by Pip Adam
‘How many?’
‘Simon, hi, sorry to . . .’
‘How many?’ Simon said.
‘1,712 . . . 13 . . . 14 . . .’
‘Hilarious.’
Mary heard Simon shift from his chair and walk to another room.
‘What’s gone?’ he asked.
Mary scrolled through the report. ‘All the legislation, most of the forms and all the letters off the internal site.’ She watched as Simon stopped the publish and the report slowed, then stood still. ‘1,812,’ she said.
‘We have a winner,’ Simon said.
‘It’s getting worse.’
‘Ya think?’ Simon said, then, ‘Damn,’ under his breath.
She heard typing and mouse-shifting and began to swing in her chair.
‘Did you go as Gabriel in the end?’ Simon said.
‘Yeah.’ Mary picked at the silk Greek-style dress she was wearing.
‘Feathers or cellophane?’
‘Feather ones.’ Mary looked at the wings on the chair beside her.
‘Very Victoria’s Secret.’
‘Yeah, without them I kind of just look like Jane Austen. There were three of us.’ There was silence over the phone except for the typing. ‘Gabriels.’
‘Did you have an archangel cage fight?’
‘Don’t get weird,’ Mary said.
‘You better get a cup of tea,’ Simon said.
‘Is it going to take a while?’
Mary padded to the kitchenette in bare feet, her long dress sweeping the floor and floating out behind her. It was warm in the building; the air conditioning was turned off on Friday at about midnight and back on at four o’clock on Monday morning. It made the whole place a new type of quiet. When she worked late she could tell time by the level of silence. It was wetter without the air conditioning. As the jug boiled she took hair clips out of her hair. She shook her head and glitter rained on the bench. Her hair stayed in place. The sign above the sink said, ‘Your mother doesn’t work here – wash your own dishes!’ She heard her phone ring.
‘How committed are you to this publish?’ Simon said.
‘Oh, that sounds like what I want to hear.’
‘I’m just asking.’
‘The changes have to be on the website by 8.00 a.m. Monday.’
‘Or what?’ Simon said.
‘There could be some discomfort.’
‘Yeah, but, no one’s going to die,’ Simon said. ‘It’s not brain surgery.’
There was silence for a moment.
‘The CEO wants the changes on the site by Monday at 8.00 a.m.,’ Mary said. There was more silence and the sound of Simon waiting. ‘The CEO came down on Friday and said he wanted them on the site by 8.00 a.m. Monday.’
‘Do you like your job?’ Simon said.
‘Not at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, dressed as an angel.’
‘Archangel.’
‘Sorry, archangel.’
‘I think I might be able to find a way of limping on.’
Mary looked at the ceiling, rows and rows of holes in tiles. ‘With all due respect Simon, isn’t “limping on” what got us here in the first place?’
‘Don’t go all “due respect” on me. Do you want a publish or not?’
‘I want a publish without some huckery fix holding that publish together.’
‘You can’t have both,’ Simon said.
Mary looked out the window. A sled with reindeer flashed on and off.
‘Then I guess I want a publish,’ she said. ‘I’m not manually republishing eighteen hundred pages, though.’
‘Eighteen hundred and twelve,’ Simon said.
‘I’m not manually republishing eighteen hundred and twelve pages.’
‘Nah. Just don’t push it to live.’
‘Ya think?’ Mary said.
‘Yeah,’ he said sarcastically, ‘because with all due respect, Mary, if you do that we’ll lose at least eighteen hundred and twelve pages off the live site.’
Mary rubbed her face and more glitter came off in her hands. Simon started typing on the other end of the phone.
‘Mary,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you go as Mary?’
‘Should I leave you to this?’
‘Nah, I need you to watch the report – I’m at home, I haven’t got access to the report.’
‘Home?’ Mary said. ‘I’m on the seventh floor of a corporate building on a Saturday night.’
‘Don’t jump off.’
‘You didn’t say Simon says.’
‘It’s implicit.’
