by Calvin Wolf
The Worker
1.0
“You son of a bitch,” the father hisses. “You son of a bitch.” He has just been hit with a fifteen thousand dollar itemized bill for tutorial services received by his seventeen-year-old son. The kid has some learning disabilities, nothing serious, but the family has Ivy League dreams and needs to maximize his resume. Tutorials have been routine and in-depth, often with multiple teachers. Two of the teachers have PhDs, which command high hourly fees.
“We were covered! We had the deluxe tuition insurance!” shrieks the mother.
“A routine review revealed that your son’s learning disabilities were pre-existing conditions,” our local Educorp attorney says, his voice trained and soothing. “You either knew, or should have known, of his conditions prior to enrolling at the high school.” Early this morning, we had discovered that the kid’s elementary and middle school records were sufficient to justify our plan.
Scores were low enough to indicate a potential learning disability, but the family did not indicate that he had been tested. So, at eight-thirty, we made the call and got both parents in. I’m wearing my best suit and have had several shots of Disaronno to steady my nerves.
The father, ironically, works for a health insurance conglomerate, and is pissed to hell.
“This is a fraud! A scam!” he roars. Behind me, four APs wait to see if the parents might need restraining. The father is pudgy but quite large, and his fury is building. The mother, in another touch of irony, is stick-thin. She probably gets her diet pills paid for by her health insurance, I think, but it’s probably the Disaronno talking.
“And this comes up only a few days after the test scores come back! How convenient!” snaps the mother, her voice as sharp as her elbows and knees.
“You want us out, right?! Admit it!” Dad spits, his voice frothy with rage and saliva.
“We would love the opportunity to continue teaching William,” I lie. “Unfortunately, our policies mean we can no longer cover his tutorials through Edusurance. If payment is a problem, we have several monthly payment plan-”
The father launches out of the tasteful armchair and lunges at me. His wife is screaming for him to stop, and he barrels into me. We topple out of my chair - I hope it’s undamaged - and land on the carpet. I am stunned. His meaty forearm is on my throat. I cannot yell. I try to hit him, but my arms feel weak. Too much Disaronno, maybe?
He is pulled back by three APs and I can breathe again. As it try to sit up, I see his polished shoe coming straight at my face and
2.0
I wake up and see Gunderson sitting in the corner of a white room.
“Oh hey, you’re awake!” he says, his farmer’s face ruddy and cheerful.
“Where am I?” I croak, and my throat feels like the Sahara desert.
“Hospital, buddy. That insurance bastard’s shoe hit your skull in a million-to-one shot. Not a hard kick, but it hit you in exactly the wrong place. You were in ICU for a full day.”
“My family?”
“Getting dinner downstairs. The doc said you’d be out for several more hours. I was just playing on my phone. Want me to call your wife?”
I decide against it, wanting to talk shop for a moment or two. My head feels numb, and I need the numbness to deal with Gunderson. I don’t like that he’s the AP who has come to see me, but I figure it’s only natural. Has Educorp made him interim head principal? Probably. The fucker.
“Don’t worry - we’re probably gonna the shit out of that guy,” Gunderson beams. “But, uh, he has filed a lawsuit or two in the meantime…”
When I press him, Gunderson admits that we’re all co-defendants, as is Educorp, a slew of our subcontractors, and the state itself.
“So, if I’ve been out for a few days, what’s going on with all that?” I rasp.
Gunderson hems and haws, but then admits that Educorp wants to keep things quiet. I start to feel woozy as he talks about “leadership changes” at the school. I am being put out to pasture. Paid a settlement to keep quiet.
“Could you call my wife now?” I whisper, and everything fades to black.
2.1
My wife wakes me gently, rubbing my brow with a cool hand. I open my eyes, smile at her, and peer around for my corporate replacement. Fortunately, Gunderson appears to have left.
“They’re cutting me loose,” I whisper. She shakes her head and tells me not to worry. “You had a bad dream,” she smiles. The door to the room opens and Max and Madison come in, elder brother guiding younger sister with a hand on her shoulder. My face is starting to hurt, but I smile bravely.
“Hey kids,” I say, striving for a full voice. Max asks if I’m okay, and nods happily when I assure him that I am fine.
Everyone begins talking, but I can’t think. My mind is replaying Gunderson’s voice, giving me a death sentence: Settlement. Severance package. Letter of resignation. Job placement.
Gunderson’s voice had been as smooth as a politician’s, offering no promises. Educorp could keep things quiet, and try to place me in a “suitable” job somewhere, but only if I left quietly.
My stomach and bowels feel watery. I know what could happen if I don’t roll over and comply. Educorp is great at applying pressure.
