I looked at my list and prioritized the items by their difficulty. It was after lunch, so donuts were highly unlikely. I hoped, if it was a skewed universe, I wouldn't have to stay until fresh donuts arrived the next day. The women's restroom troubled me, but it shouldn't be too difficult to find someone to get water for me. I decided to start with the colored pens, and kept an eye open for delivered flowers and unclaimed donuts.

I walked through the localization area and headed towards the legal department. I searched each supply cabinet along the way. There were black and blue pens, and the occasional red. If the Oracle had not specifically mentioned "ball-point" pens, the rainbow of dry erase markers would easily suffice for this task. I pocketed the three colors of pens and continued towards the legal department.

"Attention everyone!" someone announced, "Today is Martin's 35th birthday. In honor of this once in a lifetime occasion, we bring you a smorgasbord of sweets!"

On the food table was a king's feast of sweets: cake, cookies, and of course, two dozen donuts. "What luck!" I thought.

As I stepped towards the food table to claim a donut, I stopped when I saw something worse than the jaws of the Bobblehead twins. People swarmed from every direction and surrounded the food table. They climbed like geckos over the cube walls. They stampeded down the halls. In seconds, Martin's birthday sweets were devoured like a marinated cow standing in a piranha filled river.

These piranha people all had thin and pointed teeth like fish bones. They grabbed and gobbled the food quickly and grotesquely. Crumbs flew from some peoples mouths only to be snatched by needle-filled mouths of other piranha people.

They ate all the cookies. They ate all the cake. The two dozen donuts? Gone. Not a crumb was left. Even the containers were shredded beyond recognition into teeny, confetti-sized particles.

"Damn," I said under my breath. My office mates joked about how fast free food lasts, and how people flocked to it like vultures to a carcass. It turned my stomach to see people eat that quickly. The sickly sweet scent of sugary foods hit my nose after the last person crept away.

A passing engineer looked at the food table, then looked at me.

"Free food?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Too slow?"

I nodded, again.

"Better luck next time," she said and walked away.

Monstrous bobble heads? Piranha people? I hoped what I was going through was worth it. It was like a bad dream I could not wake up from.

I passed by the door to the legal department area because I misread the backwards lettered sign. I expected only odd looks for requesting for a Pig Latin EULA. I did not expect to find a department full of weasel-like employees.

Human-like weasels filled the legal department's cube farm. They all had slender bodies with short, stubby legs and arms. Their noses were long and pointed and their ears were short and rounded. These weren't animal kingdom kinds of weasels, either; they were more like human versions of cartoon weasels. I wondered where the company hired so many weasel-like legal people, or if they grew that way over time.

One legal weasel approached me. He picked lint from his Dockers with stubby fingers.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

"Um. Uh," I said.

"Fresh out of Ums and Uhs. Anything else?"

"Oh, yeah," I said. I looked down at my list, took hold of as much reality as I could hold onto, and asked, "Can you get me a copy of Section XXVI of the latest EULA?"

"Only Section XXVI?" he asked.

"Yeah. And, can you translate it into Pig Latin?"

"No problem. Have a seat. I'll be right back."

"You don't have any donuts, do you?"

"What am I, a caterer?" he said, and wobbled off on shortened legs.

There was a circle of chairs in a meeting area not too far away. I found a seat and waited for him to return. On the list, I marked three ticks for the three out of five pens. I tapped my pencil on the page and looked around the legal weasel department. Weasel people scurried around like mice in a maze.

It was difficult to concentrate on my tasks with all the legal weasels zipping around, but I forced myself to at least look for the colored pens as I sat there. I scanned over the pencil holders on the cubes for two more colors of ink. There were several black pens, a forest of number two pencils, and highlighters in yellows and pinks. No other colored ball-point pens.

A second scope of the area revealed the absence of delivered flowers, too.

I laughed to myself when I imagined one of the weasel people getting a bouquet and sniffing it with their long, pointed nose. Of course, the picture wasn't complete without a sneeze-induced, petal blizzard.

A woman legal weasel walked by with her pointed snout in a document. She twirled a green, ball-point pen around the stubby digits of her left hand.

"Excuse me," I said.

She stopped in front of me and raised the index digit of her paw-like hand to signal "Hold on a moment."

"What's up?" she asked.

"Where did you get that pen?"

"From home."

"Oh. I need a variety of pen colors for a, uh, presentation. Do you know where I can find more colors?"

"Ask Mrs. Templeton. She's the admin for this floor."

"Mrs. Templeton?" I asked, penciling the name in my notebook.

"Yeah. She's a bit of a stickler, but you might be able to finagle one out of her."

"Thanks."

"Sure," she said, and walked off with her snout pointed back into her document.

I waited a few minutes more, then started to worry. What if I offended the guy with my donut comment? By the time I made up my mind to either track the guy down, or find someone else to help me, he appeared again with a printout in hand.

"Here you are. Sorry to keep you waiting. My wife called. You know how it is," he said and handed me the printout.

I glanced over it, and assumed it was correct. All the words seemed to end in "-ay" and appeared to be Pig-Latinized legalese.

"Thanks, uh, what was your name?" I asked.

"Ernie," he said and extended his hand.

"Thanks, Ernie. I'm Charlie," I said and shook his tiny hand. His grip felt warm and squishy like rising bread dough.

I folded the EULA--Section XXVI and tucked it into the middle of my notebook. I marked a check next to the item and asked Ernie how to find Mrs. Templeton. He gave me directions and I left the legal weasels behind me.