It’s 7:00 a.m. on a Friday, and she’s running late for work (again). She does her best to weave in and out of the rush-hour traffic and somehow manages to clock in at 7:30 a.m. on the dot, all while only cutting off one car—a white Jeep—in the process (he flipped her off). It’s going to be a good day, she thinks, because she’s caught up on her work (she has an inbox full of unanswered emails), so she scrolls through Facebook to pass the time. She sees a post from an extended family member (racist), so no longer does she think it’s a good day; in fact, she’s now in a bad mood and wishes that four o’clock would come sooner so that she could go home. When she’s driving home, a song about Las Vegas comes on the radio, which makes her think about Las Vegas. She’s never really gotten the appeal, and she has no desire to ever travel there—but then she’s sitting inside the Venetian or the Paris (or maybe it was Caesars—she couldn’t really remember), at a slot machine, smoking a cigarette (because it’s Vegas, and people in Vegas smoke indoors), even though she knows it’s a nasty habit. She thinks that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so she doesn’t really care that she’s smoking (or that she’s lost more money than she cares to admit), because she’s having fun (finally), and because something in her gut is telling her that she’s going to hit big on her next spin. She also thought that ten spins ago (and ten spins before that), but she pushes that thought back somewhere deep inside her as she keeps playing and instead thinks that even though she just keeps losing money, at least she’s having fun (finally). She decides that she likes Vegas. She decides that, instead of being stuck behind her desk all day, she should probably stay in Vegas forever. But there she is—back at her desk—where nothing has changed and nothing will ever change, and where the only proof of her trip West is the Viva Las Vegas mug (and her drained savings account) that caught her eye from a shop inside the MGM. She sips her coffee out of the mug, logs onto Facebook, and wishes for it to be four o’clock so that she could check one more day off her desk calendar. One day closer to retirement, she thinks (she’s only 34), and she wonders whether in a decade she’ll still be working here at the same desk, drinking coffee from her Viva Las Vegas mug and painstakingly checking off days from her calendar—just going through the motions.