Free Time for a Change by Diane Collier

Sally sighed and rolled her eyes as she dropped the phone back into its cradle. This is a disaster , she thought to herself. A calamity! She tapped her short fingernails against the desk in frustration and sighed again. She couldn’t see a solution to her current problem and it was frustrating the heck out of her. If only she had a magic wand. And knew how to use it.
    Flicking her dark hair over her shoulders she let out a loud groan and stood up, almost toppling her chair over in the process. Coffee. She needed coffee and some time to think. And a holiday. She probably needed a long holiday somewhere exotic and exciting. She was almost completely over this crap job and her currently crap life and a break was called for.
    As she walked to the nearby coffee station she tried to work out how much leave was due to her and came up with a disappointingly small number. She automatically greeted her co-workers with smiles, nods and small waves as she walked past them, but she was so deep in thought that she didn’t really register any of it.
    Her mother was right.
    As this thought crossed her mind, she came to a complete stop in the narrow passageway, almost causing an accident with her manager, Andrea, who had been following closely, also on a coffee mission. After apologizing several times, Sally went back to her coffee task.
    Working in a call center wasn’t the most ideal job for her. She was mostly bored with smatterings of frustration and often fantasized about a more exciting career, day dreaming instead of capturing data. Her talents were wasted in what she fondly referred to as Hell With Fluorescent Lighting. She really needed to find a new career path, something that challenged and stimulated her mind.
    Settling back at her desk, Sally narrowly escaped tipping her mug of coffee over her keyboard and decided to celebrate this small achievement by checking her emails again.
    An email popped up and when she saw who the sender was, Sally groaned out loud making her neighbors glance her way in surprise.
    She loved her mother, really she did, but the woman kept setting her up on blind dates. She was deeply upset at the fact that Sally had reached the ancient age of twenty-eight without finding a suitable husband and producing a string of grandchildren for her. A woman’s place was in the home, she told Sally frequently, not gallivanting around and working in an office.
    The blind dates her mother dug up for her were mostly horrible. Sally thought back. There was the man, apparently wealthy, who’d declared his deep, deep feelings for her on the first and only date. He’d wanted to start discussing their future before they’d even ordered dessert. That had creeped Sally out immediately.
    Then there was the guy who’d had such deep social issues that he’d only been able to speak to her through a sock puppet which he’d brought to dinner. Dessert? She hadn’t gotten past a starter. When his sock puppet had leered down the waitress’s top, Sally had walked out. No words were sufficient to cover that experience.
    Another date had been with an accountant (smart and financially sound, according to mom) who had used a calculator to work out their dinner bill, informing Sally that she needed to pay for the whole bottle of wine since he’d only had water with his dinner. There had been no dessert. Unimpressive to say the least.
    In the past five years or so, she’d dated dozens of men at her mother’s insistence and not one had made her want a second date. She was now officially done. She’d dated more than her fair share of freaks, losers and chauvinists. It was time to stand up for herself and say No! It was past time that she let her mother know that she wasn’t going on any more dodgy dates.
    Brought out of her daydream by a small commotion nearby, she peered over her partition to see what was going on. A man was standing near the photocopier, talking to her Andrea. He was glancing around the office with a frown on