Mary looked out the window. The city spread out, then stopped abruptly at the water. ‘I’m going for a bit,’ she said. ‘I left my tea in the kitchen.’
‘Tea,’ Simon said. ‘All right for some.’
‘Get yourself a cup of tea, Simon.’
‘Don’t go far. I’ll ring you.’
Mary pushed the end button on her phone and turned in her chair with her headset still on. The floor was running a ‘decorate your cubicle’ competition for Christmas. Her team hadn’t started yet. They were all dealing with the cannibalising publishing system. Mary was a translator; the rest of her team produced content for the website. They went to people in the ministry, asked them what they needed, then wrote pages to go on the website. When there was a problem they came to her and she went to the technical people and explained their problem in technical terms. Then she went back to her team and explained the solution in non-technical terms. She looked at the box of business cards on her desk. They literally called her a Translator. People used to make things. She’d been brought in after a couple of altercations that escalated to written warnings, at least one of them addressed to Simon. Her boss, Robyn, said technical people weren’t people-people, they were logic-people; communication was never a technical person’s strength. Mary’s main task was to talk to Simon, so no one else had to. He was the most difficult person in the technical team to deal with, because he was the one they relied on the most. For years he’d been cobbling together fixes to keep the publishing system functioning. By the time anyone realised this, he was the only one who actually knew how it was working. Simon displayed the arrogance of a failure. Mary imagined his mother saying things to him like ‘They’re only jealous.’ People disliked him.
It had all gone underground since the publishing system had started deleting content. People stopped hushed conversations when Mary approached them. It started slowly, so no one had noticed. Then complaints started piling in: broken links, call-centre staff unable to find content, then the minister’s office. A few people, including Mary, knew exactly what was wrong; no one knew how to fix it. Everyone blamed Simon. There were rumours and conjecture and finger-pointing. It wasn’t the first time Mary had been in the office late and alone – it wasn’t even the tenth. The publishing system had always been an ugly, dysfunctioning child that needed constant reassurance and direction. This was how she explained it to the rest of her team: ‘You know Frankenstein’s monster?’ They joked about getting her an apartment in the block next door and making a trap-door for her to crawl through in the night. Her team called the publishing system ‘her baby’. Simon called it a badly deformed abomination he’d inherited from another company that knew nothing. He talked constantly about what he would have done differently. Mary listened, ate almonds and said, ‘Aha. Yip. Aha,’ and when he was finished asked if he could do something for her. When he said yes, she’d make a joke with him and they’d laugh. People who didn’t understand her job thought Mary was Simon’s friend.
Her phone rang.
‘Simon,’ she said.
‘How did you know it was me?’
‘Everyone else I know is at a party,’ Mary said.
‘There’s something wrong. I can only find one page altered.’
‘Yeah,’ Mary said, ‘that’s okay.’
‘Eh?’
‘We’re only altering one page.’
‘We’re deleting eighteen hundred
documents . . .’
‘Eighteen hundred and twelve.’
‘We’re breaking the publishing freeze to alter one page?’ Mary could hear him scrolling. ‘The home page?’ Simon said. ‘We’re breaking the publishing freeze to change the home page?’
‘How’s the fix going?’
‘It’s a Christmas message.’
‘I’ve run out of almonds. I’m ready to go home.’
‘It’s a Christmas message from the CEO.’
She could hear Simon leaning back in his chair.
‘Out of almonds, Simon.’
‘Merry Fucking Christmas,’ Simon said.
‘I’m not talking to you about this, Simon. I’m talking to you about the fix and that’s what I’m talking to you about – and almonds.’ She started looking through the drawers of her desk for more almonds.
‘It must be great working for the public service, Mary – standing up, making a difference,’ Simon said. ‘Now, as an employee of an evil multinational corporation I don’t care what it is I’m doing at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, it’s all money to a bread-head like me, but you, Mary, look at you, you’re really making a difference.’
‘I am literally squeezing a stress-ball, Simon,’ said Mary. ‘You have reduced me to cliché. What’s happening with the fix?’
Simon hung up.
