032. You know what I mean?

“You know when you get on a bus and the bus driver asks you which suburb you live in, but you can’t remember?” Mr Donsfield asked, his badly dyed beard glowing under the fluorescent lights.

“I guess…” Matt answered. He had one of those faces – the freckly, earnest kind, that made you think he would know what you meant. So ever since Collaborate Investments had given him the desk next to the water cooler, he’d been included in a string of awkward overshares he couldn’t possibly admit to not understanding.

“You know when you’re adding a new page to your cat’s scrapbook?” Mindy had started this morning. “But the whole time you’re cutting out photos you can feel the ghost of your first cat staring at you?”

Then Tina had chimed in. “Don’t you hate it when your date sets fire to your kitchen?” she whined. He smiled politely.

Dave’s after-lunch rant had nearly done him in. “My future-life self just keeps resurfacing,” he told Matt. “You know, when you get that sudden urge to wear a cape and explore distant planets and you think to yourself: Listen, man, it’s just not your time yet.”

Two years ago, Matt had felt so bad about his failure to identify with his colleagues’ life stories that he began to set up dozens of specialised online chat forums. He populated them with imaginary characters who felt “just the same, man”, and now the people he loved could marry off their pets, baste themselves in cooking oil and convince their lovers to dress up as turnips, without ever having to admit it any of it was weird.

But the confessions kept coming – and he was having trouble manning the 132 online communities he had created.

And worse, the idea that there might not be someone else out there just like him – someone labouring away at fake online communities to make their fucked-up colleagues feel less alone – made the whole thing harder to bear.