From his desk, Jim looks up toward Reception. Where Ryan looks back and asks, "What?" By way of explanation, Jim THs that Pam's on vacation and is returning tomorrow, and reminds us that Pam's getting married in June. Another look at Ryan. Ryan THs that he "would be creeped out, but it's nothing compared to the way Michael looks at me." Of which we get a demonstration this very second, as Ryan looks up to see Michael's nose pressed against the glass wall of his office. Michael pretends he wasn't looking at anything at all. Badly.
Pam's back! Shortest vacation ever. When Michael arrives, he makes up for a missed week's worth of obnoxious greetings on her first morning back, and then heads into his office. But he's all but physically driven back by a horrid stench when he opens the door. The camera gets the merest out-of-focus Blair Witch glimpse of something on the carpet on the far side of Michael's desk. You can only see, like, the bottom edge of whatever it is. Which is just enough to tell you that it is not. Friendly. Kevin comes to investigate, and Michael sends him in to check it out. And then he shuts Kevin inside to try to force him to identify it. In another expedition, a group of people all go in together, then duck back out. All except Dwight, who stands over the out-of-frame mess like he's working a crime scene. Michael thinks it's the product of a burst pipe, but Toby thinks not. Creed arrives for the day with a new theory of his own: "Somebody makin' soup?"
Later, a masked cleaning lady comes out of Michael's office, presumably having removed the...er...artifact. But the smell remains. Michael THs about this being like his own audition tape for Fear Factor. Naturally, it's a short tape.
Jim arrives and wants to hear all about Pam's vacation, but he's a little distracted at the sight of masked warehouse guys carrying Michael's furniture out. In a TH, he assures us that it wasn't him. So does Ryan, struggling to keep a straight face. Back in the bullpen, Jim watches stuff leave Michael's office. As for Michael himself, he's parked at Jim's desk, offering to be "desk buddies " for the day. Jim doesn't really see how that would work (at least in any remotely tolerable sense), and points out that there's a desk open in the back. And when Michael doesn't move, that's where Jim goes. So the question is: was it Michael or Jim who found the more unpleasant surprise in his workspace this morning?
So now Jim and Kelly will be cube-mates for the day, as Jim takes the desk that used to be Toby's until Toby's "allergies" forced him to leave. Somehow, Jim still doesn't know what he's in for.
Michael sits in Jim's desk, which he tells Dwight used to be his own. Dwight asks who had Michael's office in those days, prompting a look of disgust from Michael, as well as a contemptuous TH about Ed Truck and a shot of an old staff newsletter with a cover photo of Ken "The White Shadow" Howard shaking hands with a mulleted, fanny-packed, much-younger Michael. Seriously, Michael can't be a day over thirty-seven in that picture. Michael says that when he was promoted, he promised himself that he would be the opposite of old, anti-fun Ed.
Kelly is filibustering to Jim about how disappointing her new closets are. Jim looks at us with a silently beseeching look on his face. "Today they had to unveil Kelly 2.0?" he thinks. "Today of all days?"
Meanwhile, Michael tells Dwight that Dwight's desk used to be Todd Packer's when he wasn't on the road. This triggers all manner of Scott-ian reminiscence about his glory days with Packer, like when they went around without pants for a whole day, or the time Packer held a guy's head in the toilet for a minute. I'm surprised that guy wasn't Michael. As he continues his story, he bugs everyone in unfunny ways, like interrupting one of Stanley's customer calls with a Wimpy from Popeye impression and popping Creed hard on the shoulder for no reason. He also tells us that Packer once banged every chick in the office as a joke. "It was hysterical," he giggles.
Kelly is reciting to Jim a list of all the things she likes (she is careful to include "things that are awesome") when Ryan comes and tells Jim that Michael wants to know how to raise Jim's desk chair. After Ryan leaves, "things Kelly likes" suddenly recedes into the back of her tiny little mind, as Ryan just became the entire list. She gushes to Jim about how cute Ryan is, and begs Jim to talk to Ryan for her. Aw, poor Jim, getting caught up in someone else's doomed, dead-end, awkward office no-mance on the same day that circumstances have prevented him from attending to his own doomed, dead-end, awkward office no-mance.
Michael drags Dwight into a "raid" on Accounting. This turns out to consist of walking over there and throwing around all of Kevin's, Oscar's, and Angela's stuff. Except that Michael's so busy trashing the files that he doesn't notice that Angela's stern warning look at Dwight keeps him from doing anything more than dropping one of her pencils on her desk. Michael and Dwight return to reception, gloating about how awesome they are. In a TH, Oscar says that what happened to Michael's carpet was wrong, and he doesn't keep a straight face any better than Ryan did.
In a pensive TH of his own from the conference room (where his desk stuff is piled willy-nilly on the credenza behind him), Michael speculates idly on the motivation for ruining his carpet. Love? Hate? Neutrality? Hatred of the cleaning lady (whom Michael now hates himself, because his office still stinks)? After an oddly-placed ad break, Michael has decided that it was an act of terrorism.
