Now for the Disappointing Part

by Steven Barker

  When the bar closed we walked across the street to the beach. I stripped down to my boxers, leaving my clothes in a trail behind me, not worrying about my wallet or phone. I swam out to a floating raft with two diving boards. When I was twelve my flips garnered attention at the public pool, but it had been ten years since I’d launched myself off a high dive. I got comfortable with a few angular swan dives and let my long body hang in the moonlight before splashing into the soberingly cold water.

  I stood on the high dive and looked over at Melissa sitting at the edge of the water with my belongings in a neat pile next to her. It was too dark to make out her face, but it seemed as though she were watching me. I strutted across the board like Greg Louganis, then double bounced myself into the air. I tucked into a flip and rotated once, then another time, and kept going until I smacked my face against the water. As I sank to the bottom, the cold water numbed my face.

  “Did you see that?” I asked Melissa as I pulled my sopping boxers up my waist.

  “See what?”

  “I just triple lindy’ed that shit.”

  “I got you a towel.”

  “Thanks. From where?”

  “I ran back to my apartment. I didn’t want you to freeze.”

  The following morning my attempt at showing off was displayed on my face. Blood vessels surrounding both pupils were broken, and puffy purple sacks hung under each eye. I looked like I’d just been peeled of a sticky fight club floor.

  “Oh my,” Melissa said when I slipped back into bed with her. “Your face.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  She put her hands on my cheeks and examined my eyes. “Does it hurt?”

  “Not really.”

  “It looks painful,” she said.

  “Do you think it will be okay by tomorrow? It’s my first day.”

  “Want some makeup?”

  “No thanks.”

  Even with my nicest work shirt and a fresh haircut, there was no chance of pulling off a photo worthy of a Franzen book jacket. The image on my name badge looked like it belonged on an episode of America’s Most Wanted.

  I walked to the building where I would start my new assignment and rehearsed my answer for the inevitable “What happened to your face?” question.

  I do a little amateur boxing and just had a match, but you should see the other guy.

  Some guy was being handsy with the ladies at the bar, and I had to put him in his place.

  Fell off my skateboard. Was trying to kick flip down six stairs.

  My manager wore wide-legged cargo pants and a striped shirt, which seemed like an odd choice of dress for a man with thinning hair. I’m pretty sure when I was in the fourth grade my mom bought me the exact same outfit at a Bugle Boy outlet store.

  I avoided eye contact with Bugle Boy as we waited in line at the IT desk for my laptop.

  “You’ll be keeping track of inventory,” he said. “It’s pretty fun because you get to be like a detective.”

  “Cool,” I said, not convinced that any part of the job could be fun.

  Amazon employees were evaluated on analytics. A good performance meant hitting the number that made your manager happy, so he could make his manager happy, so that guy could make his manager happy, until it traveled far enough up the ladder that Bezos felt a satisfying tingle in his balls. The fun part was when you hit your number for the hour with fifteen minutes left over to waste on Reddit.

  “We try to resolve about ten tickets an hour, but we won’t expect that from you until the second week. For now, we just want accuracy.”

  As we advanced to the IT desk, I wondered whether I should proactively explain my black eyes. He must have been curious.

  “Damn, dude,” said the ponytailed IT guy when we approached the desk. “Did you get in a bar fight?”

  Bugle Boy raised an eyebrow and looked over at me.

  “Diving board accident,” I said while excluding the detail of how many pitchers of beer I had consumed prior to the mishap. “I tried to show off and ended up smacking my face against the water.”

  “You look tore up,” the IT guy said as he handed me my new laptop and login info.

  “It looks worse than it feels,” I said.

  I was assigned a desk in a windowless room with a few other temps who had also just started. Baron was the most knowledgeable of the group. He was only two weeks out of college and possessed the Excel skills expected of all temps in our department.

  My agency profile stated that I received a 96 percent on an Excel aptitude test. I took it online and failed on my first try, struggling to pull off seventeen out of fifty. It could have easily been a thirteen out of fifty had I not made a few lucky guesses. I had Melissa take the retest and she scored a forty-eight out of fifty. She was disappointed that she didn’t get a perfect score and looked up what she missed. Had there been an option to take it a third time, she would have aced it.

  Her ambition was one of the reasons I liked being with her. She was five years younger, but miles ahead on the path to adulthood. She had an MFA, a full-time job in academics, and a book deal. She possessed all the qualities I lacked. I hoped some of it would rub off on me.

  Unfortunately, her Excel skills didn’t rub off on me, and I found myself lost on my second day. I spent an hour staring at my screen having no idea what to do next when I asked the person next to me for help.

  “Baron, someone just asked me to concatenate this spreadsheet. Any idea what that means?” I asked.

  “Yes!” He walked to my desk and hung over my shoulder. “They’re just asking you to put everything in an ascending series.” He motioned for my mouse. “Mind?”

  “Go for it,” I said while pushing myself away from the desk.

  He clicked on some funny-looking symbols that I was used to ignoring, and the spreadsheet refreshed into neatly organized lists of numbers and titles.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem. Let me know if you have any other questions. Excel is fun for me.”

