Following his lead, I removed the stack of papers from my in box and, one by one, began sorting through them. I had no idea what I was looking at, but it didn’t seem to matter. Derek said nothing to me, and I continued to look at each page, pretending I knew what I was doing.
It was an hour later when the phone on my desk buzzed twice, although it felt to me as though five hours had passed.
“Mr. Stewart,” Derek said, speaking his first words since the enigmatic “New jobs.” He nodded toward the phone. “Press star seven.”
I picked up the receiver, pressed the asterisk button and the number seven on the console. “Hello?” I said.
“No.” Stewart’s voice was strong and disapproving. “When you answer the phone, you say, ‘Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation. Bob Jones speaking.’”
“Sorry,” I said. “No one told me.”
“Now you’ve been told. I don’t want to catch you answering the phone incorrectly again.”
“Sorry,” I said again.
“I may have forgotten to mention it,” Stewart said, “but you are entitled to two fifteen-minute breaks and an hour lunch each day. Your breaks will be taken at ten in the morning and three in the afternoon. Your lunch will be from noon until one. Your break may be spent at your desk or in the fourth-floor break room. You may leave the building and spend your lunch wherever you want as long as you return to your desk by one.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
The phone clicked in my ear, and I looked down for a moment, panicked. I’d been fiddling with the phone cord, and I thought I might have accidentally cut him off, but my hand was nowhere near the cradle, and I realized that he had simply hung up on me.
I replaced the handset and glanced over at Derek. “Where’s the break room?” I asked.
He did not look up. “End of the hall, turn right.”
“Thanks,” I said, walking past his desk and out the door.
The break room was small, the size of the living room in our apartment. There was a refrigerator and a soft-drink machine against one wall, a dilapidated couch against another, and two mismatched dining room tables in the center. The room smelled of old ladies, of closeted linen and cloying perfume. Underneath, more lightly, I detected a stale scent that was either refrigerated lunches or lingering body odor.
There were three old women seated around the closest table, dressed in too-bright floral blouses, and pantsuits that had been stylish several decades back. One woman, hair dyed years younger than was flattering, sat nibbling on a bear claw, staring into space. The other two drank cups of coffee, idly flipping through well-thumbed copies of Redbook. None of the women spoke. They barely looked up at the sound of my footsteps as I entered the room.
What the hell had I gotten myself into here? I suddenly found myself wishing that I’d kept my part-time job at Sears as a backup. I could’ve quit this job then. We’d been poor with both of us working part-time, but we’d gotten by, and if I’d known it was going to be like this, I would’ve turned down this position and waited for another.
But I was screwed now, trapped here until I could find something else.
I vowed to start applying elsewhere as soon as possible.
Cokes were fifty cents. I had three quarters in my pocket, and I dropped two of them into the machine, pressed the button. A can of Shasta Cola rolled out. Shasta? The machine sported a Coca-Cola logo.
I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Stewart was sitting in my seat when I returned to the office. He swiveled to face me as I entered the room. “Where have you been?” he asked.
I looked at the clock above the filing cabinets. I’d been gone less than ten minutes. “Break,” I said.
He shook his head. “You’re not one of those, are you?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“You’re entitled to a break by law,” he said. “But don’t abuse the privilege.”
I wanted to respond, wanted to remind him that he had called me and told me to take a fifteen-minute break and that I had been gone only seven or eight minutes, but I didn’t dare. I nodded. “Okay.”
“All right, then.”
I waited. He did not get out of my chair but sat there, leaning back, as he looked at a stapled sheaf of papers in his hand. I stood awkwardly in front of my desk. “On January first,” he said, “Automated Interface will be coming out with a new software package called PayPer. PayPer is an integrated payroll and personnel information system that will allow users to maintain personal data files on employees as well as process payrolls, calculate state and federal withholding deductions, and incorporate pretax and posttax flexible benefit programs. I want you to write a description of the product for a press release I’m preparing.”
Already I felt hopelessly out of my depth, but I nodded in what I hoped was a confident, competent manner.
“I’ll leave this overview with you to look at.” He leaned forward, placed the sheaf of papers on top of my desk, and stood. “I don’t think you’ll have any problems, but if you do, just give me a ring. You can turn in the description before you leave today, or even tomorrow morning if you want. That should give you more than enough time to finish the assignment.”
I nodded again, flattened against the wall to let him pass as he walked around the side of the desk.
I sat down, looked at the paper he’d left me. I wasn’t sure what he wanted. A description? What did that mean? No stylistic guidelines had been laid out for me, I’d been given no examples of the company’s previous press releases; I had not been told “this is what we want” or “this is what we don’t want”; I had not been given a length or line limit. I was on my own, and I realized that this was my first test in the new job and that I’d damn well better pass it.
I glanced over at Derek, and this time there was a real smile on his face.
I did not like the way it looked.
