Personal Days (2 page)

The rest of us don’t say anything, partly because we’re afraid the Sprout is taking notes and will fire us, but mostly because we are getting hungry and have lost the will to fight. Usually at these meetings there’s a stack of sandwiches and coffee—what the Sprout would call a
carrot—
and sometimes actual, literal carrots. But not today.

Lizzie nudges Pru. The Sprout is in the corner, eyes narrowed in concentration, chin planted in chest. Jonah’s remarks have sent him deep into thought, so deep that he’s actually sleeping.

The outside world

As we’re filing out, George, the lawyer, asks Maxine,
Grab lunch?

Just like that.

Two words.

She beams at the prospect. Our jaws fall off their hinges and Crease mimes shooting himself in the head.

Lizzie goes foraging for Claritin and Red Bull.
Does anyone want anything from the outside world?
she asks.

On the way to the drugstore she spies George and Maxine sliding into his car, a silver BMW.

Maxine is gone for the rest of the day. We have all been monitoring the situation intently. Laars says something critical of BMWs, German engineering, the legal profession as a whole. Laars rides his bike to work when he can. Today he wears a faded long-sleeved T advertising a New Jersey swimming pool company, the white letters nearly washed away, a recent flea market find. What could Maxine possibly see in George? Pru points out that George wears a clean shirt, the kind with buttons.

Us/them

Is Maxine one of us? One of them? For the first few months we were under the misapprehension that she was someone’s secretary, but then we started getting memos from her, some with a distinctly shape-up/ship-out undercurrent.

She might even outrank the Sprout. The subject merits closer, more fanatical observation. Could it be that the Sprout reports to
her
?

Pru tells us how all of the Sprout’s issues about working for such a practically mythological creature as Maxine get inflicted on
us.
His lust for her leads to his hatred of us, roughly. His fear of her makes him want us to fear
him.

As Pru talks, she flowcharts it on a pad, little multidirectional arrows and
FEAR
in huge letters.

The cc game

Against the advisement of George, Maxine will sometimes compliment us on our hair or other aspects of our scruffy appearance. The next day, or even later the same day, she’ll send an all-caps e-mail asking why a certain form is not on her desk. This will prompt a peppy reply, one barely stifling a howl of fear:

Hey Maxine!

The document you want was actually put in your in-box yesterday around lunchtime. I also e-mailed it to you and Russell. Let me know if you can’t find it!

Thanks!

Laars

P.S. I’m also attaching it again as a Word doc, just in case.

There’s so much wrong here: the fake-vague
around lunchtime,
the nonsensical
Thanks,
the quasi-casual postscript. The exclamation points look downright psychotic. Laars plays what he calls the cc game, sending the e-mail to the Sprout as well. You should always rope in an outside witness in order to prove your competence or innocence. On the other hand, this could be seen as whining.

Maxine never writes back. The Sprout will not get around to Laars’s e-mail for a week. He doesn’t like to deal with the petty stuff, though it could also be argued that he doesn’t like to deal with the big stuff, either.

He will study the e-mail for a few seconds, frown, and then delete it.

Stalling

Despite Maxine’s scatterbrained management style and seeming incompetence, we can’t help but be caught in her spell. We realize that this is bad. It makes her incompetence seem like brashness, her haphazard ways a calculated line of attack. The more she does everything wrong, the more she can do no wrong.

Lizzie still can’t use the bathroom if Maxine’s in there. If Lizzie happens to see her by the sink, she’ll head into a stall and sit in excruciating, faucet-drip-counting silence.

< 2 >

Jackrub!

Everybody needs a routine. Jack II’s thing these days is to drop by your cubicle between two and three every afternoon and say
Who needs a backrub?
Even if you don’t exactly raise your hand he latches his mitts onto your shoulders and starts working away. It was nice at first and then it was funny but now it’s out of control. His stress-release technique is itself stressful. At the sound of Jack II’s voice we automatically tilt to face him so that he can’t sneak up and get a grip.

Jackrub!
Pru will shout-hiss, a warning signal to all in the vicinity.

