I took a step backward. “I just needed—”
“You just need to shut up. I’m tired of you, Jones. I’m tired of your shit. Your probation period’s not over yet, you know. You can be let go without cause.” He glared at me. “Do you understand?”
I understood what he was saying. But I also understood that he was bluffing. Neither he nor Banks had as much control over me as they wanted me to believe. If what they tried to make me believe was true, I would’ve been fired weeks ago. Or, more likely, I never would’ve been hired at all. Someone above them was calling the shots, and they were hamstrung. They could rant and rave and piss and moan, but when push came to shove, they couldn’t do diddly.
Maybe that was why Stewart had been riding me so hard lately.
I stood my ground. “I just wanted to know what I was supposed to revise. I couldn’t tell from the note.”
Connor was staring at us. Even he seemed taken aback by the force of Stewart’s outburst.
“You are supposed to revise the manuals,” Stewart said. He spoke slowly and deliberately, angrily.
“Which part of the manuals?” I asked.
“Everything. If you had bothered to look through the books I left on your desk, you would have noticed that we no longer use that hardware system. I want you to revise those operator manuals so that they reflect our current system.”
“How do I do that?” I asked.
He stared at me. “You’re asking me how to do your job?”
Connor had grown increasingly uncomfortable, and he nodded toward me. “I’ll show you,” he offered.
I looked at him gratefully, smiling my thanks.
Stewart fixed the programmer with a disapproving glare but said nothing.
I followed Connor back to his cubicle.
It was easier than I’d thought it would be. Connor simply gave me a stack of manuals that had come with the computers Automated Interface had recently purchased. He told me to xerox them, put them in binders, then deliver them to the different departments within the company.
“You mean I’m just supposed to replace the old books with new ones?” I asked.
“Right.”
“How come Mr. Stewart told me to revise the manuals?”
“That’s just the way he talks.” The programmer tapped the cover of the top manual he’d given me. “Just make sure you return those to me when you’re through. I need them. You should find a distribution list somewhere in your desk that will tell you how many copies each department gets. Gabe always kept an up-to-date distribution list.”
Gabe. My predecessor. In addition to being friendly and outgoing, he’d apparently been well-organized and efficient as well.
“Thanks,” I told Connor.
“You’re welcome.”
I licked my lips. This was the first positive contact I’d actually had with one of my coworkers, and more than anything else I wanted to follow up on it. I wanted to build on this tentative base, to try and establish some sort of relationship with Connor. But I did not know how. I could have attempted to continue the conversation, I suppose. I could have asked him what he was working on. I could have tried to talk about something non-work related.
But I didn’t.
He turned back to his terminal, and I returned to my office.
I saw Connor later, near the Coke machine, and I smiled and waved at him as I entered the break room, but he ignored me, turned away, and, embarrassed, I quickly got my drink and left.
At lunch, I saw Connor leaving with Pam Greene. They didn’t see me, and I stood on the sidelines, watching them take the elevator down. I’d begun dreading lunch, feeling self-conscious about the fact that I always ate by myself. I would have much preferred working eight hours straight and getting off an hour earlier at the end of the day, not taking a lunch at all. I did not need sixty minutes each day to prove to me how I was regarded by my coworkers. I was depressed enough by the job as it was.
What depressed me further was the fact that everyone—everyone—seemed to have someone to eat with. Even someone like Derek, who as far as I could tell was almost universally reviled, had someone with whom he spent his lunch: a squat, toadlike man who worked someplace upstairs. I alone was alone. The secretaries who were nice to me during working hours all said good-bye and waved politely before abandoning me at lunchtime, not even bothering to ask if I would like to accompany them, perhaps assuming that I already had something to do with my lunch hour.
Perhaps not.
Whatever the reason, I was ignored, not invited, left to my own devices.
The secretaries, I must admit, did seem to be nicer to me than everyone else. Hope, our department secretary, always treated me well. She had the calm, kind, perpetually friendly air of a stereotypical grandmother, and she greeted me each day with a cheerful smile and a heartfelt “Hello!” She asked about my weekend plans on Friday afternoons; she asked how those plans turned out on Monday morning. She said good-bye to me each evening before I left.
Or course, she was equally nice to everyone within the department. She talked to everyone, seemed to like everyone, but that didn’t make her interest in me any less genuine or any less appreciated.
Likewise, Virginia and Lois, the women from the steno pool, were decent to me, friendly in a way that separated them from everyone else within our department.
Or within the building.
The guard in the lobby still paid no attention to me, although he seemed to be jovially familiar with everyone else who passed through the doors of Automated Interface.
To Jane, I continued to give a fairly neutral account of my days at work. I told her of my frustration with Stewart, complained about some of my bigger problems, but the day-to-day difficulties, my seeming inability to fit in with my fellow workers, the sense of social ostracism I felt, these things I kept to myself.
It was my cross to bear.
A week after I’d distributed the computer manuals, Stewart walked into my office, waving a sheet of blue interoffice memo paper. I was on break and reading the Times, but Stewart slammed down the memo on top of my newspaper. “Read that,” he demanded.