I gathered that Stewart was writing a press release, and that I had to write a short description of this PayPer system for him to incorporate into the release. I read the information he gave me, which was basically a detailed description of PayPer written from a technical standpoint, and figured all I had to do was paraphrase and simplify what I’d been given.
Before I knew it, it was twelve, and Derek was putting away his papers and getting ready to go to lunch. In the hallway outside our office, I saw other men and women carrying sack lunches or jingling keys as they walked toward the elevator. I did not want to be stuck eating lunch with Derek, so I let him leave, then gave him a few extra minutes before walking over to the elevator myself.
I hadn’t brought a lunch, and I didn’t especially feel like hanging around the building for an hour, so I took the elevator to the first floor and walked out to my car. I’d seen a Taco Bell near the freeway on my way in that day, and I figured I’d eat there.
Apparently, a lot of other people from Automated Interface or the other corporations in the area had the same idea as me, because Taco Bell was packed. It was a half hour before I ordered and got my food, and because all of the tables were taken, I was forced to eat in my car. By the time I finished eating, drove back to work, and found a parking place, I knew my hour would be over.
From now on, I decided, I would bring my lunch.
I saw Lisa walking out to her car when I returned, and I waved to her and smiled as I made my way through the parking lot. She stared at me blankly, then looked away. I realized, too late, that her show up there in Personnel had been just that—a show. She had not been flirting with me after all. She had been doing her job. Obviously, she smiled at everyone the way she’d smiled at me, touched everyone the way she’d touched me.
I returned to my office, feeling chastened and humiliated.
I was finished with my description by two, but I still had three hours to kill, so I spent the time going over my copy, trying to make it perfect. I typed the description on the typewriter next to my desk and brought it
to Stewart’s office around four-thirty. He said nothing as he read it, and no expression crossed his face. He didn’t say it was brilliant, didn’t say it was a piece of shit, so I assumed it was acceptable.
He placed the page in a drawer. “Next time,” he said, “I want you to write on the PC so we can revise your work if necessary. I’m going to have the typewriter taken out of your office.”
I was not that familiar with word processors, but I had used one in a communications course in college and was pretty sure I’d be able to pick it up easily, so I nodded. “I would’ve used it for this,” I said, “but no one told me where it was.”
He glanced at me. “Sometimes you have to take your own initiative,” he said.
I nodded, said nothing.
Jane was making dinner when I came home—spaghetti—and I took off my jacket and tie, threw them on the back of the couch, and walked into the kitchen. It felt weird to me, coming home like this. The apartment was warm and filled with the smell of cooking food, the local news was on TV, and though these were things that happened every day, I felt out of it and slightly disoriented because they were already in progress when I arrived. I hadn’t been home when Jane had closed the windows against the late afternoon chill, I hadn’t been home when she’d turned on the TV for Donahue, I hadn’t been home when she’d started dinner, and all of this made me feel like a stranger, an outsider. I guess I’d gotten used to the way things were, to working part-time and hanging around the apartment for a good portion of the day, and this readjustment of my daily life threw me more than I would have expected.
I walked into the kitchen, and Jane turned to me, smiling, still stirring the spaghetti sauce. “How was it?” she asked.
She didn’t say, “How was your day, dear?”, but the intent was the same and for some reason it rubbed me the wrong way. It was… too Ozzie and Harriet. I shrugged, sitting down. “Okay.” I wanted to say more. I wanted to tell her about Lisa and Banks and Stewart and Derek, about my horrible office and the horrible break room and my horrible job, but her question put me off somehow and I sat silently, staring through the kitchen doorway at the TV in the living room.
I opened up later, during dinner, telling her everything, apologizing for my earlier silence. I was not sure why I’d taken out my frustration on her—I had never done that before—but she took it in stride and was more than understanding.
“First days are always the worst,” she said, collecting our plates and carrying them to the sink.
I closed the lid of the parmesan cheese container. “I hope so.”
She returned to the table, reached underneath and gave my penis a small squeeze. “Don’t worry. I’ll cheer you up later,” she said.
We watched TV after dinner, our standard lineup of Monday sitcoms, but I told her I had to get to bed early because I had to wake up at six for work, and we walked into the bedroom at ten instead of the usual eleven.
“Do you want to take a shower with me?” she asked as I sat down on the bed.
I shook my head. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Too tired?”
I smiled. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m too tired.”
“Too tired,” was our own personal euphemism for oral sex, one that had gotten started when we’d first moved in together. She’d wanted to make love one night, but I wasn’t sure I’d be up for it, so I told her I was too tired. I’d closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew, her mouth had been open and ready for business. It had been wonderful, and ever since then the phrase “too tired” had taken on a new meaning for us.
Jane gave me a quick kiss. “I’ll be right back, then.”