No one in Mary’s family understood what Mary did for a job. They understood the translating thing, but they weren’t sure what it was all for. What did she do? She tried to explain it was like management and her father said, ‘Oh, so you’re a manager?’ and her parents’ faces brightened a little. She said no, she wasn’t anything like a manager – it wasn’t like management.
She would get excited sometimes and ring her father and say, ‘Check out the site, there’s new stuff on the website.’ He liked music and pictures. A few months ago one of the Communications team had brought up an armful of T-shirts. They were cleaning out the cupboard, did anyone want a T-shirt? The T-shirts said things like ‘Get moving’ and ‘Move it or lose it’. They’d been printed for the ministry’s team in the Corporate Challenge. Three hundred public servants walking and running through the streets of Wellington to show a commitment to work/life balance. Mary had sent one of the T-shirts to her father. Every time she’d talked to him since, he said it was the best T-shirt he had. He was wearing it to the gym; could she send him another one? It was such great cotton.
The phone rang within the half hour.
‘I just thought of something,’ Simon said. ‘I wonder if you can help me out with this, I think I have it straight. So we’re not breaking the publishing freeze for the Select Committee information to let people make informed submissions, but we are breaking it for a Christmas message?’
‘Wearing thin, Simon,’ she said.
‘This must irk you, Ms Mary.’
‘It has Santa on it,’ said Mary. ‘How could anything with Santa irk me.’
‘Your Te Reo resources can’t go up – but a Christmas message can?’
‘PC gone sane, Simon. What can I say?’
‘Your job sucks,’ he laughed and hung up.
It was his fault. She tried to be nice and say, ‘Oh, no maybe it was us. We push the publishing system so hard. We were bound to break something eventually,’ but it was his fault. All his dodgy fixes had made the publishing system eat itself and when he said, ‘Yeah, it was probably you,’ she was pretty sure he knew it was his fault.
Ten minutes later, he sent Mary an email saying, ‘Tin a cocoa. Tin a cocoa. PC never looked good on you.’ This was how he tried to secure her allegiance. It was like he watched other people being friendly, tried to replicate it and got it all wrong. ‘We’re like the Odd Couple,’ he once said to Mary. ‘You’re a liberal and I’m a realist.’ She drank cold tea from her white mug and thought, this is my job.
On Friday, Robyn had asked Mary to join her in the General Manager’s office. They’d explained the CEO’s request and asked if she could organise it. A month before, they’d promised technical support a publishing freeze until the New Year. No new content going on, no old content coming off, so they could concentrate on fixing the problem. Mary took notes in a hard-covered exercise book and said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Robyn had faith in her completely; this meeting was for the benefit of the General Manager. The website was making him look bad. Mary closed her book and, looking out the window, said, ‘There are risks.’ The General Manager had said, ‘I don’t want to hear about risks, I just want it done.’ Mary stood for the website and all the things about the website he didn’t understand. All the things he didn’t understand were the things making him look bad.
The phone rang.
‘Happy Holidays.’ She imagined Simon, sitting in his office at home, doing whatever he did, suddenly thinking of it and saying to himself, ‘I must share that with Mary. We like to have each other on. That’s what friends do.’
‘Simon.’ For all she knew the fix was finished and he was pissing about.
‘Isn’t that what you liberals say?’ Simon said. ‘It says “Merry Christmas”, you know, Mary? Isn’t that a bit denominational? There’s a picture of Santa on it.’
‘And a small robin holding a sprig of holly.’
‘Do you want to call the PC Police or shall I?’
Suddenly she didn’t feel like being nice any more.
‘Simon, you don’t seem to be getting much done towards this fix – shall I call Robyn?’
There was a pause.
‘Robyn’s in Hawera,’ Simon said.
‘It’s okay, I’ve got her cell phone number,’
‘Give me half an hour or so.’ Simon hung up.
