"Fuck this town," she says. "I hate this town."
     The new soda machine has extra large buttons. Lodi thinks it looks like the interface a trained chimp would use to fly a rocket ship. "Big buttons. Hit the red one, rocket goes up. Hit the blue one, rocket comes down. Hit the green one, hatch opens up, and space chimp gets a banana. Gets a parade around New York. Gets to meet the president. Gets to retire. Simple."
     "Because we're like trained monkeys is why you say that, right? The people who work here, we're all like trained monkeys. You're making the point that, you know, management thinks we're all trained monkeys and anyone could do our jobs," says a man, a coworker whom Lodi has been introduced to once or twice and sees every single day, but whose name she, frankly, has completely forgotten. He is smiling and he is nodding slowly at her. "That's funny. That's pretty funny."
     She thinks probably he is coming on to her or is going to come on to her if their conversation continues, so she decides not to get into the whole chimp-not-monkey conversation someone should have gotten into with him in grade school or earlier. Lodi waits for Diana to meet her at the soda machine before she goes on. Diana is walking slowly, reading something in a magazine, her head down. She is tall and thin, and her hair reaches down her back almost to her waist in a style Lodi likes to refer to as "Christian-splinter-group-chic." They are in the break room, which is overwhelmingly beige and too small for the number of people who work at the bank. The male coworker has left, slunk off, perhaps headed to the bathroom. Someone is asleep on an old brown leather couch in the corner, his nose lightly whistling, but otherwise, the tables are empty. The comfortable chairs are empty. The room is mostly empty. Just Lodi, and Diana, who is microwaving something — soup maybe — the whistler, and the man whose name Lodi has forgotten. He is wearing khaki pants and running shoes, a look Lodi despises. By the transitive process, Lodi despises the man. He has glasses, but otherwise his face is indistinct and practically invisible.
     "Also, on the old soda machines, you had just the logo of the soda," she says. She and Diana are finding a seat at the table, and Diana is flipping through the magazine. There is a woman with a huge number of children on the cover of the magazine. She looks pleased with herself. "Or before that, machines just had little placards with the name of the product, but now it's a picture of the can, and a familiar color scheme. Dark blue is regular cola, light blue is diet."
     "Because it's less like a real cola?" says Diana, looking up from her magazine. "Some of the blue has been leeched out of it, and now it's light blue."