John

Slow. So slow. John felt like everything was moving in slow motion as he waited for the clock to strike five and release him from another day in hell. He was watching the clock on his desk intently, counting the seconds down, one by one. He heard the buzzing in the office around him, as if every other worker bee in his vicinity paid no heed to there only being a mere five minutes left. Without looking up, he pictured how the office looked around him. All the different people he'd come to know (and hate) since he started working here.
There were the nerds in their booths, who happily sat by their computers alone, using some sort of witchcraft (he assumed) to turn caffeine into code. There was a certain envy of the ease with which they seemed to do their job, but he didn't really mind the nerds when it came down to it, they left him alone and he did the same to them. The hens on the other hand, those he hated. They were a small group of women (the far rarer sex around the office) who made it their job to get into everybody's business. He heard them standing around the photocopier not far from his cubicle. Sometimes he wondered what their actual jobs must be, since he never saw them doing anything except for gossiping among themselves or trying to extract new gossip from whoever else was available. John had never let them get anything of interest out of him on pure principle, but this had only spurred them on even harder and he was now their main focus. Little did they know he didn't have any secrets near exciting enough to fulfill the expectations they had now put on them. Not that it mattered, he would never tell them, the spiteful bitches.

The other women in the office were far more agreeable, he had even fancied a few of them a bit and had at first often revenge-gossiped about the hens with them. They did, however, tend to veer a bit too far on the other side of the spectrum. These girls were of the nerdier type. Spending their days coding and having deep discussions on things that he was only marginally informed about made him feel inferior. And if there was one ting John couldn't put up with it was feeling inferior, so he ultimately shied away from even them.
He'd only been working in the office for three months but had already bounced around almost every single clique in the building where they worked. From the office band, to the mail room guys, to the stoner security guards, to the bosses, on and on he'd moved between them. It had always started out fine, but sooner or later he'd find a fault with the group and decide it wasn't for him (usually this was preceded by him feeling inferior in some way). So in the end he was alone, which would have been fine. Or at least it was for the first two weeks. But then, last weekend it had happened: He'd made a fool out of himself, horribly and publicly, made even worse by the fact that at this point there wasn't a person in the office who didn't know him.

A bigger man might have just laughed the event away with everyone else and shaken it off, but not John. His insecurities gnawed at him with every thought. He tried to scare them away with anger and hate towards the world, his job and his coworkers, but it did little. Again; a better man might have accepted it and realized that no one else actually cared that much. But not John. To him, this was unacceptable. He'd humiliated himself and no one would ever again look up to him. They would know him for his inadequacies. He hated them. He hated them all. Nothing would ever be right again. Not unless they all lost their memories or died or.. or.. wait.. what if they all died?

The clock finally struck five and as it announced the end of the work day a dark thought had already begun to take form within John's mind.