Mary took off her head set and said ‘Fuck you’ to the phone. She flicked the space bar of her keyboard with her index finger. She could push the test site to live and destroy the whole website – she could say it was an accident, it was late, Simon was annoying – she’d warned them. She could have asked a question in the General Manager’s office. She could have said, ‘The risk outweighs the benefit.’ She could have said, ‘I feel uncomfortable with this.’ She could have said, ‘This is crazy.’
The cubicle across the floor, Actuaries, was decorated with sand, towels and a tent. The banner above it said ‘New Zealand Christmas’. Human Resources had fastened white fluffy snow to everything. They had a snowman in the centre of their cubicle. The lawyers had cut out paper to make some sort of Santa’s grotto. People used to build things for a living; her father built houses. She lay down on the couch outside the General Manager’s office and read a women’s magazine she found on his PA’s desk. Her phone rang at 1:45 a.m. She let it ring, then walked slowly towards her desk, still in bare feet, dress floating behind her.
‘I thought you’d gone home,’ Simon said.
‘Lindsay Lohan’s in rehab,’ she said.
‘Robert Downey’s out.’
‘Wow, is it, like, 1995 at your house?’ Mary flicked through the magazine. She was the boss now.
‘It’s done,’ said Simon. ‘You can run the publish again. Have you still got it all in the profile?’
Mary moved her mouse and looked at the screen as she stood behind her desk, ‘Um, yup.’
‘Okay, start the publish. Merry Fucking . . .’
‘Simon, you’ve done that one already.’
‘You can go home,’ he said. ‘Come back in the morning and push it to live.’
‘Yeah,’ Mary stretched. ‘I’ll call you if there are any problems.’
‘There won’t be any problems.’
‘Have a good sleep Simon,’ she said. ‘Talk to you tomorrow.’
‘Hopefully not.’
‘True story.’ She picked up her wings from the chair beside her.
‘See ya,’ Simon said.
‘Thanks.’
The next morning when she came in the test site was intact. She emailed Simon to say ‘All well,’ and pushed the test site to live. On Monday afternoon, identical bo
xes wrapped in identical ribbon were delivered to every staff member on Mary’s floor. There was a card in each box saying, ‘Thanks for your good work,’ with the ministry’s stamp below. One of Mary’s team said, ‘Oh look, it’s like the whole ministry’s wishing us Merry Christmas.’ The box contained a beach towel, some sunblock, a torch with an alarm and an AM/FM radio.
‘What’s the handle for?’ Mary said, playing with the small black handle on the side of the torch.
‘You can wind it up to charge it,’ Robyn said. ‘It’s for your survival kit at home.’
Mary wound the handle and it made a whirring noise. Her father would like the beach towel and she might send the sunblock to Simon – for Christmas.
You Might Be Right
‘We’re vegan.’ He says it, kind of waving his hand to indicate he means all of us: me, him and the baby. ‘We don’t have any animal products.’ They smile. We sent an email earlier. Before we got here – to Samoa – we sent an email to the hotel to check we could eat something. The person we sent it to sent it to the maître-d’, who sent it to the chef, who sent it back to the person we sent it to, who sent it back to us, saying, ‘This should be fine. Not a problem.’ The manager, the person we sent it to originally, forgot to delete the messages underneath his. He had forwarded our email to the maître-d’ with a message saying, ‘Get a load of this *grin*.’ The maître-d’ forwarded our email and the manager’s message to the chef saying, ‘Sorry – this is bound to be a pain in the arse.’
We feel bad before we get there. We take silver packs of soy protein and vegetarian luncheon sausage. I feel like a spaceman. Everyone we know who was vegan is freegan now. People say we care more about animals than people. I watch a documentary showing someone killing baby cats – kittens. One of the last vegans I know says she can’t watch it. She says vegans should be exempt from watching it. Someone else says that’s shit, if she expects other people to watch it she should watch it herself. I hate cats. I watch about ten seconds more of the documentary and I can’t watch it any more. They poison some dogs with cyanide. The dogs look like frightened children. I don’t particularly like children either. When I meet people I try to wait as long as possible before I tell them – about the vegan thing. Most people don’t like children particularly – or cats.
