Dance of Chaos

Fiona MacDougall is conceited, lazy, ignorant, and completely lacking in common sense. Her mind is filled with science fiction and Walter Mitty fantasies, and her grasp on real life is not strong. She applies for a job in her company’s infotech department because she will get an afternoon off work to sit aptitude tests.

Everyone except Fiona is surprised when she is awarded one of the coveted positions. Trouble rears its head when her current boss refuses to approve her transfer, but Fiona has resources at her command – a fortuitous piece of salacious gossip provides the means to exert blackmail power on him, and she moves to the I.T. department, where she is, as usual, quite out of her depth.

Things take a turn for the worse when the new manager, Godfrey Goebbels, arrives; he is a bully, and Fiona in particular draws his ire, due to her bad attitude and lack of work performance. When his new secretary arrives and turns out to be Aboriginal, Goebbels is revealed to be a hardcore racist as well, and life in the office reaches a new low.

There is no relief at home either, as Patrick, Fiona’s teenaged brother, gets himself into ever more impossible scrapes, and her tomcat, Moses, engages in ever more egregious misbehaviour. Soon, Patrick is pretending to have a vocation for the priesthood in order to escape the consequences of his misdeeds; this results in a great deal of interaction with Father Morelli, a priest whom Patrick hates intensely. Patrick sees himself as the injured party when Morelli catches him in some misdeeds and becomes obsessed with the idea of obtaining revenge. To this end, he persuades Fiona to burgle the Dominican convent to plant a pornographic magazine in Morelli’s room.

Fiona escapes from this predicament in her usual way, by lying, and is then fired from the job for hitting the Emergency Stop on the computer during some horseplay in the computer room. As we say goodbye to her, she is contemplating joining the Police.