Alright, sorry about that. Had a little hiccup with an iron and some of a newt, I think they've worked out their differences.

Where was I?

Right, the giant chair. The giant office. The floor that shouldn't have existed.

You know, our culture really underestimes our ability to process the seemingly impossible. We all think something alien, nonsensical, outrageous enough will either send us shrieking reflexively in the other direction or break our minds and leave us gibbering in a fetal position, or something.

Hollywood sensationalism, of course. These things do happen, certainly, we've all had our scares and our traumas, but there's definitely a point at which something becomes so bizarre that even fear flies out the window, and when that hideously cheap yet monolithic office chair swiveled around, groaning like the stars themselves needed to be oiled and I saw the face of that booming, rumbling voice...I laughed.

Not the laugh of a brain struggling to process the writhing visage of some cosmic god.

It was the laugh of someone expecting a cosmic god and getting a wedge of cheese with noodle arms.

Don't get me wrong, it was a B-I-G wedge of cheese. Really big. It could have fed any reasonably sized city desperate enough to eat nothing but pure, straight cheddar for a month out of their lives, god help them.

The vast, orange-yellow, triangular wedge was pockmarked with throbbing, circular holes, and a gooey mouth divided most of its length, chewing a cigar the size of a redwood. Its oily, yellow arms were like a pair of rubber hoses protruding from two of its gaping pores, ending in muppet-like, four-fingered hands.

The thing shoved a boxy, primitive-looking cellular phone into one of its holes as a round, white eyeball swiveled into view through another, at the corner of its mouth-slit, regarding me as an unusually petulant sperm whale might regard a mole rat that just stormed in and urinated all over its plush carpeting.

The cheese leaned forward, plucked the cigar from its mouth and tapped it into an "ashtray" that appeared to be a plastic kiddie pool, decorated with cartoonish fiddler crabs. I noticed then that the cigar had its own set of eyeballs, narrowing scornfully in my direction.

The cheese spoke again.

"DIDN'T I JUST FIRE YOUSE?"

The Yosemite-Sam voice rumbled through the floorboards around me, as the cheese-mouth flapped and smacked like a wet, rubbery hand puppet. I held back another snicker and said the only thing I could think of.

"So...you're the big cheese around here, huh?"

In retrospect, maybe I'm not always smart.

The gargantuan fromage returned to puffing its cigar, smoke billowing from its many cavities, and rose itself up on its arms. It didn't have legs, but did have a rather nice, freshly pressed business suit...swinging like a tie from where the suit collar had been nailed or stapled directly into the cheese-flesh. The empty pant legs dragged along the desktop as the monster leaned forward.

"WE GOT A WISE GOIL, HUH? LISTEN TOOTSIE, WE CAN'T HAVE NONE GREY BRAWDS BRANCHITATIONIN' ON COMPANY MICE, CAPISCE?!"

I swallowed hard, and did my best to take a patently absurd situation a little seriously. I mean, I could still be in real trouble, right? I didn't even know how or why any of this existed, let alone what this thing was actually talking about.

"Er, uh" I stammered. "Branch...ating?"

Another, even more petulant eye filled in another of the cheese holes, positioned in arbitrary relation to the first below the right edge of its mouth. It pulled the cigar back out.

"YA DEAF OR SUP'M? I AIN'T AUTHORATIZED NO NEW BRANCHES THIS SECTOR, AN' IF I DID, IT SURE AIN'T WOULDN'T NOT BE FOR NO KINDA NOBODY PAPER-PUSHER ON NO DIRTCLUMP, AT'S FOR SURE. PACK UP YER GEL LAYERS AN' GET OUTTA MY SIGHT!"

"YEAH! squeaked the cigar suddenly, with a spray of fading embers.

"...My what?" I asked, my amazement and amusement giving way to agitation. This may have been ridiculous, yes, incredible, definitely, but we were still apparently talking about my job, here. I sure wasn't going to be fired for something my brain didn't even evolve to comprehend under natural circumstances.

"YER GEL LAYERS YA SCHMUCK. YA PUTZ. THEY'RE OUTTA CONTROL. LOOKIT WHATCHER DOIN TO MY BRAND NEW DRAPES, GOOF-OFF!"

