by Ed Park
Instant folklore
Laars looks gaunt these days, his floppy hair hanging limp around his temples. More and more he lies for a spell on the pungent but very comfortable maroon sofa he inherited from Jason. I just need to close my eyes. He confesses to spending his evenings nursing Scotch before his computer at home, Googling himself until the wee hours. There’s a person out there who shares the same name, incredibly enough. Person or persons. He’s found himself in Appalachian hiking e-gazettes, antique typewriter societies, and University of Alaska alumni newsletters. I must destroy them, he says.
Worse is when he Googles former girlfriends, high school crushes, drunken flings from his semester abroad. There are more of all of these than you would imagine—indeed, than he imagined.
He’s good-looking but not that good-looking, says Pru. Lizzie thinks he gets a lot of mileage out of the floppy hair.
Laars’s innumerable past dalliances trouble him and he publicly declares a vow of chastity. We could be imagining things but for a second Lizzie’s eyes droop with sadness as he says this.
Alas, Laars is powerless to stop the hunt for figures from his past. He tries to devise searches that will sniff out maiden names and the like. But some people are gone for good, they have vanished, and the string of words he puts into the engine returns the most hilariously useless links: midwestern college soccer squads, science fair runners-up, family trees dipping into the eighteenth century.
He does this all day at work now, too, in between complaining about the pencil sharpener and complaining about the air-conditioning. He’s found out a lot about his cousin’s ex-girlfriend from Spain. No doubt he’s Googled everyone in the office, uncovering secrets nestled in the thirty-fifth screen of results.
Jack II says that when you feel a tingling in your fingers, it means someone’s Googling you. We take to this bit of instant folklore immediately.
Friendship
Jonah’s e-mail sign-off used to read Sincerely, then Sincerely Yours, then Cheers. He disapproves of Lizzie’s Best, let alone Jenny’s Warm best. He says it’s important to set the right tone with your tagline. For a while he used Thank you in advance for your cooperation. Lately every e-mail ends: Your friend, Jonah.
What if you’re not their friend? asks Pru.
< 3 >
The Californians!
Our company was once its own thing, founded long ago by men with mustaches. After several decades it wound up, to its surprise, as the easternmost arm of an Omaha-based octopus. The tentacles eventually detached, or strangled each other, a few of them joining forces, most dying out altogether.
Over time the name shrunk and mutated, changes captured in reams of old letterhead in the closet by Jonah’s office. The stationery reads like the fossil record. Syllables disappeared. Ampersands were added and later removed. In the mid-’90s everything was consolidated into a set of five initials, two of which don’t actually stand for anything. The vowelless result defies easy pronunciation, even by longtime employees. You say it a different way every time. This quality lends it a daunting preverbal power.
Lately we hear that some Californians want to make us their easternmost outpost. We base this conjecture on an opaquely worded one-inch paragraph on the fifth business page of the Times that appeared last month.
Think positive, we tell ourselves. There’s no reason to believe that a new owner will be any worse than the current one. But when have things ever gotten better?
We know that the Firings were just a taste of what’s in store, and like morbid climatologists tracking twisters, we anticipate their return. If something ominous happens—nasty memo, Coke machine empty two days in a row—we see it as a sign of our new owners’ impending arrival.
At these times Pru likes to shriek, The Californians!
Jack II thinks the best thing would be for them to come in and clean house, install their own people. He says it’s unlikely any of us will survive. Their mentality is totally different out west, he says. I mean, I should know. He lived in San Diego for about a year after college, trying to be a comedy writer, despite the fact that he is neither outwardly funny nor humorous on the printed page.
You are here
Our office is located on what must be the least populated semi-wide street in all of Manhattan, a no-man’s-land just far enough from two fashionable neighborhoods to be considered part of neither. Wind gets stuck here. At twilight, crumpled newspapers scuttle across the pavement like giant crabs. Plastic bags advance in tumbleweed fashion. Sometimes it feels like the edge of the world.
We occupy the middle three floors of a nine-floor building, at the uneasy intersection of two quasi-avenues, which merge without clear signage. Further complicating matters is the abundance of honorary street names for people you’ve never heard of. Rabbi S. Blankman Street? “Mama” O’Sullivan Road? Who were these colorful figures of yesteryear? Cabbies throw their hands up and think of turning in their medallions.
The Starbucks just down the road, uncomfortably situated on a corner between a boarded-up bar and a boarded-up locksmith, looks like a bordello. We call it the Bad Starbucks for its low-impact saxophone music and an absence of natural light combined with doomed, possibly improvised original drinks like the Pimm’s cup chai.
The Good Starbucks, two blocks farther in the opposite direction, also looks like a house of ill repute, but with better ventilation and more freebies, little paper cups of cake.
We’re within five minutes of two subway stops, but at such illogical angles to them that we have difficulty instructing people how to get here: You go left and then cut across the second parking lot, not the one that says PARK.
To make it easier we tell them we’ll meet up by the newsstand right outside the subway station three blocks away. We ask them beforehand, What will you be wearing? We describe ourselves: Glasses, dark shirt. This could be anybody.