Today, to everyone’s surprise, Lizzie accepts a Jackrub. She says she did something awful with a calculator: She punched in the Net Pay from her paycheck and multiplied it by 26. The total was so low she was sure she’d dropped a digit, like maybe she had multiplied by 6.
I have to economize,
she says,
but I’ve already been economizing.

Except for the shoes,
says Pru.

Lizzie needs a new job, but for now she’ll take that Jackrub.

Lots of tension in this room,
says Jack II, cracking his knuckles.

The Original Jack

We call him Jack II because there was a Jack before him, now known as the Original Jack. He was let go during the Firings a year ago and no one’s stayed in touch. This nickname-after-the-fact makes us think of him as a whimsical chap, always ready with a wisecrack or droll observation. Actually he was on the dull side and could be a total asshole.

People drop off the radar once they leave the office. Week after week, you form these intense bonds without quite realizing it. All that time together adds up: muttering at the fax machine, making coffee runs. The elevator rides. The bitching about the speed of the elevator. The endlessly reprised joke, as it hits every floor:
Making local stops.

You see co-workers more than you see your so-called friends, even more than you see your significant others, your spouses if you have them. None of us do at the moment, though there are reports that Jenny’s on the verge.

Lizzie has a hunch that Crease was once married.
He has that I Was Married look,
she says.
The blank stare.

We know each other well but only to a point.

Instant folklore

Laars looks gaunt these days, his floppy hair hanging limp around his temples. More and more he lies for a spell on the pungent but very comfortable maroon sofa he inherited from Jason.
I just need to close my eyes.
He confesses to spending his evenings nursing Scotch before his computer at home, Googling himself until the wee hours. There’s a person out there who shares the same name, incredibly enough. Person or persons. He’s found himself in Appalachian hiking e-gazettes, antique typewriter societies, and University of Alaska alumni newsletters.
I must destroy them,
he says.

Worse is when he Googles former girlfriends, high school crushes, drunken flings from his semester abroad. There are more of all of these than you would imagine—indeed, than
he
imagined.

He’s good-looking but not
that
good-looking,
says Pru. Lizzie thinks he gets a lot of mileage out of the floppy hair.

Laars’s innumerable past dalliances trouble him and he publicly declares a vow of chastity. We could be imagining things but for a second Lizzie’s eyes droop with sadness as he says this.

Alas, Laars is powerless to stop the hunt for figures from his past. He tries to devise searches that will sniff out maiden names and the like. But some people are gone for good, they have vanished, and the string of words he puts into the engine returns the most hilariously useless links: midwestern college soccer squads, science fair runners-up, family trees dipping into the eighteenth century.

He does this all day at work now, too, in between complaining about the pencil sharpener and complaining about the air-conditioning. He’s found out a lot about his cousin’s ex-girlfriend from Spain. No doubt he’s Googled everyone in the office, uncovering secrets nestled in the thirty-fifth screen of results.

Jack II says that when you feel a tingling in your fingers, it means someone’s Googling you. We take to this bit of instant folklore immediately.

Friendship

Jonah’s e-mail sign-off used to read
Sincerely,
then
Sincerely Yours,
then
Cheers.
He disapproves of Lizzie’s
Best,
let alone Jenny’s
Warm best.
He says it’s important to set the right tone with your tagline. For a while he used
Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Lately every e-mail ends:
Your friend, Jonah.

What if you’re not their friend?
asks Pru.

< 3 >

The Californians!

Our company was once its own thing, founded long ago by men with mustaches. After several decades it wound up, to its surprise, as the easternmost arm of an Omaha-based octopus. The tentacles eventually detached, or strangled each other, a few of them joining forces, most dying out altogether.

Over time the name shrunk and mutated, changes captured in reams of old letterhead in the closet by Jonah’s office. The stationery reads like the fossil record. Syllables disappeared. Ampersands were added and later removed. In the mid-’90s everything was consolidated into a set of five initials, two of which don’t actually stand for anything. The vowelless result defies easy pronunciation, even by longtime employees. You say it a different way every time. This quality lends it a daunting preverbal power.

Lately we hear that some Californians want to make us
their
easternmost outpost. We base this conjecture on an opaquely worded one-inch paragraph on the fifth business page of the
Times
that appeared last month.