“Hey, this place has Netflix Ultra,” Max says, discovering the remote at the foot of my bed. There is a knock at the door and a nurse enters, bearing a clipboard with paperwork. “How will you be paying for your stay?” the woman asks, as if we are in a hotel.
“I’m on Educorp insurance,” I say, and my wife nods.
“I’m sorry, but it appears that your account has been cancelled,” the nurse replies coolly. “Do you have any private policies?”
2.2
After my wife and kids go home to get me a change of clothes, Gunderson returns and tells me that I will be retained as a temporary Educorp employee, meaning that I get to keep my health insurance, if I tender my resignation from my post as head principal.
“You sign, and I can tell the hospital staff to re-check your Educorp policy,” he says.
“You’re a real son of a bitch,” I tell him.
“It’s not like I have a choice,” he snaps back. “That fat asshole sued and his lawyers pounced right away. They got wind of some stuff, so Educorp wants to settle. It went down so fast, man!” He continues to babble about the disgruntled father. He almost sounds impressed when he talks about the insurance executive’s legal blitzkrieg.
“His lawyers must’ve gotten to one of the APs. Jenkins, maybe. Or Hotchkiss.” Or maybe you, you goddamn Machiavelli. I’ll bet you squealed like a pig and made the deal to get my job.
I ask for a pen and he hands me a customized, silvery one. I recognize it as the type of pen that Educorp gives to head principals. When I take it, I use my good eye to scan its surface. Sure enough, his name is engraved on the side. Must’ve got it just hours ago.
I sign my name on a lengthy, complex document full of fine print. I don’t read it because it doesn’t matter. There is no way to fight Educorp. Their legions of lawyers have undoubtedly crafted this document to give them an ultimate victory. What do I get? Whatever they will allow me.
Until a few days ago, those lawyers drew up these things when I wanted them to. Live by the lawyer, die by the lawyer.
Gunderson takes the document and, true to his word, gets on his smartphone and calls someone in the regional office, a towering office building in downtown Dallas. I am now a consultant of some kind, making a fraction of my previous salary. I am on a six-month contract. My nemesis leaves the room and I turn on the television, looking to tint my numbness with sitcoms.
In six months I’ll be unemployed. I wondered if I should start creating profiles on all the temp apps.
2.3
The doctors declare me ready to go home at eight, and at eight-thirty I’m changing into clothes brought to me from home: a pair of
exercise shorts and a hoodie from the local university. “It’s a bit chilly out,” my wife says. She’s trying to be chipper, but I can tell that the reality of my being let go by Educorp is starting to sink in.
She’s thinking about the job market, how it’s intended to get employers the most worker for the least wage. Never thought I’d be back in it.
My wife takes the kids to go bring the car around to the front doors of the hospital. I wonder if we’ll have to sell it, since we’re still making payments on it. Will be making payments on it beyond my six month “consulting” gig. It’s an SUV. I suddenly wonder what gas prices are. With disappointment, I realize that they have probably already taken back my company car.
“Sir, we have an issue with your payment,” someone tells me as I wait. I tell them that my Educorp insurance should cover it, and they tell me that there were some pre-existing conditions. “Your X-rays indicate that you had an old head injury.”
“Yeah, when I was a teenager. Concussion from falling off a rock,” I say, remembering a Boy Scout camping trip in New Mexico. It had been a hot day, and rock climbing had been on the agenda. My hand had been sweaty and slipped off the rock. I’d also broken my leg.
I remembered to put my broken leg on the insurance form when I hired on with Educorp. but I guess I forgot to put the concussion.
“Your insurance company says that your current head trauma has been exacerbated by your earlier injury. It refuses to pay the claim,” the hospital employee tells me.
I am too messed up to deal with this and tell them I will call their offices tomorrow. My wife’s SUV is at the front doors, I can see it through the glass, and I stumble toward it. Behind me, the hospital employee says nothing, letting me flee.
They can let me go, say nothing. They have my address, phone number. They can collect.
The night is chilly, and I start to cry.
2.5
I show up at the downtown office at eight. My suit is clean and my tie is tight. I have a bruise over my eye, but otherwise I’m feeling okay. My blood is about forty percent coffee, and I’m about to start sweating bullets.
Got to work my way back in. Work my way up. Educorp will treat me right if I show them I’m still a valuable asset.
The online news had nothing about a lawsuit, but I did find a blurb on Google reporting that Gunderson had, indeed, been made interim head principal. Corporate will give him the permanent job before the day is out. He’ll fire and slash and cut costs to the bone, just like they like it. I walk through the corporate lobby, bright and impressive, and tell the receptionist who I am. She points down a corridor and I head that way, my expensive loafers clicking on polished tile.
