Why Benjamin Stork broke the ribbit glass – by Angus Macdonald
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Benjamin Stork sent his final email of the day with Kindest Regards, switched his computer to Standby mode, gave the account executive in the adjoining cubicle a small, apologetic nod, passed Zeke the janitor in the kitchenette, smiled, received a radiant beam of teeth in return, stopped, talked to Zeke about the lobby’s malfunctioning automatic door, looked dumbly at his smart watch, learned from Zeke that a special infrared-sensor part was being shipped in from Portugal, finally took his leave, used his ID card to swipe out and expressionlessly looked at the reflection of his reflection in the lift’s mirror, waited for the usual bus beside people he did not in any way know but could recognise from a great distance just by the way they were standing, refreshed his banking app, rode the bus to the train station, saw the express service was delayed and boarded a busy all-stops train, found his eyeballs to be momentarily and magnetically locked onto the bright green signage for the glass-encased Emergency Brake, sat and scrolled and watched and read and watched and scrolled and stood, finally alighted into the black night, walked home uphill, ate last night’s dinner for his dinner, wondered why Zeke was always beaming his teeth at people, half-watched a few episodes of an office-based situational comedy while looking at his phone, transformed into an enormous frog, brushed his teeth, albeit with some dexterity issues, and went to bed.
His dreams were green but otherwise ordinary.
When he woke up he was human again.
No one in the meeting room knew why the meeting had been called. Addressing this was item two on the agenda.
‘Loop us all in when you send that through to Brenda, Tony, but it sounds like we’re in a good place,’ said Kate. She was the de facto chair of any meeting she was in. She was also good at saying No in a way that seemed like Yes.
Benjamin wrote ‘Tony to loop in ALL, good place,’ on his company-branded A5 spiral notebook with his company-branded pen in handwriting that was neat and tiny. This was his first real job. He did not speak in meetings. He would type his notes up in long form and email them to Brenda, his supervisor, who was recovering from a routine eye procedure involving lasers. Some good-natured jokes had been made about ‘optimising corporate vision’ and ‘seeing the bigger picture’ in the meeting’s awkward beginning, after everyone had taken their seats but before Kate had exhaled and said, ‘So?’
‘When does Noah in Systems get back from leave?’ Tony asked.
No one knew. Benjamin wrote, ‘Noah (Systems) leave?’ and put one neat asterisk beside it. He realised he was also not sure what ‘Systems’ meant, who Noah was, or what the broader purpose of the company and his place in it might be. He was about to draw another asterisk when the pen slipped out of his hand.
‘Benjamin, you seem to have turned into a large frog,’ said Kate. ‘But did you get those briefs approved by Rob yet?’
Benjamin shook his bulbous green head. The room was fish-eyed and had many more amperes of colours than when he’d sat down.
‘Let’s streamline that please, Benjamin. Get Brenda to assist when she’s back on deck.’
The note Benjamin made, when he finally managed to pick up his pen, was little more than a squiggle. He knew what it meant, though.
Benjamin’s afternoon biscuit was not easy to get out of its individually wrapped plastic. In the end, he pulverised it into crumbs, ripped the packaging with his maxillary teeth, and scooped up the fragments with his long, pink tongue.
He transformed back into a human in the middle of turning his computer off and on again. It was having network connectivity issues, which the IT department did not believe in and refused to look at. Holding down the power button did the trick, though. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a computer is kill it, wait ten seconds, then bring it back to life.
It was a pretty amphibious weekend for Benjamin Stork. His promising round of golf fell to pieces when he transformed on the back nine. Meal prep, too, was a challenge. The brunch date he’d teed up with a friend’s roommate’s chatty colleague was a non-starter, frog or no, since he couldn’t find a good way to explain his job.
He met his friends at the pub but had to have his second and fourth schooners of tart IPA craft beer through a straw – the suspicious timing of this frogification sparking some sharp comments about the lengths he’d go to to avoid paying for his round.
For many in the office, going for a coffee was mainly about ingesting caffeine – a substance to which everyone was addicted. Benjamin enjoyed the ritual. He got great satisfaction from asking his colleagues about their previous and upcoming weekends, a feat he could still accomplish in frog form.
He had also been in love with the building’s barista since his very first soy cappuccino on his very first day at work. This is simple brain chemistry. It also had something to do with their cool tattoos.
The coffee de-frogged Benjamin. He imagined sprinting back downstairs to ask the barista on a date. Or writing his phone number inside a love heart on the back of his coffee loyalty card and leaving it in the tip jar.
Sometimes Benjamin imagined screaming in the middle of a product meeting. Or touching the art in a museum. Or breaking the glass around an Emergency Brake. Or resigning. Or all kinds of other things he knows he would never do.
On Wednesday morning, Benjamin turned into a frog on his way into the office. The automatic door’s replacement part had been lost in a port in Portugal, but it opened smooth and wide when it sensed his hopping. This was hard to explain to Zeke in gestures and ribbits. And Zeke was screaming.
In his cubicle, Benjamin struggled to action many of his key deliverables. He was not even able to write his weekly to-do list, without which he was at sea. Brenda sighed, not unkindly, when Benjamin hopped over to her desk, dour, slimy, croaking forlornly, pointing gooey fingers at the nonsense hieroglyphs on his company-branded notepad.
‘I know exactly how you feel,’ she said. ‘Hump day.’
When Benjamin slopped onto the train on Friday afternoon, a gaping schoolkid stood and offered him her seat. He politely declined with a shake of his head.
Since Benjamin had left work as a well-dressed professional, his tie was now pinching at his great green neck. He tried to loosen it, but he was still getting the hang of his frog fingers. He didn’t want to make a fuss. He made himself very still and tried his best to quietly gulp air into his strange amphibious lungs. No one looked at him anyway.
Every single human being on board the train, without exception, even the schoolkid, was absorbed in the blue glow of a screen. The one and only frog was looking at the Emergency Brake. ▼
Image: Jack Hamilton - Unsplash
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