Mark sighed as he walked down the driveway. There wasn’t anything he could really do about it. His boss was about to fire him, he was sure of it. Smashing the other bags down, he wedged the trash into the oversize can and rolled it out onto the curb in the right spot for the automated truck to pick it up and dump it out.

The project was not going well, and it had been not going well for a very long time now. He was about to have to actually show some progress, and there was almost nothing to show. He had made up some bullcrap about progress with research into the field and the evaluation of their different options, but he was pretty sure that the truth would come out.

Mark wasn’t a particularly good manager. He was typical when it came to dealing with people, which meant that he really was just jovial when he thought that they were indifferent towards him, and attempted to reciprocate when there was some extraordinary admiration or loathing involved. That didn’t make him a good manager because you had to be mean to people who actually liked you. At least that’s what Joe told him.

The team consisted of a couple of programmers, a designer, and himself, so it wasn’t even particularly large. Meetings had taken up the first couple of weeks, but when the spring break hit - a particular curiosity of the company they were all working for - they didn’t really pick up on the planning when they returned.

The blame rested on Mark, of course, for not whipping the team into shape. So now he was going to be fired. Just another Monday.