I should be working, but I just knocked this sort of character sketch thing up instead. It's ****e, but intriguing at the same time.

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The clock on John’s windowsill has been broken for years. Not that it’s stopped – it’s just broken. It still works. Just that bits are falling off it. It’s basically just the face planted on a stand now. It used to look like Big Ben, so maybe the fact that it now resembles nothing more than a plain clock-face on a very tall spike it actually something of a blessing. Anyway – the fact that it is broken is important. Because it used to be an alarm clock. The alarm bit broke. So I guess it is broken in an important way after all. So it didn’t go off this morning – not really a problem, because John never expected it to, seeing as how it’s been broken for years and all – but then neither did his phone alarm, which is the one he uses these days now that his alarm doesn’t work properly any more. Anyway, his phone alarm didn’t go off, so he was two hours late for work, by which time they’d already cleared his desk for him. It was a fair cop, really, because he was a fireman and by turning up two hours late he had (although it’s difficult to actually substantiate this claim) caused the deaths of three hundred people stuck in a lift somewhere downtown. Don’t ask me how they got three hundred people in a lift in the first place – maybe it was some kind of record attempt.
But anyway. He was late for work, and now he’s unemployed and facing a rather large lawsuit, which I would say is a bit unreasonable on the part of the victims’ families – a man has to have some sleep every now and then; we can’t just run around saving lives all day, otherwise we’d forget about our own and that’s the important thing (being selfish – what modernity is all about). So he’s gone back to bed and he’s listening to the rise and fall of his breathing (which has something of an asthmatic lilt to it these days, having spent so much time hanging around in smoky buildings, not to mention his dreadful fifty-a-day habit) and suddenly there’s this crash next door, and then this ‘bump-bumpity-bump’ sound, what the **** was that? Turns out the guy next door has hanged himself from the top landing, but the rope was too long – snapped his head clean off, and it rolled down the stairs till it hit the ground floor. Where have I heard that one before, thinks John, but the cop told him that had happened (were they allowed to be that specific?) and so it must have been true. Yeah, like you never get a lying cop. He’s gonna stick to that story anyways, though, ‘cause it would sound better at parties.
Not that John ever goes to any parties, or knows anyone but other firemen for that matter. He’s a naturally sociable person, but his job has made his life pretty antisocial by default. Ladies might love a fireman, too, but not one that gets home at about four-thirty in the morning (John has a drinking problem, which shouldn’t surprise you when you discover how many people he’s seen burned alive in his lifetime (about four hundred)).