My boss was an oversized woman named Shirley, a professional working mom who wore brightly colored blazers with shoulder pads and gaudy jewelry, and screamed when she sneezed, like an actual scream that you scream when someone is stabbing you with a broken wine bottle. Shirley’s office, with a window covered in those corporate white blinds, overlooked the accounting department cubicles. From her throne, she could watch all of us labor beneath her.

The cubicles were what you’d expect from a typical bank office: overhead fluorescent lighting, creaky black desk chairs in front of computers that only produced pale green text on black screens, and hideous carpeting to muffle all of our screams.

Out in the open cubicles sat my coworkers, six middle-aged women—Linda, Patricia, Cynthia, Maxine, Deborah, and Janice—all of whom had worked in that very office for longer than I’d been alive, each crazier than the last, perhaps because they’d been trapped together in that very same basement since the bank was built above it forty years earlier.

Shirley led me to my desk, or rather, led me to the desk I’d be sharing with Janice. I was to be, in essence, Janice’s protegé. Janice worked only part-time to begin with, and she was slated to leave for a month in the coming weeks, so my job was to learn her tasks so I could perform them while she was away.

It took thirty minutes to discover just how special Janice truly was. She was a small, paper-thin woman, the kind who might blow away in a particularly weak breeze or fall over after a gentle cough. Her eyes looked like they were always asking for your permission, and you just had to be like, “Janice, stop being weird and show me how the copy machine works.” She was constantly crumbling with stress. Every minor problem was a cause for major concern. If we ran out of paper clips, it was a category-five shit storm, and Janice was seconds away from bursting into flames.

We sat side by side at her desk, in front of her whirring computer, and she walked me through her day. First, we looked at all the business checks that needed to be signed by two people and made sure they were actually signed by two people in case a local pizza shop co-owner decided to stage a silent coup in the dead of night and stealthily withdraw all the pizza money from the account he shared with his wife.

As we were flicking through the checks, she stopped me and asked, “Do you have kids?”