Now for the Disappointing Part

by Steven Barker

  I had a meeting with Don so he could train me on how to process Cortana’s audio files, a task I would have to complete once a month. His office had a bookshelf filled with craft-writing books and a poster listing TEN TIPS FOR WRITERS. He told me he wrote plays, which made sense because he had a theatrical way of describing how the audio files were transferred between servers.

  “It all starts with us sending off a script,” he said with the mannerisms of a Shakespearean actor. He put his hand in the air and plucked an imaginary file from the cloud, “and zooooom,” he said while clasping his hands and pulling them down to his waist. “And ka-pow,” he aimed his hands at his monitor and opened them. “Some magical force puts the files on our computers.”

  I had no idea what he’d just told me, but he seemed like the type of guy who wouldn’t be bothered if I had follow-up questions when it came time for me to implement his lesson.

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  “Right on.”

  Don was the furthest thing from my image of a typical Microsoft employee. He didn’t have a bad haircut or wear cargo shorts.

  “Thanks for taking the time to show me this,” I said.

  “No problem. Do you prefer Steven or Steve?” he asked.

  “Steve is good.”

  •

  By the third month I was driving one or two meetings a week, which is when I discovered what hell must be like—typing on a display screen with an audience of editors. Every time I spelled something wrong or even fat-fingered the keys and threw an extra letter in a word, they’d shout the mistake. They were so quick that, even when I saw the error, they’d point it out before I had a chance to hit the delete button. They were hardwired editors and couldn’t let a mistyped word pass without a comment.

  The group’s suggestions came so fast that I played it fast and loose with the commas. I so frantically recoded the words that I carelessly dropped punctuation marks without following the grammar rules I’d learned in freshman English. When the thought was done I corrected my spelling with a quick right click, then waited for someone to tell me where I needed to add a comma and whether there was an opportunity to get fancy with an em dash or ellipsis.

  One day I added a comma to a response we’d just agreed on and started scrolling down the page.

  “No! Semicolon, Steve,” Suzanne commanded.

  “Oh.” I scrolled back up the page, and my fingers shook over the laptop as I struggled to remember where the semicolon was on the keyboard. I found it and replaced the comma and felt a sigh of relief from the room.

  “Sorry,” Suzanne said. “I didn’t mean to sound so demanding. I was just excited to use a semicolon.”

  “It’s cool,” I said.

  “Remember, Steve is Canadian, so he’s sensitive,” Sandy said.

  “Sorry, eh,” Suzanne said in her best Canadian accent, which filled the room with laughter.

  As stressful as it was to drive meetings, I appreciated the fact that David believed I could handle it. It made me feel like part of the team, even if my badge was a different color.

  Melissa texted me a couple months after the breakup and asked if she could swing by. Her books, clothes, and toiletries sat in a bag hidden behind the couch. Even though it was out of sight, I felt its presence. The job kept my mind occupied during the day, but in the evening I thought about her. And just like I couldn’t help myself with Ashley, I’d sometimes find myself on her Facebook page, where I analyzed what guys routinely liked her statuses and wondered if she was workshopping writing with any of them.

  “Hi,” I said as I got into the passenger seat of her car—the same place I’d been the last time we’d seen each other.

  “Hi,” she said while flashing me a forced smile. “Your stuff is in the backseat.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “How have you been?”

  “Okay, I guess, you?”

  “I love my job.”

  “That’s great. What do you do?”

  “I’m a Canadian creative writer at Microsoft. I write funny and interesting lines for a virtual assistant.”

  “Cool.”

  “It’s just a temp thing, but I’d love for it to go long-term.”

  “That’s great,” she said. It was hard to tell if she really cared. For four years I could tell exactly how she was feeling just by the curl of her bottom lip or by how often she pushed her glasses up her nose, but in that moment, I had no idea.

  “Seems cool,” she said.

  “I think so.”

  She’d moved out of the city, like she’d talked about when we were together, which I hadn’t taken seriously at the time. “I want to live around trees,” she used to say.

  Her family was healthy, and her cat missed me. She’d been getting a lot of writing done and had an ebook coming out. She had everything she wanted, and all it took was cutting me out of her life.

  “I’m happy for you,” she said and pushed her glasses up her nose. “The job sounds like something you’ve always wanted. I mean it. It’s really great.”

  “Glad you’re happy too,” I said as I reached for the door. “The country sounds awesome.”

  “It’s so quiet.”

  “So, we’re homies?”

  “Homies.”

  I stood on the curb as I watched her drive off. Techno music blasted from an apartment window, and someone shouted, “Give me a cigarette.” When her car was out of sight, I walked back to my place, passing a drunk kid pissing between two cars. His friend was taking video on his phone. “I’m gonna Gram this, bro.”

  I wondered what it was like to live around trees.