Michael gets a taste of the annoying behavior that Jim has to deal with all day, as Dwight tries to be the 107th caller to a radio station. But unlike Jim, Michael can order Dwight to stop, and forbid him from even picking up his phone again. Dwight claims to be making a sales call, and he turns away from Michael to whisper, "Am I the 107th caller?" Michael looks like he's wondering where Jim keeps his gun.
Jim is in purgatory; he can't visit Pam at Reception, because Roy's there, talking about their vacation. And he can't go back to his temporary desk, because if he does, Kelly's going to give him an aneurysm. So he goes into the men's room for a nice, long crap. After all, Michael's new carpet hasn't been installed yet.
Michael gets grumpy about people's attitude, and decides to motivate everyone by offering "a crisp hundred-dollar bill" to the person with the most sales at the end of the day. Except it's only $83 in random bills. He starts to stick it up behind the Chamber of Commerce plaque, but reconsiders when he realizes Darryl and Roy will be walking right by that spot. Michael says he's taking over Jim's clients for the day, since Jim is disqualified for some reason. As always, Dwight is highly enthusiastic about his boss's latest scheme. "Michael is gonna wipe the floor with us!" he says excitedly.
Jim is about to go into the break room for lunch, but seeing Roy sharing a table with Pam, he decides to take his brown bag elsewhere.
Michael gets off the phone and goes into a lengthy and obnoxious victory dance over having just made a sale. When Roy and Darryl haul the befouled carpet out and take the wind out of Michael's sails in the process, Michael tells them how much they suck compared to the Extreme Home Makeover people. Instead of speaking up in her fiancé's defense, Pam later THs, "Somebody did something bad to Michael's carpet. Maybe that's all we need to know."
Roy and Darryl nap on the new, rolled-up carpet in Michael's office. Out in the bullpen, Michael gets irritated at Oscar's and Creed's jovial speculation about the culprit, and petulantly calls off the sales contest. Which probably means he was losing (not that we get confirmation of that outside of the deleted scenes). He says he's the victim of a hate crime, and can't resist invoking Stanley's name in support. "That's not what a hate crime is," Stanley rumbles. "Well, I hated it!" Michael bitches. He wants the culprit to step forward, and when nobody does, he puts the whole office on time-out. He doesn't even let Phyllis answer her ringing phone.
In the break room, Jim runs into Ryan and asks what he thinks of Kelly. Ryan starts to say something about junk in your...? Something? I have no idea what the rest of that thought was going to be, since Ryan remembers the camera and interrupts himself. In short, he's interested, and that's Jim drafted as their hapless go-between.
In the break room, Michael is having himself a long, dark coffee break of the soul. He confides to Creed that his worst fear is turning into Ed Truck. Creed tells Michael he should have bigger fears than that, and is grouchily dismissed. That went very well for Creed.
So after spending the day hating on Ed Truck, Michael has gotten the man himself to meet him out by the Dumpster on false pretenses. Upon hearing about Michael's carpet, Ed admits that the same thing happened to him once. Oddly, you can see the rolled-up rug sticking out over the to of the Dumpster right to them, but neither of them appears to notice the smell out here. If the air outdoors in Scranton is really that fresh, remind me to visit sometime. Michael asks Ed for advice, but as usual, he doesn't want to hear it when someone tells him that his employees will only ever see him as a boss first. "Why can't your workers be your workers, your family be your family, your friends be your friends?" Ed asks rhetorically. Michael doesn't answer, but the obvious answer is that since he's only got workers, they have to fill the other two roles as well.
Jim gets tired of giving Pam distant waves that she doesn't see, and the fact that she seems to be getting through her day just fine without him is salt in the wound. So he calls up Brenda Something's voicemail and asks her out. Kelly, whose amazement threshold is pretty, low, is super-amazed.
A grumpy Michael answers Jim's desk phone, and there's a fey voice on speaker asking for a "gay nerd" named Michael Scott. Michael doesn't realize right away that it's Packer, and when he does, Oscar doesn't seem to appreciate Michael's happy reaction to the call. Perhaps it's the "gay nerd" phrase being used as a putdown, not that anyone in the office is aware yet that Oscar is a nerd. Packer asks Michael if he got the "package" that Packer left in Michael's office. Michael takes forever to get it, even going so far as to ask Roy and Darryl if they saw a package in the middle of his office. "You mean the thing?" Darryl asks, and Packer cracks up over the phone. Michael acts like the good-natured marks on Punk'd, but even Dwight is disgusted. And you know, I think I just figured out who did it to Ed Truck, too.
Afterward, Michael THs about Packer's "advanced sense of humor," and how he's been proven right about its having been done out of love. And now he loves his employees again. "Oh, I'm just so sorry that I threw the thing out," he sighs. Hero-worship can be an ugly thing. Not as ugly as a big old poo on your office floor, but it's close.
Closing time. On his way out, Jim sees his voicemail light blinking. He rolls his eyes and picks up the handset, fully expecting to hear a voicemail from Brenda Something shooting him down. But the first message is from Pam, being cute and charming about how weird it is to keep seeing Michael in Jim's spot. So is the second message. And the third and the fourth and the fifth and the sixth and the seventh. She missed him after all. Sure, it's rough when you have to be away from your imaginary work girlfriend for a whole day, but getting a concentrated fix at the end helps make up for it.