I read the memo. It was from the head of the accounting department and simply asked if we could send an extra copy of the computer manual since Accounting had recently received a new terminal. I looked up at Stewart. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll make another copy and send them a manual.”
“Not good enough,” Stewart said. “You should’ve sent them the correct number to begin with.”
“All I had to go on was Gabe’s distribution list,” I told him. “I didn’t know they’d gotten another computer.”
“It’s your job to know. You should have asked each department head how many copies he or she needed instead of relying on that outdated list. You screwed up, Jones.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re sorry? This reflects on the whole department.” He picked up the memo. “I’m going to have to show this to Mr. Banks. I’ll let him decide on the proper course of action to take with you. In the meantime, get that manual to Accounting ASAP.”
“I will,” I said.
“You’d better.”
My workday went downhill from there.
Things did not improve when I got home. Jane was cooking hamburger casserole and watching an old rerun of M*A*S*H when I arrived. I’d always hated hamburger casserole, but I’d never told her so and it was not something she’d ever been able to figure out for herself.
I walked over to the TV and switched the channel. I liked M*A*S*H but I was a news junkie, and from the moment I got home until the start of prime time, I liked to watch the news. It made me nervous not to know what was going on in the world, to be oblivious to brewing disasters, but it didn’t seem to bother Jane at all. Even when the news was on, she paid attention only to movie reviews, and she preferred to watch reruns or films on cable.
It had been the source of many fights.
She knew my position, sh
e knew how I felt, and I couldn’t help thinking that her choice of TV fare tonight was a direct provocation, an attempt to goad me. Usually, she had the news on when I came home. The fact that she didn’t this evening seemed to me to be a direct slap in the face.
I confronted her. “Why isn’t the news on?”
“I had a test today. I was tired. I wanted some light entertainment. I didn’t want to have to think.”
I understood how she felt, and I should have let it go, but I was still pissed off at Stewart, and I guess I had to take it out on somebody.
We got into it.
It was a big fight, almost a physical fight. Afterward, we both said we were sorry, and we kissed and hugged and made up. She went into the kitchen to finish making dinner, and I stayed in the living room and watched the news. I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the couch. I hadn’t told her I loved her, I realized. We’d made up, but I hadn’t told her I loved her.
She hadn’t told me she loved me, either.
I thought about that. I did love her and I knew she loved me, but we never used those words. Or at least we hadn’t for quite some time. We’d said them at first, but strangely enough, though I’d told her that I loved her, I wasn’t sure at the time if I meant it. I’d said it, but the words had seemed hollow and clich�d, almost false. The first time, it had been more of a hope than an admission, and I felt no different after than before. There’d been no surge of joy or relief, only a vague sense of unease, as though I had lied to her and was afraid I’d be found out. I’m not sure how she felt, but for me “love” was a transitional word, an acceptable way to escalate the relationship from boyfriend/girlfriend to live-in lovers. It had been necessary, and not necessarily true.
After we moved in together, I stopped saying it.
So did she.
But we did love each other. More than before. It was just that… it wasn’t the way we’d imagined it. We enjoyed each other’s company, we were comfortable together, but when I came home after work I didn’t rip off her clothes and throw her on the kitchen floor and rape her then and there. She didn’t greet me wearing nothing but a G-string and a smile. It wasn’t the intense passionate romance we’d been promised by books and movies and music and TV. It was nice. But it was not all-encompassing, not constantly exciting.
We didn’t even make wild passionate love after an argument, the way we were supposed to.
We made love that night, though, before going to sleep, and it was good. It was so good that I wanted to tell her that I loved her.
I wanted to.
But for some reason I didn’t.
FIVE
At work, my duties became more substantive. I don’t know why this was, whether my success with previous assignments had proved me capable of handling more difficult chores, or whether word came down from on high that I should be pulling my weight and earning my salary by doing real work. Whatever the reason, I was given first one press release to write, then another, and then a full overview for a set of previously written instructions for something called FIS, the File Inventory System.
Stewart made no comment when I turned in the first press release, a two-page piece of unabashed hype modeled after a press release of his own. I attempted to be a little less Madison Avenue in the second release, putting forth the positive attributes of the product in a more objective, journalistic manner. Again, no comment.
The overview was harder to write. I was supposed to describe what the File Inventory System accomplished and how it worked without getting bogged down in too much technical detail, and it took me nearly a week to finish it. When it was done, I made a copy on the Xerox machine and took it over to Stewart, who told me to leave it on his desk and get out of his office.
An hour later, he called.
I picked up the phone. “Hello. Documentation. Bob Jones speaking.”
“Jones, I have some things I want to add to your FIS overview. I’m going to mark up the copy you gave me and let you type in the additions.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ll look it over one more time after you’re finished. I have to approve it before we send it on to Mr. Banks.”
“All right. I’ll—” I began.
The phone clicked as he hung up.
