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Cubicle Hearts - a plot summary

Here's a plot summary for a romantic drama comedy I wrote a few months ago. I doubt I'll ever gather enough energy, motivation or money to make it a reality, but I like the idea of it.

Two interns at a big city promotions-consultancy office, a man and a woman, become friends despite a heavily competitous environment. Firstly it's just a move from both sides to gain the trust of their competitor in the climb of the corporate ladder, but later they realize that they have more in common with each other than with the corporate culture they serve.

They keep up the act at the workplace that they are serious rivals but spend their brakes (and also several "business planner meetings") smoking together in a secret corner of the office, secretly planning their internal sabotage against the company.

Through a series of events this evolves into something else, as they both get feelings for each other. Their superior, a greasy alcoholic with jokes of sexual character as speciality, first tells the man that he's going to get promoted to junior consultant ("women don't have the brains for this job anyway, haha"). However, after a fight between the man and the woman at the company's christmas party, the woman ends up in her boss' bed and receives the promotion instead. Filled with disgust against the corrupted corporate culture in general and her boss in particular she turns to the man for help.

He has mixed feelings for this, but after being taunted by his bad conscience (played by a sarcastic cockroach) he decides to do choose love over career and take action. He explains to the woman that he has given their superior a cup of coffee spiked with urine which he drank. This is shown subtly in a sequence while he tells her of his revenge, but it's not actually true, which the cockroach keep teasing him for. He later confesses and tell her the truth, only to find that she's known this all along but never had the heart to openly doubt him (she found him lying about it in order to make her feel better was sweet).

With the help of a guy even lower on the pecking order at the office, a shy IT-technician, they plan the final revenge and hack their way into their superiors computer and gain access to personal information that reveals his systematic sexual abuse against interns. They combine this information with his notorious habit of using other people to do his work to put together a power-point, that he presents to the board of the company with disastrous consequences.

They both find that, despite the promotion of them both they cannot stay in such a destructive environment and decides to leave the office forever, together with their smoking habits. The man also manages to get rid of his bad conscience, not by stepping on it and killing it (something he's tried earlier) but by spray-gluing it alive to the office carpet.

2 comments:

elvis said...

Bwhahaha! Who could've known you were such a twisted sucker Peter :) Is there something autobiographical in this or what? Can I play the insecure IT-technician? Can I can I can I? Hohoho. You gotto stuff a Rubik's Cube into the plot, just just gotto!

Office Space / The Office with romance and urine. Gotto love it.

Peter said...

Actually I think I just may throw in a rubik's cube there somewhere. Perhaps there's even a sponsorship-deal, hmm.