As I head down the hallway, it becomes dull and drab, morphing yard by yard. The public doesn’t see this part of Educorp, so no need to spend money on appearance. By the time I make it to the office of my new supervisor, I feel like I’m back in the ‘70s. Most of the decor seems like it was purchased at retiree garage sales. I hear those are a thing now, given that 401(k)s are not holding up for the younger Baby Boomers.
“Hello,” says a thirtysomething drone in a suit as I enter an open office, his voice cautious. He looks slick and his hair is gelled to a sheen. I immediately peg him as a graduate of a flagship university, a former frat boy, with parents who worked white-collar corporate jobs. He has big dreams and is putting in his time out here in West Texas. Soon he’ll be in Dallas or Houston, with a pay raise.
We shake hands and he leads me to my cubicle. My job is curriculum development for the social studies courses of U.S. History, Government, Economics, Sociology, Psychology, and Philosophy. “Parents demand higher scores on the new state tests. If we can show them that we’ve got more curriculum staff, we can better justify raising tuition rates,” my new boss tells me. He takes me on a brief tour of the offices, which includes a small employee lounge and a dilapidated restroom.
“The forms and paperwork are pretty similar to what you did at the school,” my boss says, then introduces me to a coworker. His name is Raul and he will show me the ropes. The boss immediately disappears back into his office and closes the door. Mr. Big Time is done with the peon, I guess.
“I heard about what happened to you,” Raul practically whispers. “Man, I’m sorry.” I can only nod. He gestures for me to enter my cube, so I do. He pulls over his own rolling chair from an adjacent cubicle and begins to show me my job. Raul apparently does the curriculum stuff for English. He mentions that he’s an aspiring novelist.
I have a headache and can’t help but glance at the clock every few minutes.
2.7
“They tell us to quit whining, that we got to pick our careers,” Raul says between bites of a tuna fish sandwich. “Like we had months and months to sit around after college and pick and choose. Fuck, I had to go with the first job offer.” Raul graduated in ‘09, he says, at the depth of the Great Recession. He had to go back to school and get certified as a teacher, then landed a job teaching junior high English.
“Eventually I got to do this curriculum job, which ain’t half bad. It wasn’t a pay raise, that’s for sure, but there was no way that I was gonna stay in the classroom after things got privatized. Hell, angry parents were already up my ass over everything as it was.”
Raul swigs some Coke Zero. “And I don’t have to hold lunch tutorials, which is nice.”
It’s my third day on the job, fulfilling my deal with the Educorp devil, and I’m adjusting. I have copies of the Educorp textbooks in my assigned subjects and my web browser is open to WikipediaPay, Google, and the Educorp search engine EduSearch. I’m building PowerPoints, worksheets, tests, and quizzes for teachers, more so by administrator decree than teacher request.
Oh, and parent request. Since parents are paying tuition, they get to request district-made supplemental materials for their students. I just got another batch of parent requests on my Educorp page fifteen minutes ago, and these folks are needy. I take a bite of my Subway footlong and agree with everything Raul is saying.
My boss swings by and demands to know how parent requests are coming along. I tell him how many I’ve finished and he clenches his jaw. “We need a faster completion rate on these,” he says. I try not to glare, even though this punk is more than a decade younger than me and clearly has no experience in the field of education. “I’m working as fast as I can,” I say.
“You can do some of this at home,” he replies. “You have your Educorp login to access your employee page.”
When I nod unenthusiastically, the asshole decides he needs to make a jab anyway. “I know that a lot of administrators get to clock out at five, but teachers often need to work from home. It’s no big deal,” he says with a sharkish grin. I resist the urge to snap at him.
“No problem,” I respond. I’m in no position to argue, especially since my six-month contract is basically probationary. They can cut me at any time, and I have a fifteen thousand dollar hospital bill to pay. Pre-existing condition my ass.
My wife had put my car and our Chevy Tahoe, which was for trips to my family’s mountain cabin, for sale on CraigslistElite this morning. If we’re lucky, the pair might fetch a total of twenty-five grand, which would let us pay off the hospital bill and get me another car. I’m hoping for a used SUV, but that might be wishful thinking.
“I’ll have them done by tomorrow,” I assure with a confident smile, plotting my rise to usurp this slick corporate drone. He nods and heads back to his office, which is an echelon above our musty breakroom.
3.0
My wife and I go over the spreadsheet again and again, trying to figure out how to handle our $15,000 in medical fees.
“I’m a lawyer,” she insists again. “We can fight this.”