Slice of life
The Bad Starbucks is where Jenny sees her life coach every Thursday at 4. She doesn’t think we know, but we know.
Laars wonders what the difference between a therapist and a life coach is.
A life coach doesn’t have an office and isn’t accredited, says Lizzie.
Lizzie has been out of sorts these days, slumping at her desk, leg hopping like a jackhammer. She is between therapists right now. She used to see one way uptown. He was good but the commute was killing her. She’d get there late and then they would spend half the remaining time discussing the reasons behind her lateness.
The real reason she stopped going, though, is because the pizzeria around the corner from his office had raised its prices by a quarter. Her therapist used pizza as an inflation barometer, and set his fee at one hundred times the price of a slice, which was now at two bucks, exclusive of toppings.
Jenny later concludes that her life coach uses bagel prices to set her fee.
The grand tour
Sometimes one of us will have a visitor. If it’s his or her first time to the building, we’ll say, Do you want the grand tour? like it’s our new apartment. Actually, it’s always the guest’s first time. No one ever comes back if they can help it, possibly due to overhearing someone like Laars shouting You are not going to believe the size of this roach.
After braving or ignoring a sermon from the Holy Roller security guard, and taking the leisurely elevator up, the visitor walks straight into the middle of a labyrinth. Without a reliable guide, he or she can wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window. Lizzie remembers her first day on the job: Stepping into this feng-shui-proof layout, heading straight to the bathroom, and crying.
Most of us spend our days at a desk in one of the two archipelagoes of cubicle clusters. The desks have not been at capacity for over a year now, and so we let our stuff sprawl, colonizing adjacent work spaces, hanging a satchel in one, a jacket in another.
A few of us have our own little rooms. Even though everybody could probably snag one at this point, given that staff is dwindling, the
Sprout gets very agitated at any such request. That doesn’t work with my comfort level right now. Better to play it safe. Some of these rooms look out on the back of another office building. We wave to the workers there if our gazes happen to meet, and they wave back. That’s as far as it goes.
Jonah has a room with a door, but no window. Crease has two desks, on opposite ends of the floor.
The college of noncompetitive running
People put too many things on the bulletin board. Bizarre newspaper items, notices for group shows exhibiting the disgruntled visual expressions of friends of friends, ironically saucy or inscrutable postcards. Wish you were beer.
Laars polices this corkboard commotion, giving everything a week before tearing it down. Schedules, announcements, responsibilities: These weigh on his spirit. When Laars started with us—six months, nine months, a year ago?—he was full of pep, but we managed to squeeze it out of him.
Laars occasionally gives off an Ivy League vibe, but he actually went to a small liberal arts college called Aorta or something. None of us have heard of it, a school in the Pacific Northwest that doesn’t have grades or even pass-fail. It emphasizes feelings rather than performance. On the website you see pictures of a guy with the eraser tip of his pencil resting on his lip, two girls running noncompetitively—one’s wearing jeans—on a weedy-looking track, a white guy with an Afro reading under a tree.
Multiple-desk syndrome
I’ve got it down to under a minute, says Crease, and as with a lot of what he says, we need a moment to figure out what he’s referring to. Forty-seven seconds. He means the traveling time between his two desks. In his mind, everyone is always thinking about him, worrying over Crease minutiae.
Last year Jason got fired, right in the middle of a project. No one saw it coming. Crease, who was not on the same team, was told to take over—Step up to the plate, per the Sprout—but was never told exactly what needed to be done. He had to figure it out on the fly. Baptism by fire, as the Sprout, and later Crease himself, put it.
With no time to move all of Jason’s folders and meticulously organized report bins to his own desk, Crease commuted from one side of the office to the other, doing the Jason work until 2 and his own until he left at 7, at 8, at 9.
When the project was over he started moving his own stuff from his original desk to Jason’s—the same model, but with better-greased drawers. Jason had vividly colored Post-its from Japan, exquisite semicircles that he bought on a trip. Crease loved them but used them sparingly because once they were gone, that was it.
After his initial burst of nesting, Crease soon discovered he had more old files than he could easily move, and found himself drifting back to his original home for certain tasks. Now he keeps his Creasedom divided, flitting between the desks several times a day. Each desk has a computer. He logs in as Jason on one, as himself on the other. The commute has become his major form of exercise. He also thinks the division is a good survival strategy: If they try to fire him when he’s not at one desk, they might lose interest before they find him at his second home.
< 4 >
It’s OK to relax
A while back, the Sprout handed out self-evaluation forms and said, Help me help you. We just needed to be as honest as possible. The evaluations would remain anonymous. Some of us, actually all of us, didn’t take it seriously enough, writing things like I enjoy ice cream and unprotected sex, in a crazy-person scrawl. That was when the Sprout had a sense of humor. Jules, when Jules was here, answered entirely in Spanish.
We thought the Sprout had abandoned this exercise but today there’s another round. Everyone gets a golf pencil and a three-page packet. This time he wants our names printed at the top. Maxine strolls the conference room perimeter like a strict but hot schoolteacher, like we imagine teachers are in California.