  A couple weeks into the contract, I realized that I got along with all of my coworkers. It was odd, because there was always at least one person I didn’t vibe with in every office I spent time in, sometimes multiple people like in the case with Amazon. Sure, the group razzed me when I butchered the spelling of “foreign” so bad that spell check didn’t even have a suggestion, but it was lighthearted and everyone caught equal amounts of flak. Sandy and I even had a silent language when I was driving the meeting. If I felt unsure about placing a comma, I would circle the area I was considering with the cursor. She’d nod if I needed to add one. I confided in her about my poor grammar skills, which as a writer was my most shameful flaw. She took it upon herself to copyedit all my work that was stored in public files and never mentioned it to the group.

  When a new guy joined the team, I welcomed his presence, because it meant I was no longer the newb, but as he got more comfortable in the group I noticed he treated me differently than everyone else.

  He was nowhere near the expert level condescender I’d run into at Amazon, but among the rest of the team he was the only one who didn’t treat me as an equal.

  I referred to him as Bing. For two reasons: first, because he resembled Stephen Tobolowsky, who I associated with the character Ned Ryerson who said, “Bing!” a bunch of times in the movie Groundhog Day. The other was because he had spent the past few years working in Microsoft’s Bing department—a fact he managed to squeeze into most conversations. “Oh yeah, I know Gary; we crossed paths a few times at Bing.” Or “Glad to finally be off that Bing alias. So many emails.”

  Every time he made one of those remarks it felt like he was trying to remind the group that he’d been with the company long before joining our team and wasn’t worthy of the new-guy label.

  David put me in charge of creating responses for the query tell me a fact, and Bing challenged everything I brought to the meeting, even when I had sources to back it up.

  “Kintsugi is a Japanese process of fixing pottery with gold lacquer. It treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise,” I read to the group.

  “Wait,” Bing said. “Is this true?”

  “Yes,” I said, opening a Wikipedia page, which I’d prepared for that exact moment. “It says it right there.”

  Don read the definition aloud, then said, “
It looks right to me.”

  “Don’t ship this one just yet. I’m going to have to run this by some of my friends at Bing Japan.”

  I knew that if someone else in the group had written that fact he wouldn’t have challenged it, which was discouraging. I’d come so close to feeling like part of the team and not just a temp, yet whenever I felt a little too comfortable he’d gleefully point out one of my spelling errors or point out an incorrect detail in one of my facts.

  His insistence on fact-checking everything was helpful; it caused me to work harder and double-check everything before I showed it to the group. The sinking feeling in my stomach every time he looked up from his phone with a smile to say something like “Steve, Rickey Henderson spells Rickey with an ‘E’” was enough to make me triple-check my work.

  Bing wasn’t my first experience with an FTE who felt superior to me because I had a different color badge. I’d developed a passive-aggressive way of handling his type. I didn’t succumb to the subordination they tried to inflict on me. It wasn’t extreme, like I wouldn’t say, “Get me a soda, bitch!” But I let it be known that I wasn’t giving the freshman-to-senior type respect they expected from a temp. I didn’t fake laugh at their jokes or make their requests a priority. I handled all my assignments with care and on schedule, but I didn’t end my emails with exclamation points. And I never smiley-face-emoji responded to their funny link emails.

  One afternoon, after receiving a demeaning busy project from Bing, I went over to Sandy’s office to vent.

  “This is a safe space, right?” I asked and closed the door behind me.

  “This sounds juicy,” she said. “Whatever you say in here will stay in here.”

  “It’s Bing,” I said, though I used his real name. I never shared the nicknames I made up for people.

  “What did he do?”

  “You know how some FTEs make a point to treat you like a temp?”

  “Story of my life.”

  Sandy’s screen saver kicked in—a picture of her feeding a camel crossed the screen, followed by a picture of her standing next to a koala bear.

  “Where is that?” I asked when an image of a white sand beach appeared on screen.

  “That’s Australia. I went by myself a little while ago. It’s a beautiful place.”

  “Are all of those pictures Australia?”

  “Some are Latin America. I travel whenever I can. Working as a vendor provides a lot of opportunities.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “What do you do during your breaks?”

  “Not enough, apparently.”

  “So what happened with Bing? Was he being a jerk because you’re a vendor?” She leaned closer to me. “Or is it because you’re Canadian? That’s discrimination! You should go to HR.”

  “He just dumped a bunch of busy work on me, and I can’t seem to get it to his satisfaction.”

  “He’s not your boss.”

  “I don’t want to get into anything like that.” I was losing interest in the conversation because I was distracted by the slideshow of exotic lands and animals playing on her screen. “Those are some really great pics.”

  “I took most of them. I really like photographing nature. Birds are my favorite.”

  “Is that why you temp?”

  “I don’t know. I also do freelance editing on the side. I guess I just like having the free time you don’t get when you’re an FTE.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  “So, what are you going to do about Bing?”

  “I may have overreacted,” I said. It’s hard to say what it was about seeing those nature photos that brought the pettiness of my complaint to light, but how could I be pissed at the guy when he only expected that I do a good job? “I’ll do his project,” I said. “But when I’m finished and I send him an email, I’m just going to write ‘done’ followed by a period. No exclamation mark for him!”