“Against the insurance company’s lawyers? We’d be crushed.” I know their game: Delay, delay, delay, and drive up the plaintiff’s costs. Even if we had a case, it
would exhaust all of our resources to make it to trial. They’ll bleed us dry and then settle for pennies on the dollar.
“We could just not pay,” she says adamantly. “They’re fucking us over with that bullshit pre-existing condition crap.” She has become a lot more profane over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, the dirty talk has not extended to the bedroom. Stress has not helped her libido, though I’m thrumming like a live wire most days.
“It would wreck our credit,” I sigh. We need credit if we’re going to continue funding Max’s HGH treatment. We need to continue Max’s HGH treatment if we’re going to get him a scholarship to a good college. We need to get Max into a good college so that he’s not a thirty-year-old living off of Bids and Temp and sleeping in his old bedroom.
I double-click over to my retirement fund and stare at the numbers. The digits used to seem pretty nice, but have lost their luster now that my income has been decimated. Someone has offered five thousand for the old Tahoe, but my car hasn’t prompted any offers near twenty. Every time I refreshed the page, I saw more and more cars being put up for sale. My wife says someone will offer more, but I doubt they will.
Time to settle. Take the money. Nineteen today is better than the eighteen you’ll get tomorrow. Returns diminish and interest increases. I chuckle at that last bit of mental trivia, and my wife glares at me.
“Something funny?” she asks. She’s trying to be supportive, but she’s getting pissed. By the situation? By me?
“No, sweetie.”
“Then let’s figure this out.”
I set down my tablet and open a bottle of wine from the kitchen. I look over at my office and see papers and books strewn about, the bric-a-brac of my new profession as curriculum jockey. When I was a principal, my home office just for show. A museum exhibit. I feel both anger and pride. I used to only use that computer for porn. Who’d’ve thought it would actually do work?
I snag two glasses and bring them back into the living room. I pour generous glasses and drink mine quickly, hoping to feel the buzz of alcohol. I have always relished that feeling, though nowadays more than usual. My wife grabs her own glass and also drinks deeply.
Max and Madison are asleep and I wonder if I can talk my wife into a blowjob.
We talk and decide to leave my retirement account alone. We’ll sell the cars and dip into my dwindling savings to buy another vehicle for me. I go to Craigslist and CraigslistElite and begin shopping and selling. Someone texts me and offers to sell me drugs. Someone else sends me a dick pic.
The hospital bill is due in three days.
3.2
My wife traded her SUV back in at the dealership for a four-cylinder sedan and I purchased a “gently used” Honda Ridgeline from a man named Gomez or Gamez at a seedy used car dealership down by the interstate. An independent mechanic said that the Honda was in good shape, so I made the deal. My old Tahoe and my European import had gotten me nineteen thousand in two Craigslist sales, both of which I finalized in the parking lot of a Walmart.
I managed to snag the Ridgeline for sixty-five hundred, leaving me eighty-five hundred for my hospital bill. I used my phone to move some savings to checking and then sent the payment to the hospital, paying the charge in full. As soon as the payment went through I dialed their billing department.
I listen to bureaucratic babble for a bit, and then I press her over whether or not the bill I received earlier is the final tally. “Is that the full amount?” I demand thrice. Finally, she admits that I might receive an additional invoice from a consulting neurologist. What the fuck?
“I never spoke to a consulting neurologist,” I explain, striving for calmness. I announce who my doctors were.
“Sometimes, sir, additional doctors are requested during or after surgery to consult.”
Looking out the window, I am livid. “The hospital should cover the cost. I was told precisely what my bill was, and that is what I will pay. Not a penny more.” She begins to protest, and I end the call. My heart is pounding. Who knows how high this extra bill could be. A thousand? Two? Five. My stomach lurches, and I fight back the urge to vomit.
Raul swings in on his rolling chair, his arms gripping doorframes and walls while the chair wheels squeal. “You okay?” he asks.
“Fuck no. The hospital might send me an additional bill. They say other doctors may have ‘helped’ with my surgery. After I got kicked in the face by that insurance guy, you know?” Raul nods. He offers me a candy bar, a gesture of camaraderie, and I accept. We bitch about health insurance for a while, lowering our voices when we hear sounds that suggest our boss is out and about.
“If you wanna make some more money, Educorp just posted some new jobs in and around the district,” Raul says. I suddenly remember what day it is - annual “culling” and rehiring day. If your quals don’t measure up, Educorp policy is to search for a replacement. If they don’t find one, you get an extra six months to earn your way back into corporate’s good graces. If they do find one, you’re out on your ass.
I turn to my computer and look at Educorp’s new job offerings. Bingo. A path upward. As Raul goes back to working on English worksheets for high school juniors, I begin polishing my resume. I’m gonna tear the job market a new one.