We put a number to everything, 1 to 6, to reflect the strength of our feeling. The statements have a North Korean vibe, affectless yet intense.
I am happy with the way I am treated.
As the workday ends, it’s OK to relax.
Jonah is sure there’s a law against this sort of interrogation. We all respond the way we think the Californians want us to respond, except Jenny, who misheard Maxine’s directions and thought that 1 indicated Strongly Agree.
I feel there are other opportunities for me here.
It’s not OK
The self-evaluation ends with an essay section. Maxine encourages us to be creative.
A flutter of panic turns into a full-fledged spiritual crisis. We all want to get out of there but no one wants to be the first to leave. All of us except Jill wind up staying for ninety soul-searching minutes, crafting epic texts of dashed hope and toxic cynicism. It doesn’t occur to us that this is a bad idea until we put down our pencils, fingers sore from using such antique devices.
Jill leaves her sheet blank and flees before everyone else.
Maybe it was an 8
A month ago Maxine e-mailed us elaborate charts that none of us could decipher. The words were cryptic: Release, Objective, Orient. Was this information meant for us? She used five different colors, a rainbow of anxious strategy. She used fonts we’d never even seen, fonts so powerful most of our computers crashed.
Our latest theory is that she’s a consultant in deep cover, looking to increase profits by 20 percent before the company is sold to the Californians. We base this knowledge on the fact that Laars saw a pie chart in the Sprout’s office, with a green wedge that said 20. We’re trying to decide whether this means she wants the profit margin to expand to 20 percent, or that the current margin should increase by 20 percent of itself.
Some of us are not so good at math. This might in fact be why we were hired.
It should also be noted that later Laars thinks maybe the 2 was a 3. He didn’t get a clear view. Maybe it was an 8?
The not-so-funny part of our Maxine theory, based on something Pru overheard: She’s going to fire three of us by the end of the year, or possibly the end of the month. Pru stood outside the Sprout’s office for a whole minute, listening to Maxine complain about us.
On the human-interest side of the ledger, Jenny reports that she’s seen Maxine with the sexual-harassment lawyer guy, George, jogging lustily in the park.
Emotional rescue
Jenny says she’s heard the Sprout sobbing, the door to his office only partially closed. Jonah accused her of trying to humanize the enemy.
Maybe he was laughing, says Laars. But we all know that the Sprout’s laughing doesn’t sound like crying. It sounds like this:
Hoo-hoo!
Security issues
Crease thinks that everyone is out to steal his limited-edition Japanese Post-its, the magenta and olive and mandarin orange stickies that he inherited from Jason. We like them, but we’re not thieves. On the other hand, why should he get to keep them all? He and Jason were never particularly close. Crease’s desk has no locks and he doesn’t feel that his supply is safe. Sometimes he puts them in his satchel when he leaves the building for lunch.
< 5 >
Because
Whenever we sniff a layoff coming, which is always, each one of us thinks, It can’t be me because———.
Because I have too much work to do.
Because I’m exploited as it is.
Because, really, how much money would they save by getting rid of me versus what untold profits my labor/hard-earned know-how brings in?
I mean I’m joking but seriously.
Realistically, no way can it be me.
And then, all of a sudden, it is.
Stay the course
Beware of compliments. You don’t want your stock to rise. You want to stay the course. Someone’s stock rises and we all feel envious for a couple weeks. Then that person gets axed, or is made so miserable that there’s no option but to quit.
It happened to the Original Jack, with his dogged work ethic. It happened to Jason, with his complex yet elegant system of Post-it no
tation. It happened to Jules.
Jonah thinks the preliminary praise is unconscious on the Sprout’s part, like a poker player’s tell.
The departed send us e-mails after they leave and we forget to write back forever.
Dead letter
Has anyone noticed that the names all begin with J? Pru writes. All the fired people.
Jonah should be very nervous right around now. Same with Jack II. Management will not touch Jenny, because then everything would fall apart. She wound up absorbing the Original Jack’s duties, then Jules’s. She got a bump in title but her salary stayed the same, and she never left work before 7.
She calls it a deprotion, which is a promotion that shares most of the hallmarks of a demotion. Jenny and Pru and also Lizzie and sometimes Crease like to think up terms for things that happen in the office. It could make a good book someday, says Pru.
Jenny is safe in theory. But we shall see.
No effect
We often forget about Jill, who makes it easy. She is shy around most of us, and when she does speak it’s usually to compliment someone else: Lizzie for her outfits, Pru for her smarts, Jenny for her organizational skills.
My problem is I have a quiet voice, she once confided to Jenny.
What?
She wants to try therapy but is too shy to call for an appointment.
Jill is worried enough as it is, about life, about everything—quiet voice, limp hair, zero boyfriend prospect, the impossibility of therapy—and so this J conspiracy theory does not noticeably disturb her.
Red alert
Waiting for the microwave to finish, Jonah sees a sleek figure gliding across the far end of the hall, tossing something into a wastebasket as she passes. The microwave beeps. An hour later, en route to the photocopier, he notices a glint in the trash. He picks out five broken pieces of computer disc, careful not to smudge the words in thick black Sharpie.