I took off my clothes and crawled into bed. I was excited and already had an erection, but I really did feel tired, and I lay back and closed my eyes, listening to the sound of the water running in the bathroom, and by the time she finished her shower, I was dead asleep.
THREE
Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation.
Despite the implications of my rather pretentious title, I turned out to be little more than a glorified clerk, typing memos that needed to be typed, proofreading instruction sheets that needed to be proofread, doing the jobs the Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation didn’t want to assign to a secretary and didn’t want to do himself.
That first assignment was either an aberration, or else I’d failed so miserably at it that Stewart was not willing to risk having me work on a real job again.
I was afraid to ask which.
I tried talking to Derek the first few days, saying hello when I arrived in the morning, good-bye when I left for home, occasionally attempting to start a conversation at other times throughout the day. But all of my efforts were met with the same stony silence, and I soon gave up. Technically, we were office mates, but our relationship was even more impersonal than that. We shared the same work space.
Period.
The depressing thing was that it was not just Derek. No one, it seemed, wanted to speak to me. I did not know why this was. I was new and knew no one, and in an effort to become acquainted with my coworkers, I tried nodding or waving to other employees I passed in the halls, saying “Hi,” “Good morning,” “How are you?”, but more often than not, I was met with blank looks, my greetings ignored. Every so often, someone would wave back, smile slightly, or say hello, but that was the exception rather than the rule, and pretty damn rare.
Among the computer programmers, my presence was barely tolerated. I was not required to deal with them on a regular basis, but several times those first few days I had to go over to their area and either deliver copies of memos or pick up papers to be proofread, and they made clear their disdain for me by ignoring me and treating me as though I were a slave—an emotionless, personalityless automaton there only to do my professional duty.
Every so often, I would meet one of them in the break room, and I always tried to break the ice and establish some sort of one-on-one relationship, but my attempts invariably failed. I talked twice to Stacy Kerrin, the blond woman, and I gathered from reading between the lines of what she said and what she didn’t say that my predecessor had been well-liked within the department. Apparently, he had maintained friendships with many of the programmers outside of work and had seen them on a social basis. She spoke of him fondly, as an equal.
But I was clearly a second-class citizen.
I wanted to feel superior to these people, should have been able to feel superior—they were dorks and nerds, geeks to a man—but I found myself feeling uncomfortably out of place around them and even slightly intimidated. In the real world they might be losers, but here in their world they were the norm and I was the outcast.
I took to spending most of my breaks at my desk, alone.
On Friday, Stewart had assigned me to correct the grammar on an old chapter of the department Standards Manual, and I spent at least an hour trying to get the paper aligned in the printer. I was supposed to have the assignment finished before noon, and I had to wait until all of the pages were printed before leaving, so I was late for lunch.
It was twelve-thirty by the time I xeroxed the chapter, placed a copy on Stewart’s desk, and finally went outside.
The two BMWs that had flanked my car this morning were gone, and I pulled out easily. The Buick was almost out of gas, and there was no gas station between here and the freeway, so I decided to try the other direction. I figured I’d find a Shell or a Texaco or something at one of the intersections.
Ten minutes later, I was hopelessly lost.
I’d never really driven through Irvine before. I’d driven past it on my way to San Diego, I’d passed through a corner of it on my way to the beach, but I’d never driven in it. I didn’t know the city, and as I headed south on Emery, I was amazed by its monochromatic sameness. I drove for miles without encountering a store, gas station, or shopping center of any kind. There was only row upon row of identical two-story tan houses behind
a seemingly endless brown brick wall. I passed four stoplights, then turned at the fifth. None of the street names were recognizable to me, and I continued turning, right and left and right and left, hoping to find a gas station, or at least a liquor store where I could ask directions to a gas station, but there was only that brown brick wall, lining both sides of every street. It was like some labyrinthian science fiction city, and I was getting worried because my gas gauge was now definitely on E, but there was also a part of me that found this exciting. I’d never seen anything like it before. Irvine was a planned community, with businesses all in one area, residences in another, farmland in another, and apparently stores and gas stations in another. Something about that appealed to me, and though I was afraid of running out of gas, I also felt strangely comfortable here. The mazelike uniformity of the streets and the buildings fascinated me, and seemed to me somehow wondrous.
Finally I did find an Arco, deceptively disguised in an unobtrusive corner building the same brown brick as the wall, and I got my gas and asked the attendant how to get back to Emery. The directions were surprisingly easy—I hadn’t gone as far afield as I thought—and I thanked him, and drove off.
I returned to work feeling lighter and happier for my little noontime jaunt.
I promised myself I’d spend more of my lunch hours exploring Irvine.
The days dragged.
My job was mind-numbingly boring, made even more so by the knowledge that it was completely useless. From what I could tell, Automated Interface would have had absolutely no trouble getting along without me. The corporation could have eliminated my position entirely and no one would have even noticed.
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