Meltdown Robert Morley   © Copyright 2025 Robert Morley

Graphic by the author.

Lucy nudges Paul awake, she says; “Get up and empty the cat litter, otherwise the pee and poop is going to linger all day.” Paul says with eyes half closed; “Forget it, you do it. I have to be up for work in a couple of hours.” Lucy nudges him again; “Don’t argue go empty it now! Before the kid wakes up.” Paul gets nudged harder again and this time the sweaty exhausted dude flips and darts up and in protest he rushes past the scared cat and goes into the kitchen, he gets out a bin liner and opens it and then he holds his nose with one hand as the animal waste stench hits his freshly awoken nose and he dumps the cat poop and pee in litter into the bin bag, he quickly ties up the bin bag and holds his breath as he opens the back door and tosses the filled bag into the garden, he then locks up and marches back to bed.

He tries to lay down again but his heat stricken wife tells him to sleep on the couch and so he ‘tuts’ and then bemoans his mistreatment in the early morning sun and then he marches back down the hall to the living room next to the kitchen and he gets another whiff of the lingering cat pee and poop aftermath, he shouts out to Lucy: “We got to get that cat neutered so his pee don’t smell as vile!” He then lays down on the sofa with the sun shining through the gap in the curtain and he tries to bury his eyes and his head in a pillow, but then his son cries out, he was awoken by his shout of snipping the cat and the heat has also contributed.

Now the son is up and crying and Lucy is up and blaming Paul for waking the kid, now Paul also springs up wanting to defend his role in rousing the kid from sleep to his wife.

They are all awake, about to go to War in the hot sun having got no night rest, and the kid has to go to School at 8:15am and Paul needs to be able to function for a 9-hour work shift.

It’s time for a Meltdown! Everyone is seeing red and if you look from one end of the bungalow to another you see the other side through a blurry ripple of a heat wave that has crept inside, even with Paul turning on the fan and now shouting at Lucy telling her to not tell him off but try and soothe their son back to sleep for 3 more hours, he is opening every window and hoping to catch a breeze that will cool the trios temperaments and at least get them one hour of solid sleep without killing each other first so they can at least get through their day without having heavily consequential nervous breakdowns.

Lucy; “You loud mouth idiot, you woke Matty up, now he’ll be useless for School.” Matty; “Wah, Wah!” “Paul: “It’s not me, it’s the heat.” Lucy: “It was you and your big mouth. You don’t think. I have work tonight too and no sleep.” Paul: “Don’t play the blame game, just lay with him and stroke his head to get him to go back to sleep.”

Lucy comforts Matty in her bed and tries to stop him crying and get him to nap a bit more, Paul feels guilty as he is now too tense to sleep on the sofa, he just sits there for an hour and a half sweating with his arms crossed, waiting for his phones’ alarm clock to go off for the time to get dressed to go to work.

With a headache beginning Paul has finally closes his sweating eyelids and began to enter Rem sleep and then; ‘Beep, Beep! Beep!’ his alarm goes off and he has to get to work.

It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit according to the home thermostat, the fan has just broken too. The wife and kid get peered on by Paul as he struggles to pull his clothes over his sticky body to get to the car, he spots that they are sweating buckets about 20 minutes from their alarm clock going off to get ready for school, their bedsheets have been thrown off the mattress and into the corners of the room since last he saw them.

He needed to be quiet leaving the house so as not to prematurely awake his loved ones, but alas the cat trips him by the door looking to rub off his leg meowing for its’ breakfast. Paul trips into the door and shouts out, he is hot and angry and now so is his wife and kid, they cry and shout and they are up in a huff sweating and still tired. Lucy shouts; “You inconsiderate gimp, Paul! Leave like a considerate adult mouse, not a bull in a china shop! Stay out after work so I can sleep in the early afternoon in peace!” Paul shouts back with his headache throbbing; “Blame the cat, he tripped me!” Lucy shouts back; “Oh grow up and own up!” Paul shakes his head and then leaves slamming the front door behind him.

He has a sweat patch as big as a Frisbee on the back of his work shirt, the steaming hot sun hits him, his head is pounding as he gets to his car.

