Jules thought that between the physical exertion of climbing up the fire escape and slipping himself through his unlocked window, and downing the last of Ona's Bloody Mary before rinsing the cup in the sink, and the jet-lag, he might be able to tranquilize himself for a few hours. It was not to be. With the knowledge that he had work the next day came stress, with which came a restlessness tingling in his legs and creeping up into his gut. For hours he turned over in his bed, sure that he wanted to sleep, until he decided that it was in vain. He also was the sort to let his failures and embarrassments play on loop in his brain, so despite his best efforts, he spent much of this time cataloguing what he had done wrong with Ona that evening, opportunities he had missed for salvaging himself and their evening; how awkward work would be in the morning.

Eventually he gave up. When he had slithered out of bed he slipped his feet into slippers, and shuffled across the room, where he sat himself down at the many flickering screens and tiny, whirring gears. He booted the machine up from hibernation mode and began to whittle his hours away. He'd been told these brights lights messed with his circadian rhythm, and other such scientific jargon, but if he wasn't going to sleep anyway, he didn't see the harm in it. So by the time he was supposed to be groggily shaking himself out of his micro-coma, and coercing himself at gunpoint into an ill-fitting suit and onto a bus which reeked of [i]other people[/i], he was already awake, and attacked his loose notion of a morning routine in an undead shuffle.

Really it wasn't much of a "routine" when it changed so much from day to day. This morning he bothered enough to shower, but not to shave the itchy stubble on his face. He was neither clean-shaven nor a suave, sophisticated bearded chap, instead occupying that middle territory where he looked like he [i]recently[/i] had cared, and was not too far gone from basic hygiene and self-respect; quite unlike people who had hit rock bottom months or years ago, and could not be exhumed from that state.

Today he had enough time for breakfast, so he whipped something up in a pan which he wouldn't clean for another half a week, abandoning it in the sink like a mother with her unwanted bastard baby. And he decided that he was going to crack open that bourbon today, so he did; he broke the seal, sniffed the cork, and then began to drip-pour it into his receptacle. He was too cheap to buy a real flask, so instead he had been recycling an empty glass bottle of cheap cologne; being seen taking a swig from it was strange enough, but he could at leave it in his desk and anyone with the audacity to snoop through his drawers would not suspect it at all. It held at least four and a half ounces when it was full, and that was barely enough to take the edge off the long and grueling shifts, and not get written up as a sloppy, slobbering mess; so he filled it all the way up, and quaffed a few straight from the bottle to prepare himself for the odorous belly of city transit. His esophagus burned with this torrent; he grimaced and scoffed.

By the time he arrived at work he had grabbed a coffee from some decent little shop or other, precisely to his whimsical specifications, and he only waited for it to cool before he would throw a surreptitious pour of whiskey in there and get some motivation pumping in his veins. He didn't like the culture which had come to sprout around people being "zombies" before they'd had their coffee, but it was certainly true enough.

He had headed straight for the interview room, the side of the one-way mirrors which let him peer through them. Finding not Ona nor a potential hire, nor their controller for the double-blinds, he got curious; hadn't she said she'd do all the paperwork, so they could skip straight to the interviews when he showed up? And she knew his schedule well, too: he always showed up early (the company only allowed two late days before it declared them "liabilities" needing replacement), but not as early as her, always scraping much too close to the hour mark by the time he'd clocked in and made his pitiful rounds across the cubicles and water coolers. She knew when he'd be there and she hadn't showed up, and that was queer even for Ona. So he went to her office and tried to open it, and finding that it was locked, thought to knock. An answer did not immediately arrive, and he began to humor the thought that she had called out sick, or worse, flaked.

No, that was impossible. Ona did not break promises; and she certainly wasn't "fashionably late," not by even a second. Where the hell was she? He began to meander off, back toward the interview rooms.