I didn’t see that I had much choice. I put down my headset and hung up the phone, and half a minute later I was in the elevator with Priti headed up to the conference room.
I didn’t even have time to ask her what was going on as we rushed out of the elevator and into the large conference room. As soon as we entered the room the first thing I saw was the projector, displaying a large company logo and my horrible employee ID photograph underneath the words: “Louisa Hallstrom: Special Recognition Award Recipient.”
Oh no. No, no, no.
The door clicked shut behind me, and hundreds of heads turned in my direction. I bet every single person employed by Merit was packed into that room. Faces that I’d never seen before were staring back at me, clapping and smiling.
Priti had been standing just in front of me, but now she scooted off to the side and disappeared into the crowd, as my fellow Merit employees stood up, still staring at me, and began clapping even louder. My immediate reaction was to flush a brighter pink than the flowers on my dress. I stood in the entrance to the room, not knowing where to go or what to say for a few long seconds until the clapping died down and I heard Mr. Curtis’ voice over the PA system.
“Come on up here, Louisa,” he said from the front of the room near the projector.
I slowly started walking down the center aisle of the conference room towards the front, approaching Mr. Curtis as he motioned with his hand for me to step forward. When I got to the front of the room, he grabbed my hand and shook it, firmly. My heart was pounding as I felt all of the eyes in the room boring into my back. All I wanted was for this meeting to be over so I could get the hell out of there. I shook his hand, then stood there staring at him like an idiot.
“Ah, hem,” he said into the microphone, looking at me.
Christ, does he expect me to give some kind of speech? My face turned even redder.
When he realized that I wasn’t quite getting it, Mr. Curtis put his free hand on my shoulder and gently turned me around until I was facing the crowd, then began speaking.
“On behalf of the leadership teams at both Merit and NorCom PR, in honor of going above and beyond the call of her duties and position for the benefit of our team and company, we present Louisa Hallstrom with this Special Recognition Award.”
I peered out over my scarlet cheeks at the crowd, and much to my abject horror, saw not only was just about every employee at Merit present, but also Carla Stanton and the entire management team from NorCom PR, as well as the “I am going to eat your baby” face of Detective Rachel Lopez, the “I just smelled a fart” face of Detective Wang, and next to them, the still pretty damn hot and smiling face of Rocky.
I was really trying to get it together, but accidentally looked up at Detective Lopez, making brief eye contact and gulped. She lowered her chin and glared back. I wanted to look at Rocky, but I was too pussy to look back over in his direction with that pit bull standing next to him. Mr. Curtis was still talking about my award, and now he was holding some kind of plaque and pushing it urgently towards my midsection. Oops, I’d been spacing out again. I took it from him amidst more applause. He then turned me slightly to the left, and I was blinded by a camera flash. A young photographer in black was aiming her flashbulb at my face, gesturing for me to smile.
I did, and I was still holding the award when the rest of the leadership team approached me. They stood patiently in line, and one by one they wrapped their arms around my waist and smiled, looking at the photographer while she snapped away. I was a one-woman picture buffet. After a few minutes of this, the entire team gathered together with me in the middle for a group shot and I thought, incorrectly, that I was done with my morning’s duties.
Unfortunately the photographer and Mr. Curtis had other plans, and she began yelling instructions to the entire group of employees to come up to the front of the room for a company-wide photo, starring me.
The nerves and the heat from the flashbulbs combined hadn’t been a great combination for me. I felt tiny beads of sweat breaking out in all the good places: between my boobs, my lady mustache and all down my ass crack. As the group gathered, I stood to the side smiling like a moron and wiped my arm across my lips as subtly as I could shifting uncomfortably in my dress, and made a mental note to not lift my arms up just in case I’d pitted out, which I was guessing I had.
The photographer was running circles around the group, moving people this way and that, coordinating by color or height or whatever would make us look as presentable as possible.
“OK, Miss Hallstrom! We’ll need you down in front,” the photographer said, getting peppier by the minute. She touched me on the shoulder and pushed me to the front and center of the group. “Now, hold up your award so everyone can see it!” She trilled. “And…Smile!” Flash, click! went the camera. I felt my face squish up, trying to protect my fried eyeballs which closed involuntarily at the flash. Great, I would probably look like a red, sweaty Shar-Pei in that one.
“I think we have it! Great job folks.” And that was a wrap.
As the cluster of people started to break apart, my only thought was evacuating the room as quickly as possible, heading to the ladies room and wiping my swampy parts, then hiding in a bathroom stall until I’d recovered from the humiliation of the morning. I trained my eyes down to the carpet, and headed for the back of the room towards the exit.