  At times I thought Bing’s lack of respect for me was all in my head—as if I wasn’t able to fully grasp the fact that I had a job I enjoyed and worked with people who considered me an equal despite my temporary status. I was so used to being an outsider that even when I wasn’t treated like one I projected it on myself.

  On my first day at a Connecticut middle school, I removed my Toronto Maple Leafs hat and pretended to mouth the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, which I was hearing for the first time. On my second day my homeroom teacher wrote out the expression of loyalty to America on a note card for me to read from until I memorized it like the rest of the class.

  “This kid is stupid,” some skinny boy with yellow teeth said. “He doesn’t even know the pledge.”

  I thought it perfectly normal that my Canadian education hadn’t included America’s credo. Would he have been insulted if I called out the fact that he didn’t know “Oh, Canada”? Either way I made sure to learn it quickly to avoid further teasing.

  However, knowing how to recite a few words while holding my hand over my chest did not make me any less of a target.

  “Did you hear that?” one kid shouted when I was speaking with a teacher. “He said washroom! What are you going to do in there, Canada boy? Wash?”

  “I’m certainly not going to take a bath,” I said. “Why? What do you call it?”

  I was used to bad jokes about maple syrup and the outlandish assumption that moose roamed freely through city streets. I expected to hear “I love Canadians, they’re so nice” whenever someone discovered my heritage. I’d heard it so often, from so many people, I wondered if my fellow countrymen felt the same pressure I did when confronted with such a broad generalization. I was obligated to be nice. I couldn’t be the one Canadian who ruined the country’s reputation. How could I live with myself if I caused a Yankee to say, “I used to think Canadians were so nice, then I met that asshole, Steve”? It’s possible all Canadians shared my attitude, and Americans unconsciously influenced a whole nation into politeness, just because we want to live up to expectations, which you could argue is polite, but it’s surprising that seemingly no American has ever encountered a shitty Canadian when there are so many of them. Try ordering a double-double in English at a Quebec City Tim Hortons, and you’ll see what I mean.

  David was my first boss who made a point to make me feel equal to everyone else on the team despite my temporary status.

  “Microsoft says I’m not supposed to treat you like an FTE, but I don’t see you as any less important than everyone else on the team,” he said one day in his office for our biweekly one-on-one meeting. “I don’t understand the policy because as a writer myself I know how valuable the skill is, but Microsoft doesn’t hire writers as FTEs.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “This afternoon there is a launch party and unfortunately you and Sandy can’t come.”

  The concerned look on his face showed me that he really felt bad that he had to exclude me from the event, but I was actually relieved. I hated work functions and not being allowed to attend was ideal. I didn’t even have to make up an excuse. Besides the fact that the job couldn’t extend past eighteen months, I preferred being a temp. I never had to work more than forty hours a week, I got to skip out on work functions, and twice a month there was an FTE-only meeting, where I’d spend an hour catching up on work or hanging out in Sandy’s office shooting the shit about our pre-Microsoft lives. I was impressed when she told me she’d seen Judas Priest in concert twice.

  “I feel bad you can’t be involved,” David said after telling me that the launch party included free food and a performance by Macklemore.

  “I appreciate that, but don’t worry. I get it.”

  The next day in the meeting the group was talking about the event, and I didn’t feel like I’d missed out on anything until David said, “Man, that Macklemore sure likes talking about his penis.”

  On a Friday afternoon, in my eighth month, I got a text from my buddy. He invited me to meet him and some friends for drinks and pool later that nigh
t. I had recently embraced single life and thought it sounded like fun, but I didn’t text him back right away because I was in the middle of preparing ideas for Monday’s meeting.

  I was organizing a group of responses for Canada Day when I realized that I didn’t want to jump out of my skin. At all my previous jobs, the final hour before the weekend was a thunderstorm of nervous excitement. My legs shook under the desk while I rapidly tapped on my mouse, refreshing my email, and scrolling through Facebook, hoping no one would notice I hadn’t done any work for the previous hour.

  I wasn’t feeling any of that. I took my time making sure nothing was left unfinished. I carefully prepared myself for the following week, even completing extra tasks that weren’t expected of me, but would benefit the team.

  In my first meeting with David, I had told him that I only coasted at the jobs where I didn’t feel challenged. It was the truth, but at the time I didn’t know if the job would be one of the ones where I wanted to be more than average. Had he treated me like a just another replaceable warm body, I’d never have been inspired to do anything above adequate.

  My dad was right. I’d kissed frogs for the past ten years, but finally found my prince, which was bittersweet. I was ready to commit, but commitment was a two-way street, and according to Microsoft’s rules, temps are not allowed to work longer than eighteen months without taking a six-month break. Six months was just long enough that, by the time I would be eligible to return, someone would have filled my position.

  When Sandy’s eighteen-month expiration date approached, she worried about rejoining the job market.

  “It’s not just the money,” she said one afternoon when I was hanging out in her office.

  I’d originally stopped by to ask her a style guide question I could have sent in an IM, but didn’t have much work going on and was looking to waste some time.

  “It’s going to suck trying to pay rent, but I’m really going to miss this job,” she said. “These contract rules are supposed to protect us, but sometimes they fuck things up.”