Futile

She sits beside me now.
She's close. Close enough I can hear her laboured breathing. Close enough I can hear her typing with her index fingers at a rate somewhere around five words per minute. Close enough I can hear her make little perplexed noises when she can't work out how to use a spreadsheet.
"It's all so confusing innit!?" she laughs.
"Hmm" I agree through a clenched jaw.
She rustles through the stack of emails that lie on her desk, printed out for 'ease of finding'. Alot of things will be easier to find once they cut down all the trees needed to support her unnecessary printing habit. I alt-tab as she tries to look at my screen. Again.
She's close enough I can smell her breath.
It's a damp combination of burnt cheese and coffee. It would seem she's not a fan of oral hygiene. Or perhaps her mouth is open so often, spewing forth words whose sole function is to mask her ineptness and lack of knowledge, that a horde of bacterium have colonised the white, scum-rich valley in her tongue and her yellow teeth, where they're binary fission-ing themselves an army of stench.
She closes her mouth and I nod in feigned agreement of whatever it was she'd been talking about.
I resume my work and listen as she bellows across the office organising catch-ups, run-throughs, sort-outs and a horde of other time wasting activities disguised with hyphens.
She's mid-sentence confirming a progress-check when she tangentially begins telling someone how she 'found a piece of paper in her backyard on the weekend that was addressed to a place down the street and it was a bill from like, three years ago so she was wondering if she should take it back to the address or whether it would be even worth it because she doubts that the same people even live there any more because her friend next door told her they used to hear them having fights late at night and they even thought that the wife may have been cheating because sometimes there'd be a car that wasn't theirs parked out the front during the day while the husband was at work and then they just packed up and moved one day.'
Somewhere inside of me, a chunk of my soul bursts into flames, fanned by the knowledge she earns twice the amount I do. The smoke rises up and catches in the back of my throat.
"Crazy, innit!?" She asks
The smoke passes over my lips and presents itself as a disinterested response.
"Yeah, sure."

She continues blabbering and the sound fades out as I look to her coffee. She's left it sit while she tells someone about how she thinks she's getting the flu because her joints are swelling, which reminds her of this guy she used to know that wore a kilt and had funny looking knees.
I stare at her coffee and the gears in my head begin to click. Slowly at first, then rapidly as an idea begins to formulate.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

She sits beside me now.
She's close. Close enough I can put drops of correction fluid into her coffee when she's not paying attention.
The label says Tipp-Ex. Poisonous. Should not be consumed.
I figure five drops a day should eventually make her ill enough to need time off work.
A stir of her coffee and a genuine smile before she sits back down beside me and sips her latte.

I repeat this every day.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

A few days in I think she looks paler. She'll be ill soon. I rejoice as I imagine days without her. The freedom to do what I want at my desk without her gazing across and asking why I'm smiling at my computer screen. Days without her telling stories about how she once had a feather stuck in her cardigan but she had no idea how it had got there because she didn't know of any birds with feathers that colour.
Days without her. I smile.

Weeks pass, maybe even months. The empty bottles of Tipp-ex fill a small box in my drawer.
I can't put up with her much longer. The nonsensical stories. The constant catch-ups. The unending incompetence. The barrage of stupidity. Every. Fucking. Day.
She's unwittingly drank seven and a bit bottles now, surely she'll be ill soon.

I'm at breaking point. The rage wells up inside me and I'm starting to think I'm going insane.
I glance at her with crazed eyes as she finishes telling someone a story.
"... I mean, I wasn't even sure if they owned cats, but apparently it doesn't matter because they eventually got arthritis and we couldn't take them on holidays to Spain anymore."

My teeth crack and my hands are balled into tight fists.

"Crazy innit!?" She asks me, her teeth now smiling a brilliant white under the office's fluorescent lights.