moment, Oliver realised three things. One; he was about to be blamed for everything, from the fall of Byzantium to the loss of the tender. Two; he didn't particularly need this job. And three;

"The cake is dry."

With that, Oliver reached down and gripped the slice of chocolate cake. The icing squished slightly between his fingers as he drew back his arm and, without breaking Cufflinks's gaze, pitched the full crumbling chunk across the room. At the last moment, Cufflinks flinched and tried to turn. The cake exploded against his ear, shattering crumbs across the room and leaving a crude but surprisingly well-defined chocolate profile silhouette on the white wall behind him.

No one tried to stop Oliver as he leaned forward again across the table. This time he pulled the stand with the remaining half of the cake towards him. He stood, dusted his hands, and looked slowly around the table. He nodded safely at the dumbfounded stares. He reached down and took another handful of cake, his eyes coming to a rest on the next director.

"The cake is dry."