"Exactly," says Lodi. "The blueness represents the amount of real 'colaness' of the product. And green, the universal shorthand for lemon-lime sodas."
     "From words to pictures. It's like they think we're devolving," says Diana. "Our brains are getting simpler."
     "I for one have enough to think about in my day," says Lodi, "and appreciate that they are allowing me to make my snack choices based on pictograms."
     Diana and Lodi laugh, and return to their stations at the bank. Diana works in the Credit Department. Lodi is a teller.
     Lodi took the job a year ago, and has refused to apply for a transfer to positions with more responsibility whenever they have come up. She will leave the bank and return to Chicago—where she lived for three years with her now ex-fiancé Nico, and waited tables in the Greek restaurant his parents owned—any month now, she thinks. Any month now.


     An hour passes uneventfully, and Diana sends Lodi a text message, asking if they are going out tonight. Lodi responds: "Of course." It is Tuesday. Lodi and Diana go out after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays for drinks. Friends—well, coworkers whose tone in conversation and interest in the lives of the girls approximates something that some might call friendship—are puzzled by this schedule.
     "Why not on Fridays and Saturdays? Why go out on a work night."
     "Why waste a perfectly good Saturday or Sunday recovering from a hangover?" says Lodi.
     "Work is already as uncomfortable as it can be," says Diana. "Being hungover can't possibly make it any worse."
     This tends to make so much sense to their coworkers that the coworkers think maybe they will tag along. Lodi and Diana very quietly discourage this, and eventually, said coworkers tell them they have something else they need to do that night. Something they forgot about. "But next time?" they say. "Definitely. Definitely." And it never comes up again.


     Lodi and Diana text message one another for the dwindling hours of work. Lacking opportunities to showcase their abilities as customer service representatives, they focus their attention on the vibrating and buzzing device of plastic and aluminum in the palms of their hands. Lodi has a tiny pair of earphones, and surreptitiously slips them in under her long brown hair, the cord trailing in through the sleeves of the long white and pintucked blue shirt which she wears on Tuesdays. She can get away with listening to music on her phone if she stays ever so slightly on guard, as her coworkers and employers are ever so genuinely disinterested in the day to day operations of the business at levels below or parallel to their own.