The cheese gestured to a set of rather ugly, mauve and green checkered drapes on the cityscape mural behind it. There wasn't any window, but they framed an area of the mural containing a poorly drawn duck standing, not flying, in the open sky. I couldn't tell what exactly was supposed to be any more wrong with the drapes than the details I've provided here, but I'd understand more later about layer bleeds and gel channels. I'm afraid I can't help you understand them yourself, but trust me, those drapes were getting critical.

"...They look okay to me?" I responded, exhibiting egregious if sincere ignorance, and in the carotene layer range, a degree of unintentional racism that I cringe to look back upon.

The cheese was not amused. It hoisted itself onto its desk and erupted with a still unprecedented level of hostility.

"OUTTA HERE, SEE?!! OUTTA MY OFFICE OR YA AIN'T WORKIN' IN THIS RANGE AGAIN! DON'T MAKE ME GOTTA DONE CLOBBER YA!!!"

I decided then that I couldn't take what was probably two hundred metric tons of sharp cheddar in a fight. I threw up my hands and began to back away.

"Okay, okay! Sorry! I'm leaving. I'll clean out my cubicle and-"

"WHAT'SA MATTER WITH YOUSE!?! I SAID OUTTA HERE!!! OUTTA MEANS OUTTA, CAPISCE!?!"

Little had I realized, "outta here" had long ceased to be a spatially qualifiable state. The cheese was expecting me to withdraw my branches and sever any conceptual channels I shared with his zonal core, concepts I had not yet awakened to processing. My protestations that I was already on my way, that I'd be out of sight in no time, were not unlike being asked to leave a social gathering and only crawling under the dinner table. The cheese, suffice to say, was displeased.

I was only halfway across the ocean of tacky carpeting when my surroundings began to vibrate anew. The monstrosity was growling, and its fingers, noodly and gooey as they looked, were digging deep fissures in the surface of its wooden desk. The cheese was staying put, at least, but it was also swelling. It began to turn redder, and smoke shot from its increasingly puckered holes like a hundred tea kettles.

The end of the cigar came alive with hissing, crackling sparks, burning away like the fuse of a roman candle. It only giggled as its eyeballs blackened, hissed and popped, and it crossed my mind too late that I should have probably been making a more hurried effort to close the space between myself and the door.

Listen, when your life is being threatened by a giant cheese with a giggling cigar, your brain can have a weird way of ordering your priorities.

So there I was, still yards from safety, when the cheese finally blew. Not like a bomb, but like a volcano, a massive geyser bursting from its top as the rest of it just sort of collapsed in on itself.

I wasn't even sure what I was looking at until it began raining back down, bouncing off the desk and cascading off the edge in a chorus of high-pitched squeaks and titters.

Have you guessed that it was mice yet?

Nothing was even left of the cheese-guy but a steaming, oozing heap as the avalanche of rodents poured to the floor and scattered in every direction. By then, I was probably well on my way to breaking some sort of olympic record; I could swear my feet touched the floor only twice in the remaining thirty or forty yards to the door, which mercilessly offered a latch on the opposite side, buying me at least a few much-needed minutes as the rodent tsunami shuddered against it.

A single mouse gnawing wood in the middle of the night can be maddening. A few hundred thousand together is...kind of pretty, actually. White noise. Like a rainstorm. I could have fallen asleep to it if I had any guarantee that a similar sound wouldn't shortly be produced by, say, my freshly liberated skeletal structure.

Did you know that the "close door" buttons on an elevator don't usually do anything? That they're there just to make you feel better? I knew that, but I never knew it more angrily than I did as I jabbed the button like a woodpecker whose mind keeps wandering back to a messy divorce.

The doors finally slid shut as the first fuzzy, white shape broke out of the monster's office, and might have joined me in the elevator had it been a half-second faster. In that brief glimpse, I made two interesting new observations:

One, that the mice must have averaged about three feet all, and two, that I say "tall" because they ran on their hind legs. They weren't even shaped like normal mice, so much as knock-off Warner Brothers cartoon characters.

Look, it can be hard to judge the size and shape of something when you're fleeing in horror from about half a million of it.

Had I mentioned how long the ride up had been on that elevator? I think I did. I think I told you it felt pretty long. It was about to feel pretty longer.