“Louisa! Wait!”
Nooooooooooo. But yes. For a split-second I thought about pretending like I didn’t hear him and quickly ducking into an elevator, leaving the office, heading down Union and then driving my car off of the nearest pier directly into the Sound. Unfortunately, that’s not how rational, functioning adults behave, so I took a deep breath, paused, turned around and flashed my best surprised yet smiley-happy face.
“Hi, Clark!” I said brightly, “How are you?”
“I’m great, thanks.” He caught up to me and we started walking together towards the elevators. “You look….sweaty. Are you doing OK?”
I’d spent quite a few of my cognizant hours imagining exactly how this particular interaction was going to go down. I’d pictured breezing back into the office in my cutest outfit, oblivious to my admiring co-workers, and not casually greeting Clark until hours later, like I hadn’t even thought about him or obsessed about our kiss. He would mean nothing to me, and he would want me. My apathy would be so hot to him that he’d confess his love and attraction to me, then pursue me aggressively and relentlessly, and it would be my choice whether or not to give him the time of day. Or…..not.
“I guess so. This whole thing is has been kind of overwhelming.”
“I bet. Anyways, I have to go talk to Scott in Marketing about a new project. We might need you to set up some offsite meetings for us next week at Starbucks headquarters. I know you’re probably slammed after coming back from your, uh, break. I just wanted to make sure that would that work for you before I sent over the requests. Cool?”
Not a mention of the fact that he randomly macked on me hardcore in his BMW before I ran down the street like a mental patient, or even an expression of sympathy that I had been shot by a psychopathic gay for God’s sake. No—Clark was seriously welcoming me back to the office with a request for administrative help. What. A. Dick.
I put my head down and stared at the carpet in shock. Even though I felt like I had been directly punched in the uterus, I’m pretty sure that I managed to mutter an appropriate response, something along the lines of “Oh…I think that would be fine.”
“Thanks! Great to have you back!” Clark flashed me a million-dollar smile and bounded back into the conference room, probably to go find fucking Scott from fucking marketing.
I felt myself shaking my head and couldn’t prevent the eye-roll and muttering of “seriously?” under my breath as I continued my path to the elevators towards my temporary ass-airing-out respite. The award was obviously not only a total joke to me, but also to my fellow employees. A little band-aid meant to cover up the un
comfortable feelings that people got when they accidentally made eye contact with me in the hall and were forced to think about or actually acknowledge what I’d been through. Everyone just wanted to move on, have things return to normal and go about their day ignoring each other.
When the elevator doors finally opened and let me off on 29, I made a beeline for the ladies room where I balled up bits of toilet paper and dabbed my armpits, then, hoping to calm my still red cheeks, stood over the sink and splashed a few handfuls of cold water on my face. I half-expected Rocky to come and find me before he left he building, but also realized that this was less likely due to the presence of the ex-wife slash psycho-bitch. But because the morning had already managed to be a disaster of massive scale, I decided it would be better to avoid any unnecessary interaction, so I chose instead to wait it out on the pot for another few minutes until I felt that it was ‘safe’ to go back out and sit at my desk.
When I finally emerged from the ladies room, dry and no longer bright tomato red, the level of activity in the Legal department had pretty much returned to normal. As I walked through the front door to my desk I could hear the one-sided conversations of conference calls over the steady whirring of the printers. No one rushed over to talk to me or welcome me back. In fact, no one even looked my way as I passed by the offices and cubes—I was relieved that even after could always count on my fellow employees to show a comforting level of apathy. Sighing, I put my earplugs in, pulled up the latest episode of trashy reality TV from my online queue, picked up an IM conversation with Amanda, and went about wasting my day away.
Ingrid Reinke lives in Seattle, Washington with her patient husband, Karl. She divides her time between trying to make people laugh and trying not to drink too much wine. She frequently spills things. Dead End Job is her first attempt at a novel, and she hopes to write many more.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1: Memorandum: Your Life Sucks
Chapter 2: Stinky Cheese Towels
Chapter 3: Dates and Drugs
Chapter 4: Shock to the System
Chapter 5: Sign Here, Stupid
Chapter 6: Death and Trivia
Chapter 7: Pile it On
Chapter 8: Put a Steak on It
Chapter 9: Hard to Swallow
Chapter 10: Shit is Whack
Chapter 11: Who are You and Where are My Pants?
Chapter 12: Sloppy Seconds
Chapter 13: Tramp Stamp
Chapter 14: Hot Mess
Chapter 15: Group Think
Chapter 16: Walking Papers
Chapter 17: Sick Day
Chapter 18: All Bad Things Come to an End
Dead End Job Page 20