I sat there listening to the dial tone. Bastard, I thought. I replaced my handset in the cradle and looked down at the original copy of the overview on my desk. It was strange that he would even call to tell me something like that. It didn’t make sense. If he was going to correct my work, why didn’t he just do it and order me to type in his revisions? Why had he even called me with this song and dance? There was a reason for this, I knew, but I could not figure out what it was.
Derek was looking at me. “Watch your ass,” he said.
I was not sure if that was a threat or a warning—it was impossible to tell from the old man’s tone of voice. I wanted to ask him, but he had already turned away from me and was busily scribbling notes on a typed piece of paper.
That was Wednesday. When Thursday and Friday passed, then Monday, Tuesday, and the next Wednesday and I still hadn’t heard back from Stewart on the overview, I made a trip over to his office.
He was seated at his desk. His door was open, and he was reading a copy of Computer World. I rapped lightly on the doorframe, and he looked up. He frowned when he saw me. “What do you want?”
Nervously, I cleared my throat. “Did you, uh, have a chance to go over my work?”
He stared at me. “What?”
“The overview I wrote for the File Inventory System last week. You said you’d get back to me on it. You said you had some new things to add?”
“No, I didn’t.”
I shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I thought you said you had to okay it or approve it or something before it was sent to Mr. Banks.”
“What do you want? A pat on the back each time you complete a simple assignment? I’ll tell you right now, Jones, we don’t work that way around here. And if you think I’m going to allow you to just mope around while you wait for some sort of ego gratification, you’ve got another think coming. No one here gets medals for simply doing their jobs.”
“It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?” He stared at me, unblinking, waiting for an answer.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt flustered. I hadn’t expected him to flat-out deny what he’d told me, and I didn’t understand what was going on. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I guess I misunderstood what you said. I’d better get back to my desk.”
“I guess you’d better.”
It might’ve been my imagination, but I thought I heard him chuckling as I left.
When I returned, there was a note from Hope waiting on my desk, written on a sheet of her pink personalized stationery. I picked up the paper, read the message: “For Stacy’s birthday. Sign the card and pass it on to Derek. See you at the lunch!” Paper-clipped to the stationery was a birthday card that showed a group of goofy cartoon jungle animals waving their arms. “From the whole herd!” the front of the card said.
I opened the card and looked at the signatures. All of the programmers except Stacy had signed it, as had Hope, Virginia, and Lois. Each of the signees had also added a short personal note. I didn’t know Stacy at all, but I picked up my pen, wrote “Hope you have a great birthday!” and signed my name.
I handed the card to Derek. “What time is the lunch?” I asked.
He took the card from me. “What lunch?”
“Stacy’s birthday lunch, I guess.”
He shrugged, didn’t answer, signed the card, placed it in its envelope. Ignoring me, he walked out of the office, taking the card with him.
I wanted to say something to him, to tell him what an inconsiderate jerk he was, but as always, I did nothing.
Ten minutes later, my phone rang. I picked it up. It was Banks. He wanted me to come up to his office. I had not been to his office since the first day, and my initial thought was that I was about to
be fired. I didn’t know why or what for, but I figured that between the two of them, Banks and Stewart had finally come up with a plausible reason why I should be let go.
I was nervous as I waited for the elevator. I didn’t like my job, but I certainly didn’t want to lose it. I stared at the descending lighted numbers above the metal doors. My palms were sweaty. I wished Banks had not asked me up to his office. If I was going to get fired, I thought, I would have much rather been notified through the mail. I had never been good at personal confrontations.
The elevator doors opened. An older woman in a loud print dress got out, and I stepped in, pressing the button for the fifth floor.
Banks was waiting for me in his office, seated behind his huge desk. He did not say hello, did not stand when I entered, but motioned for me to sit down. I sat. I wanted to wipe my sweaty hands on my pants, but he was looking straight at me and I knew it would be too obvious.
Banks leaned forward in his chair. “Has Ron talked to you about GeoComm?”
I blinked, stared dumbly. “Uh… no,” I said.
“It’s a geobase system that we’re developing for cities, counties, and municipal governments. You do know what a geobase system is?”
I shook my head, still not sure where this was leading.
He gave me a look of annoyance. “Geobase is short for geographic database. It allows the user to…”
But I was already tuning him out. I wasn’t going to lose my job, I realized. I was being given a new assignment. I was going to be writing instructions for a new computer system. Not just partial instructions, not just one-page rewrites, but an entire manual.
I wasn’t going to be fired. I’d been promoted.
Banks stopped talking, looked at me. “Aren’t you going to take notes?”
I looked at him. “I didn’t bring a notebook,” I admitted.
“Here.” Sighing heavily, he pulled a pad of yellow legal paper from the top drawer in his desk, handed it to me.
I took a pen from my pocket and began writing.
When I returned to my office an hour later, it was a little after eleven-thirty. Derek was gone. I put my notes and the papers Banks had given me down on my desk and walked over to Hope’s station. She was gone, too.
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