It didn’t help that the only job Alexei could seem to keep - the only job that hadn’t ended in some ignominious frogmarch to a distant office on a top floor where he was harangued in words he barely even understood like “malfeasance” and “restraining order,” or lying bent and bruised underneath some cruel steaming machine with a nickname like “The Mangler” or “Hobart,” was a job in a nearly forgotten department of a past its prime molded plastics concern removing staples from endless reams of flimsy yellow paper.

Endless reams of yellow paper that flapped, folded, stuck and tore at the slightest touch. Endless reams of yellow paper faintly inscribed with fifth-generation carbon copies of nearly irrelevant data, crinkled and landscaped, spindled and folded. Endless reams of yellow paper with edges that, for all their insubstantial creperie, cut like a razor. Endless reams of yellow paper that some craven middle management types insisted must be saved, must be kept! in case of lawsuit or audit by overly curious head honcho.

But the staples added, so the craven middle management types held, the equivalent of five pages’ thickness to any given thinly stapled document, and so in order to save file space, they must first be removed. Alexei knew, as any intelligent person would, that this was silliness of the first water. But it paid the bills and it left his mind free to wander far afield from his shabby bus stop, from his grimy office/closet with the dingy grey-tan carpet, from the stifling pong of the diesel fumes, from the suffocating closeness of the endless reams of flimsy yellow paper, from the trailing skein of bad timing and bad decisions that clung to him like stale cigarette smoke.

Plus, he got to use a staple shark.