Bronze

Ron Bronze had been blowing up balloons for quite some time. He was finding it tough going and had become quite pink in the cheek as a result of his puffing up these balloons.
Ron had found that the rounded balloons were easier to get started and blow into the standard ovoid balloon shape but quite tricky to tie if you over puffed them whereas the longer balloons took a little more puff but tied up easier.
"Such is life." thought Ron. This was one of Ron's regular sayings. He had a few standard little phrases that he trotted out when things like this balloon conundrum occured.
Ron was blowing up balloons because one of the lady secretaries was about to go off and have a baby and some of the other office staff had decided that as it was a Friday it might be nice to have a leaving ceremony.
There was a buffet and some drinks although Ron had made a mental note not to have more than one glass of champagne because he got a little tipsy on champagne and he was driving tonight. Mrs. Bronze had her regular bridge game and Ron regularly drove her to her too her "Brood" and in between then and having to pick her up he would go home, pop on some of his vinyl records and find a game of internet chess. Ron liked his internet chess and he played several days a week but on Fridays and Tuesdays he was in a league. The league had players from as far a field as Seoul, Boston Massachuesetts, St. Petersburg, Johannesburg, Rekjavik, Mumbai, Bucharest and Chinese Taipei. It was a very exotic league, except for Ron who lived in Milton Keynes and suspected he had the least exotic lifestyle of all the on-line chess league players even the one from Anchorage Alaska where it was only daylight for six months of the year.
Ron wasn't doing spectacularly well. He lost more games than he won and tonight he was due to play as black so that almost certainly meant another loss.
Ron languished in the bottom third of the league of eighteen players and hadn't really shown any signs he was about to change his fortune with a couple of wins and pull himself into the top half of the table.
As usual Ron was doing slightly worse than average, which was the way his whole life had gone. He was slightly worse than average at school, university and in any sports he ever played.
Ron drove a Citreon, which is a nice car but isn't a BMW or an Audi. It was five years old now, not the brand new car every two years at the very worst that his more successful university peer group drove. It was a decidedly less than average vehicle and one that says maybe I could have done better in life.
All of this had meant that the girls organising the party for their preganant colleague had only entrusted the relatively minor task of blowing up balloons too Ron. It wasn't something he could get spectaculalry wrong and he had managed a good thirty so far but some of them looked like decidedly limp affairs.
He'd got himself a system, because there was far more oval balloons than long ones he was doing three round ones too one long one. This sort of regimented approach to tasks was the way Ron did most things. In essence he was a bit of a nerd.
But other tasks like going and buying suitable gifts and cards, getting the card signed, which so far Ron hadn't been asked to do and he wasn't sure what he going to write in it anyway, Ron wasn't good at sentmiment, getting drinks and snacks, arranging lively music and other thinsg had all been handled by other people in the office. Ron was blowing up balloons, probably because no one else wanted to do it.
Ron also knew that this little informal, not very exciting get together was only the civilised version of the pregnant ladies leaving festivities. There was a gang of the younger, more nubile folk going out to a restaurant this evening and Ron had heard a couple of guys with trendy haircuts discussing going to a club much later on. They had plans to investigate the methods used to make the pregnant lady pregnant with some of the non pregnant ladies, probably with not such a dramatic consequence as the one that had got the pregnant lady pregnant though.
Ron hadn't been invited to this and under normal social ettiquette Ron could put this down to being a bit too old but he never really got invited to proper parties or late night pubbing visits when he younger either so it probably was just assumed that Ron wouldn't be that much fun surrounded by what Ron assumed would be copious amounts of shagging and rivers of liquor. Ron really had no clue about parties. He had been to so few of them in his life. Ron wasn't even invited to the ones his wife's bridge club held once a year and they were for charity.
It had taken a lot out of Ron blowing up all of these sodding balloons. They bobbed around his desk like a metaphor for how rubbish his life was. It wasn't shocking enough to moan about it but it was definately panning out far less successfully than he would have expected. Ron was a man of lower than average abilities with a higher than average expectation of how far those abilities should have got him by now. If anything his endurance should have seen him rise higher than he had but every year a new group of thrusting, spunky, energetic, cocky gobshites turned up and eclipsed Ron in the list of people considered for promotion. He was now just too old to claim experience as a valuable asset and was that wrong side of being thought of as over the hill.
Ron half heartedly wafted away a balloon that was lightly mocking him on his desk but all the balloon did was casually bob out of the way of his clumsy jab, deftly using an invisible thermal to make Ron look like a bit of a chump, a decidedly average chump.
Ron hated blowing up balloons.