  It wasn’t long before the other temps in the room realized Baron was the go-to guy for questions. We had the same training, but he had absorbed much more of the information. While Bugle Boy gave us a two-hour demo on how to apply our Excel skills to the job, I stared out the window watching a high-rise crane deliver steel beams to the fifteenth floor of a future Amazon building.

  Across from me sat a veteran temp who’d just done a stint at Google. Judging by the fact that every time I passed his desk he was on Facebook, I could tell we shared the same blasé attitude about the job.

  “Baron, can you teach me how to concatenate too?” Google asked just as Baron was sitting back down at his desk.

  “I’d be happy to!”

  Bugle Boy’s comparison of the job and detective work wasn’t totally inaccurate. If someone ordered a six-inch HDMI cable, but received a six-inch dildo, it was my duty to retrace the steps of the order and find where the mistake was made, then make sure it didn’t happen again.

  Between cases, I G-chatted with Melissa. We checked in with each other whenever there was a lull in the workday.

  Melissa: How’s it going?

  Steve: Good. A couple guys have started calling me Fight Club because of my black eyes.

  Melissa: Still? But you’re healed.

  Steve: Yeah, but my picture is attached to every case I work. I rarely interact with anyone face to face. People see my black eye picture more than my actual face.

  Melissa: Can you retake it?

  Steve: Maybe, but I kind of like it. It gives me an edge.

  Melissa: I just want to go home.

  Steve: I feel that.

  Melissa: I have to run to a meeting. Do you want to see each other tonight?

  Steve: Want to come over?

  Melissa: I was hoping you’d come to my place. Parking is so stressful by your place.

  Steve: I’ll cook dinner if you come to mine.

  Melissa: K

  By the end of
the first month, I found a rhythm to resolving the expected number of tickets while having time to G-chat with Melissa and play Facebook Scrabble with my dad. I planned on continuing that practice for the remainder of the contract, but then Bugle Boy announced a change.

  “No new cases,” he said. “I need you to provide quality assurance on the work our new hires in India are doing.”

  “New hires?” Baron questioned.

  “We just hired a new team in India who will take over this department. We need you guys to make sure they’re fully trained before we complete the transition.”

  “When is that?” Baron asked.

  “Four to six weeks,” Bugle Boy said. “It depends on how fast they pick up the work.” He looked down at the fraying laces of his Skechers. “You’ll each be assigned a few new Indian employees. I need you to review their work and give them feedback.”

  “Does this mean all our contracts will be up in a month?” Baron asked.

  “I can’t answer that. Of course, we want to keep all of you onboard! It just depends on the work.” He clapped his hands together and walked out of the room.

  “I guess it’s time to update my resume,” Baron said.

  “I wish I didn’t just spend all that money replacing the clutch on my car,” Google said.

  “I was expecting to be here a while,” Baron said.

  “There’s no security as an Amazon temp.” I was hardly surprised and didn’t share the same discouragement as the others. I didn’t like the job enough to care that I was getting replaced. If anything, it was a relief to have an excuse when I would eventually be unemployed. “Fucking Bezos,” I’d say when someone asked me why I didn’t have a job. “He outsourced my job.”

  Through rumors and hearsay I learned that the job my agency paid me eighteen dollars an hour to do (which meant Amazon paid the agency at least twenty-seven dollars an hour) would be taken over by workers who were paid per resolved ticket. Whether it took five minutes or an hour to resolve a case, it paid the same. I had no definitive evidence, but the number floating around was they received a dollar per ticket. If they worked at my pace they’d pull $9.75 an hour.

  At the same time Amazon was importing thousands of tech workers and expanding the Seattle campus into downtown, they were also shipping jobs overseas. Eventually, every job that could be done by cheap foreign labor would ship out, potentially leaving a whole lot of unemployed condo owners.

  The first batch of cases I reviewed was full of mistakes. I wanted to give good grades, but it was hard to rationalize passing someone who clearly had no idea what they were doing. It gave me a newfound respect for my eighth-grade algebra teacher. She used to say, “I wish I could give all of you an A.” Back then, I scoffed at the proclamation, but now I knew exactly what she meant.

  “They just don’t get it,” Baron said.

  “When they get it, you’re out of a job,” I said. “It might be a good thing if they don’t understand.”

  “I love when they fuck up,” Google said. “As long as they’re messing up, we’ve got work.”

  “It’s like they haven’t even been trained,” Baron said.

  “They haven’t,” I said. “We’re the ones training them.”

  “Shouldn’t someone with more experience be training them?”

  “You’d think.”

  Bugle Boy told us to grade on accuracy, procedure, and communication skills—all of which I ignored. If I came across a resolved ticket that used a different method than what we’d been trained to do, I still issued a passing grade. It showed resourcefulness, and I wasn’t concerned about the possible future problems that could arise because a few employees didn’t know proper procedure.

  “When you’re grading these guys,” Bugle Boy said, “be ruthless.” He looked down at the toe of his Skecher poking out beneath his pant leg. “I don’t mean ruthless, of course.” He pulled his hands from his pockets and slapped them together. “Just make sure they know what they’re doing because there’s going to be a lot depending on this during the holiday season.”

