Barty Butterfield's Interdimensional Blues

Bartholomew "Barty" Butterfield considered his daily commute a profound personal injustice. It wasn't the traffic that gnawed at his soul; it was the sentient, self-assembling IKEA furniture of the Fifth Dimension, or the sudden gravitational inversions of the Chronos-Flip Nebula. Barty, you see, was an Interdimensional Commuter. Every morning, he’d brave the Gooey Glades of Gloop and the Bureaucracy Dimension (where the tax forms really *did* eat you) just to get to his soul-crushingly mundane job as a Senior Widget Analyst at Optimal Innovations Inc.

"You're late again, Mr. Butterfield," Mrs. Higgins, his boss, droned, her voice capable of withering lesser dimensions. Barty, currently sparkling with residual fairy dust from the Pixie Portal and smelling faintly of fermented space-cabbage, could only sigh. "Mrs. Higgins, the Time-Warp Tunnel collapsed into a pocket universe of sock puppets, and then I had to negotiate safe passage with a particularly obstinate kraken operating a toll booth in the Mariana Trench Dimension."

Mrs. Higgins merely raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. "Another incident with the 'Kraken Collective,' Mr. Butterfield? My records indicate that's your third this month. Perhaps you should invest in a better interdimensional GPS."

One particularly harrowing Tuesday, Barty arrived with a miniature black hole clinging to his tie and a colony of sentient moss attempting to colonize his briefcase. He’d almost been assimilated by a rogue spreadsheet in the Numeric Nexus and spent twenty minutes explaining "personal space" to a hyper-intelligent cloud in the Cumulus Corridor. He burst into Mrs. Higgins' office, utterly frayed.

"That's it!" he declared, scattering glitter and a faint whiff of ozone. "I can't do this anymore! The multi-verse is actively conspiring against my punctuality! The spatial anomalies, the temporal eddies, the *paperwork* in the Phantom Bureaucracy! It's too much!"

Mrs. Higgins slowly put down her coffee mug, a serene, almost pitying expression on her face. "Mr. Butterfield," she began, "we've discussed this. If your current residence's commute is proving too… *challenging*, you're more than welcome to utilize the corporate interdimensional relocation service. The portal is right there, next to the water cooler. It's a standard employee benefit. You *chose* to live in the 'Chaos Sector' for the 'vibrant local color,' remember?"

Barty stared, the miniature black hole on his tie humming softly. The water cooler. The *portal*. He'd been commuting *from* the absurd, fantastical dimension *to* the perfectly normal, sensible dimension where Optimal Innovations Inc. resided, all this time. And he could have just... moved next door.

The moss on his briefcase began singing an anthem of profound irony.