He opens the hand and gets a third degree burn off the door handle and flinches as he tugs it open. The Silver Fiat punto has all black seats and the whole vehicle is like a hot box, now 110 degrees Fahrenheit according to the cars electric thermostat, he sits down and closes the door, time to get microwaved.

The guy is in a huff, sweat drips into his eyes, he wipes his brow constantly, he starts the car, then tries the air conditioning but it doesn’t work, the steering wheel scolds his palms upon make contact.

This is Hell on earth. Time to get down the road and make it the 12-mile journey to work. All windows get open, but there’s no breeze, it’s thick dense heavy heat and sunshine going through you at all angles, the seat is cooking this guys butt.

Out onto the main road and oh look, it’s roadworks, temporary traffic lights, one side of the road closed and it’s more like a packed parking lot that a damn road with lines of vehicles going a mile either way on both sides.

The clock is ticking, the sweat is pouring and every sound from other vehicles and lazy road workers is piling on the pressure for poor old Paul.

The guy is going to be late for work as traffic moves at a snails pace, he wants to call in sick to avoid the lateness punishment and says out loud upon not moving; “Why don’t I just call it off? Avoid the final warning for lateness. Oh no, then I have to be at home with bickering Lucy, in this heat I’ll rip her apart and get life. Damn!”

He beeps his horn, he tries to go through the gap on the kerb and ignore the red traffic light, then he gets a beep from another driver, the sound of angry non-moving drivers and the sight of the bright burning sun and even the stench of the molten asphalt simmering are doing in Paul’s mind and body.

Time ticks over on the cars digital clock and now Paul is already 1 minute late for the beginning of his work shift, he loses it.

He decides that he’ll walk to work and ditch his car, regardless of the pay penalty for parking up on a kerb. His cognitive functions are declining and he slips his hand off the gear stick and slurs his speech shouting at a roadworker, but he narrowly avoids hitting a plastic roadwork cone in bumping up onto a gap on the kerb.

Paul gets out and starts walking down the road past bemused people in their traffic queuing cars and past dumfounded road workmen. A worker says; “Where the Hell are you going?” Paul angrily says as he marches up the main road; “I’m going to work, it isn’t going to come to me.” The worker says; “You can’t park there, it’ll get a ticket and it may well get towed away.” Paul says as he walks away from the man; “Whatever happens, happens.” A driver even says to Paul as he starts jogging; “Get back in your car and deal with this like the rest of us.” Paul just says; “Worry about yourself pal.”

Paul is jogging and burning and he calls his work and says that he has been in a car accident and will be at work in an hour maximum, he doesn’t listen to the person on the other end of the line as he phones in, he doesn’t need to hear how he is screwed, he has enough stress as it is.

He jogs 2 miles to a bus stop and hops on a bus that luckily arrives just as he gets there. He stinks by now from the sweat and his work shirt now looks like a janitors mop after a spillage on aisle 9 (booze section), he hops on a packed bus, a greenhouse from hades. All seats are taken so he grabs a pole to stand steady for the ride, unfortunately the pole burns, metal and sunshine equal skin melt.

Pulling up from the bus just 50 feet from work, he dashes in the building and clocks in 1 hour and 10 minutes late, he’ll have to stay longer to make up the difference.

He spots the assistant manager and apologizes for not being on time, the assistant tells Paul to expect to be called up to the big bosses office at some point during the shift as he will have to do paperwork and maybe even a disciplinary for being late again, it doesn’t matter than the excuse of a car accident might rub off, no reason for being late in this place will strike it off your record, not even amputation off both legs will cut it.

Luckily the place has fridges so it isn’t as cold at work as it is everywhere else in town, it’s just a shame that the fridges can’t handle adjusting to compensate for the extra heat, this means they are breaking down and leaking in 5 of the shops 12 aisles.

Customers are slipping and complaining and Paul has to keep mopping up.

As he mops in the busy store people come up to him and ask dumb questions about if products are lactose free and gluten free and it is hard for him to keep his professional cool.