  It was hard to imagine anything I cared less about than how well the new employees performed over the holiday season. Whatever happened after my termination date didn’t concern me. While Baron and Google wrote progress reports for their new employees, I G-chatted with Melissa.

  Steve: I think I’ve only done three hours’ worth of work this whole day.

  Melissa: Don’t you leave in twenty minutes?

  Steve: I’m that good.

  Melissa: I have to get groceries after work and prepare a lesson plan, but I’d like to hang out.

  Steve: Come over?

  Melissa: Can’t you come to my place? Parking over there is so stressful.

  Steve: I want to run after work. Let’s see each other this weekend. I’ll make dinner. Gluten-free tacos.

  Melissa: K

  Melissa and I had met five years earlier in a mutual friend’s studio apartment. I was wearing a Bouncing Souls T-shirt and kept asking the host to drop the needle on her Kurtis Blow vinyl.

  “This guy,” I said while holding up the record sleeve so everyone could see his tough pose on the cover. “This guy doesn’t get the credit he deserves. He’s more important than KRS-One.”

  “Is that a Bouncing Souls shirt?” Melissa asked.

  She was wearing a librarian-style cardigan that didn’t strike me as the type of thing a person who’d recognize the Souls’s Rocker Heart would wear. I lost track of the argument I was forming in my head on why “The Breaks” was the first real hip-hop song and looked down at my shirt.

  “It is,” I said.

  “I’m from New Jersey. I love Bouncing Souls!”

  I was drawn to the way she emphasized everything she said with an excited bop, and the playful set of freckles gathered under her smile.

  “You like the Souls?” she asked and pushed up her glasses to catch them from sliding off her nose.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I just saw them at El Corazon. I went by myself because I don’t know anyone else who likes them.”

  “I love them,” she said. “I would have gone with you.” Her beer slipped from her hand and foamed over when it hit the floor. “I’ll clean that up,” she said and stepped over the spill as she reached for a roll of paper towels.

  She was sopping up the spill when a song from Illmatic came on the stereo.

  “Broken glass in the hallway, bloodstained floors, neighbors, look at every bag you bring through doors,” Melissa rapped to herself as she carried a ball of beer-soaked paper towels to the garbage.

  “You know Illmatic?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “And the Souls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You like Bouncing Souls and Nas?” I had to clarify because I believed I was the only person in the world who had Illmatic and Maniacal Laughter in his top ten albums of all time.

  Before she had a chance to answer, her phone buzzed. She looked at the message and smiled. She turned the screen sideways to respond and it slipped from her hand, knocking the battery loose.

  I leaned down to pick it up, and as I raised my head our eyes met. “I could fall in love with you.” The words just fell out of my mouth, and I couldn’t take them back.

  “Oh?” she said as she raised an eyebrow.

  I was just as surprised as she looked. It was as if, for a split moment, the filter between my brain and my mouth had malfunctioned, allowing my thoughts to be verbalized without review.

  “No,” I said, unable to maintain eye contact. “Like under different circumstances.” I edged myself toward the door, trying to get as far away from her as possible. “You’re like the type of girl I fall in love with.” I bit my lip in an attempt to block anymore unfiltered thoughts from escaping.

  She forced a laugh. “Okay.”

  “I gotta go,” I said and reached for the doorknob. “I just remembered I’ve got that thing.” I opened the door and threw up a peace sign. “See ya.”


  I went home and drank beers as if enough of them could erase what I had said.

  •

  “I’m looking for other jobs,” Baron said one afternoon when Bugle Boy popped in to check on us. “When should I say I’m available?”

  “I don’t make those decisions.”

  “Do I need to request the day off?”

  “You can always make requests,” Bugle Boy said while leaning back on his heels. “Keep up the good work.” He turned toward the door. “The holiday season will run much smoother if the Indians know what they’re doing.”

  The Indian employees all had the same haircut and emotionless stare in their photo that accompanied each email. They were grateful for my feedback and always promised to improve. It was difficult to tell how much of what they said was genuine, considering that it couldn’t have been easy to take directions from someone with two black eyes.

  “Black Eyes failed me again,” I imagined one of the workers telling his neighbor.

  “Black Eyes is a total dick.”

  I held such strong feelings of resentment toward my previous managers, who used their authority to make me feel small, that I went easy on the criticism. Not only did that approach help my chances of being liked, but it also made the work easier. When I reviewed a case where I didn’t know if the ticket had been solved correctly or not, I didn’t bother reviewing the guidelines and issued a passing grade. There was no purpose of learning any more about the job with the end date approaching. The skills I acquired wouldn’t be relevant at another job—at least not one I wanted. All the time I saved by not having to write up mistakes resulted in plenty of time to G-chat.

  •

  A large portion of my relationship with Melissa existed in the digital world. Six months after humiliating myself with a drunken declaration of love, she sent me an instant message.

  Melissa: The Souls are in town next week.

  Steve: Cool.

  Melissa: I’m thinking about going.

  Steve: Me too.

  I was surprised by the message because I had learned through one of our mutual friends that she had a serious boyfriend. We ran into each other at a few events and always made a point to say hi, but I kept my distance.