MY COWORKER SARAH SMASHED MY LAPTOP AFTER THE PRESENTATION FAILED
The shattered screen was still warm against my fingers, tiny glass shards digging into my palm as I knelt there. Everyone had evacuated the stale, air-conditioned conference room minutes ago, leaving the air thick with the metallic tang of failure and the lingering acrid smell of burnt coffee Sarah had spilled earlier. She stood rigid by the door frame now, her face stark white in the harsh overhead fluorescent light, looking like a ghost.
“You did this,” she hissed, her voice barely a whisper but vibrating with suppressed, violent fury. “You deliberately sabotaged weeks of my work just to make me look like an idiot in front of everyone. I saw you messing with the file last night.” The cold dread pooled in my stomach at the accusation.
I stared up at her, numb, the broken glass biting deeper into my skin. Sabotage? That was insane. I was as blindsided by the system crash as she was. Then her eyes flicked nervously towards the closed blinds covering the window, a fleeting flicker of guilt I almost missed before she clamped down on it. “Wait,” I said slowly, standing up, ignoring the sting. “That software glitch… the one that brought the whole system down… you knew it was unstable, didn’t you?”
She paled further, opening her mouth to speak, but a loud, sharp noise from the hallway outside, like something heavy being scraped or dragged violently across the tile floor, cut through the suffocating silence. She flinched hard, her eyes snapping towards the sound, wide with raw, unexpected fear, not anger anymore. My heart hammered against my ribs.
Then a low voice right outside the door muttered, “Get rid of the evidence, quickly.”
👇 Full story continued in the comments…Sarah gasped, a choked sound, stumbling back from the door as if physically struck. Her wide, terrified eyes fixed on the handle, which began to turn slowly. It wasn’t the furious Sarah from moments ago; this was someone cornered and deeply afraid.
The door swung open, revealing two figures silhouetted against the slightly brighter hallway light. One was a stocky man in a crumpled suit I vaguely recognized from the IT department, the other a sharp-featured woman holding a tablet, her expression grim. They stopped dead, their gazes sweeping from the shattered laptop on the floor to Sarah’s ashen face and then to me, still standing, palm bleeding.
The man in the suit cleared his throat, a rough, impatient sound. “Sarah, what in God’s name happened here?” His eyes narrowed as he spotted the laptop.
Sarah found her voice, thin and shaky. “It… it crashed. The presentation failed. He…” She gestured towards me, a desperate attempt to revert to her initial narrative, but the conviction was gone.
The woman with the tablet stepped forward, ignoring Sarah. Her eyes, cold and calculating, met mine. “The system logs went dark precisely when the failure occurred,” she stated flatly, her voice devoid of the earlier rough urgency. “And we got an alert about unusual activity on the server just prior. We were checking the backup protocols in the hall.”
A sickening realization dawned. The “glitch” wasn’t random. Sarah’s nervous glance at the window, her sudden, overwhelming fear at the sound outside, the voice talking about “evidence”… It wasn’t *my* sabotage Sarah was initially trying to pin on me, or at least, not *just* that. It was the sabotage *they* orchestrated, and Sarah was somehow involved. Her earlier accusation was a desperate, clumsy smokescreen.
“You planted the glitch,” I said, my voice low, cutting through the tense silence. “The software instability wasn’t an accident. Sarah knew. That’s why you were outside, trying to cover your tracks.”
The stocky man’s face hardened. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I?” I took a step towards the smashed laptop. “This is evidence. This contains the logs of the crash, maybe even traces of the malicious code. That’s why she smashed it, to destroy the proof.” I looked at Sarah. Her lower lip trembled. She hadn’t smashed it purely out of rage; she was following someone’s panicked instruction, or perhaps she truly believed destroying it would protect her from *them*.
The woman with the tablet exchanged a quick, sharp look with the man. “Sarah,” she said, her voice dangerously quiet, “you were supposed to ensure clean system shutdown, not… this.”
Sarah flinched back further. “It happened so fast! He… he mentioned the glitch… I panicked!”
The man took a step towards me. “Give us the laptop. Now. This is company property.”
“It’s also a crime scene,” I retorted, my heart hammering. My fingers, sticky with blood from the shards, clenched into a fist. “Sabotaging a critical presentation, destroying evidence… What were you hoping to gain? Undermine this project? Steal our research?”
Before the man could grab the laptop, the woman’s tablet pinged loudly. She glanced down, her eyes widening almost imperceptibly. “Security’s on the way,” she murmured to the man.
His eyes flicked to the door, then back to me, assessing. The brief window they had to retrieve the evidence had closed. Sarah stood frozen, a picture of abject terror.
The man and woman exchanged another look. It was a decision, made in an instant. They turned and walked swiftly towards the door.
“This isn’t over,” the woman said, her voice cold as ice, just before she exited. The man followed, pulling the door shut behind them.
Silence descended again, thick and heavy, but the air felt different. The immediate threat had retreated, replaced by the chilling certainty of a much larger conspiracy at play. Sarah slumped against the door frame, sobbing quietly, no longer a furious aggressor but a terrified accomplice or pawn.
I knelt back down by the shattered laptop, the pain in my palm a dull throb compared to the shock numbing my mind. The presentation failure was just the tip of the iceberg. My smashed laptop was the key piece of evidence in a corporate sabotage attempt, and I had just become a central figure in a conflict I hadn’t even known existed moments before. Security would be here any second. The normal corporate world I knew had just shattered as completely as my screen.