A customer brings over a product that had no label and ask for a price check as he mops, so he has to do a price enquiry at the check out and then when he returns to the aisle to tell the customer the price, they have gone. This happens many times in quick succession and it is a time-wasting frustration.

The exposure to heat means the Paul feels confusion as he works aisles stock from delivery and then gets pulled away by customers to find products not on the shelves that he is asked to go check from the warehouse for back stock. He comes out and finds he has forgotten what the customer looked like whom asked him to seek out the product, on other occasions he’ll be unloading delivery onto the shelf and be asked to check the warehouse for a product not on the shelf and he’ll go fetch it and come out and not remember what he was last working on and what the backstock he bought out was for.

He gets so hot and dehydrated and over run going from aisle to aisle that he’ll not notice a fresh fridge leak and slip on his butt and make a huge impulsive reactive error and shout out in pain; “F*ck this life!” Sadly, for him the public will hear his curse word and complain.

Then the store intercom will call him to the office on the initial incident of being late this morning, which with his wet butt and banged back and head from the slip, he will now look and feel awful and have to be chastised by the Big boss with worse to come as the assistant manager will have to tell the main Boss about the swearing Paul did on the shop floor whilst Paul is already in a room with him about to give him his final warning from being late again.

He has to do the walk of shame up the staff stairs and across the second-floor corridor towards the boss’s office in this unairconditioned zero window human oven of a crawl space, his clothes dirty from sweat and fridge leakage mixed with floor muck making him look not fit for work.

He sheepishly knocks on the boss’s door and gets called in.

The Big cheese looks flustered in his blazer too, he has a busted fan than he keeps kicking as he berates poor Paul. He has only a tiny port hole like open window too, so he is overweight and overheated.

The head honcho lays into Paul about him missing his alarm twice last month and turning up late and now he has a third late day and he starts writing the final warning, then the phone rings. The assistant manager is on the other end, the words in the interior heat waved room fill Paul with tension, he has just heard the Boss be told that Paul said the ‘F’ word in front of the public and 6 people have complained in outrage and he knows that the hammer is about to drop.

The Boss gets off the phone and shouts at Paul that the stores reputation is on the line with staff swearing on the shop floor in a busy store. Paul says; “I didn’t swear at anyone. I am sorry, I fell, I hit my head and then the F-bomb just slipped out. It was an accident. Can’t you see that and let it slide?” Boss man rages, he’s a bulging old man that never heard of staff shouting curses to the public in all his years as store leader, he shouts; “This is the final straw. Time to hear another F-word, you are FIRED! Fired! Get the Hell out you disgrace!!!”

Paul is broken and about to leave when Boss man big Barry twitches and shakes, he grabs hold of his left wrist and says; “Ugh.” His left side of his face drops and with sweat pouring off him he falls.

Paul turns to check his pulse, he has not got one. The boss is dead. Paul his shocked and sad, but no one else is around, so at least now he isn’t fired.

He quickly calls the ambulance and then he calls down to the assistant manager using the store internal speed dial system and he notifies him and so as sad as it is that the heat and stress just killed the boss, the thing is; Paul can now have the press and the customers not focus on his one swear word and instead focus on mourning the stores long-term leaders passing.

Paul walks home at the end of his shift, the ambulance took Boss Barry away and after his passing away the shift had less shoppers and more gawkers so Paul had a lighter second half to his shift, mainly mopping leakage from the broken fridges.

He gets back to his illegally parked car and it has a ticket on it with a financial penalty. He doesn’t mind as he can afford to pay it because his final written warning and even the cries to fire him died with his boss. So, he still has a job, the sun has suddenly started to fall. The air is a bit cooler now and the half a mile drive back home ends with meeting up with the wife and the kid not arguing about the early morning hot madness with no sleep but with a chat about the mayhem of Pauls’ Boss kickin’ the bucket due to Heat stroke Cardiac arrest with Paul being the last person to see him alive.

Just before bed Paul fixes the fan with his screwdriver so this nights’ sleep should go better, then he phones his bosses house to send condolences to his widow.

He had a meltdown during the day, but in the end, he has gone from Zero to Almost Hero and that’ll do… at least until tomorrow that is.