You could hear people talking from the other end of the open space. Conversations flowed and voices crossed and intermingled. Every morning, no matter what happened, my dear group of female colleagues would meet for a coffee for about twenty minutes. Just to catch up on the news of the day before and to exchange on all possible subjects, even the most boring. Especially the most boring. It really didn’t help me to stay awake, it was not yet 9 o’clock in the morning and I had the impression to have already cashed all my day, or made a sleepless night. My eyes were heavy, so heavy, I could feel the air from the heater caressing my neck more and more as I slowly became unconscious. The ambient noise was slowly fading away and giving way to the beginning of sleep when suddenly two new sounds caught me. I had clearly recognized the particular sound of the stilettos pounding the ground with a decided foot. The other sound was also familiar to me even though I had never heard it for real before, a sound that woke me up right away but did not clearly wake me up from my torpor. I could feel the excitement rising unconsciously as they got closer and closer to me, the more the noise came, the more the conversations in the back of the open space faded away until they were replaced by the frantic pressure of fingers on their keyboards. The serious atmosphere was back in the office, the calm before the storm surely. The sudden silence had allowed me to concentrate a little more on the voice in my head, the part of my brain still active while my body was hesitating to fall asleep, the one that had just made me suddenly understand that the rubbery crunching noise that accompanied the heels really looked like latex…