There’s nothing wrong with getting off work a little early on a hot, summer, Friday afternoon.  Unless, of course, you were forced to leave by the police, whom you called after receiving a death threat.

The day, Payroll Friday, started out like it usually does, with the phone ringing off the fucking hook.  I had a little pile of things I need to accomplish, and I tackled those things in between obsessively checking my email and compulsively answering the phone.  And sitting on the couch in the back, with Maury on the TV, smoking and listening to my boss, Sally, yammering on about her odd, on-again, off-again boyfriend/baby-daddy.

Donnie, the payroll guy, had ordered some pizza for lunch, and the four of us who didn’t have better things to do than show up for work today hovered over it, jamming it into our mouths like we hadn’t eaten in a week, listening to the phone ring then get picked up by voicemail over and over again, with that knowing, angst-ridden feeling in our guts, thinking of all the voicemails we’d have to respond to once we’d finished eating.

Back at our desks, we continued answering the phones, and Donnie appeared in front of my office door looking a bit like someone had come along and knocked him upside the head with a ball-peen hammer.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Let’s just go.  Let’s just shut down and get the hell out of here.  I can’t take this anymore,” he said, lighting a cigarette (yes, we smoke inside–fuck the law).

I laughed, because we say that exact phrase at least fifteen hundred times every Payroll Friday.  Donnie wandered down the hall to go to the back to finish his smoke, and I kept answering the phone.

When he returned, he looked even more haggard.

“What is up?” I asked.

“Oh, just a fucking death threat.  Some asshole is pissed because we mailed his check and told me he’s going to come over here and kill us.”

“Say whaaa?”

A normal human being might shrug that kind of threat off as just a hot-head’s response to not getting his money.  But we’ve had our car windows shot out, just a couple months ago.  And this particular former employee had been fired shortly after starting work for us after we got his background check back with a hit on it, meaning he was completely unsuitable for working within the city’s school system.

Donnie nodded.  “Seriously, let’s just shut down and go.  I don’t want to take any chances.”

“Shut down and go?  Are you fucking kidding me?  We need to call the police!”  I shouted.  “What did the guy say?”

“I told him we mailed the check.  He said, ‘Where’d you mail it?  I got seven different addresses! [I'm guessing they're not for his summer cabin on the lake, his beach house in Florida, his chateau in the south of france, his Malibu party place, his Colorado ski cabin, his Manhattan high-rise condo, or his villa on Lake Como].’”

Donnie read off the address we had on file, to which the check had been mailed, and the guy responded, “I don’t live there!  You done sent my check to the wrong place!  I need my money!”

“Well, that’s the address you gave us two weeks ago when you filled out your application,” Donnie told him.

“I NEED MY MONEY!” they guy screamed.  “I gonna come over there and kill you!  I gonna send somebody over there to shoot you!  I need my money!”

“I’m going to hang up now,” Donnie said.  “I’m not going to listen to this.”

And so it went.  Donnie insisted that we all leave, yet I insisted that we call the police.  Donnie left, I called the police.  We sent our own supervisor over to the school to get the guy out if he was still in there, we got a description of the guy from the school engineer, Donnie zipped off in his Cadillac, and I called the police as the three of us remaining (all women, mind you), moved our cars into a different part of the parking lot and hid until the cops showed up.

Once they did, we re-entered the office so we could look up some info on the guy–date of birth, phone number, address, etc.  While we were doing that, no less than six guys showed up to pick up their checks.  One of whom was pissed to find that we didn’t have his check and that we didn’t know where it had been sent.  This, mind you, was the guy we’d fired earlier in the week because we’d got a call about the possibility that he was on drugs and sent him for a drug test, which came back positive for coke.

Ah, it’s all in a day’s work.

Which is why I was sitting in a bar watching afternoon baseball by 3 p.m.