Think positive,
we tell ourselves. There’s no reason to believe that a new owner will be any worse than the current one. But when have things ever gotten better?

We know that the Firings were just a taste of what’s in store, and like morbid climatologists tracking twisters, we anticipate their return. If something ominous happens—nasty memo, Coke machine empty two days in a row—we see it as a sign of our new owners’ impending arrival.

At these times Pru likes to shriek,
The Californians!

Jack II thinks the best thing would be for them to come in and clean house, install their own people. He says it’s unlikely any of us will survive.
Their mentality is totally different out west,
he says.
I mean, I should know.
He lived in San Diego for about a year after college, trying to be a comedy writer, despite the fact that he is neither outwardly funny nor humorous on the printed page.

You are here

Our office is located on what must be the least populated semi-wide street in all of Manhattan, a no-man’s-land just far enough from two fashionable neighborhoods to be considered part of neither. Wind gets stuck here. At twilight, crumpled newspapers scuttle across the pavement like giant crabs. Plastic bags advance in tumbleweed fashion. Sometimes it feels like the edge of the world.

We occupy the middle three floors of a nine-floor building, at the uneasy intersection of two quasi-avenues, which merge without clear signage. Further complicating matters is the abundance of honorary street names for people you’ve never heard of. Rabbi S. Blankman Street? “Mama” O’Sullivan Road? Who were these colorful figures of yesteryear? Cabbies throw their hands up and think of turning in their medallions.

The Starbucks just down the road, uncomfortably situated on a corner between a boarded-up bar and a boarded-up locksmith, looks like a bordello. We call it the Bad Starbucks for its low-impact saxophone music and an absence of natural light combined with doomed, possibly improvised original drinks like the Pimm’s cup chai.

The Good Starbucks, two blocks farther in the opposite direction, also looks like a house of ill repute, but with better ventilation and more freebies, little paper cups of cake.

We’re within five minutes of two subway stops, but at such illogical angles to them that we have difficulty instructing people how to get here:
You go left and then cut across the second parking lot, not the one that says PARK.

To make it easier we tell them we’ll meet up by the newsstand right outside the subway station three blocks away. We ask them beforehand,
What will you be wearing?
We describe ourselves:
Glasses, dark shirt.
This could be anybody.

Slice of life

The Bad Starbucks is where Jenny sees her life coach every Thursday at 4. She doesn’t think we know, but we know.

Laars wonders what the difference between a therapist and a life coach is.

A life coach doesn’t have an office and isn’t accredited,
says Lizzie.

Lizzie has been out of sorts these days, slumping at her desk, leg hopping like a jackhammer. She is between therapists right now. She used to see one way uptown. He was good but the commute was killing her. She’d get there late and then they would spend half the remaining time discussing the reasons behind her lateness.

The real reason she stopped going, though, is because the pizzeria around the corner from his office had raised its prices by a quarter. Her therapist used pizza as an inflation barometer, and set his fee at one hundred times the price of a slice, which was now at two bucks, exclusive of toppings.

Jenny later concludes that her life coach uses bagel prices to set her fee.

The grand tour

Sometimes one of us will have a visitor. If it’s his or her first time to the building, we’ll say,
Do you want the grand tour?
like it’s our new apartment. Actually, it’s always the guest’s first time. No one ever comes back if they can help it, possibly due to overhearing someone like Laars shouting
You are not going to believe the size of this roach.

After braving or ignoring a sermon from the Holy Roller security guard, and taking the leisurely elevator up, the visitor walks straight into the middle of a labyrinth. Without a reliable guide, he or she can wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window. Lizzie remembers her first day on the job: Stepping into this feng-shui-proof layout, heading straight to the bathroom, and crying.

Most of us spend our days at a desk in one of the two archipelagoes of cubicle clusters. The desks have not been at capacity for over a year now, and so we let our stuff sprawl, colonizing adjacent work spaces, hanging a satchel in one, a jacket in another.

A few of us have our own little rooms. Even though everybody could probably snag one at this point, given that staff is dwindling, the Sprout gets very agitated at any such request.
That doesn’t work with my comfort level right now.
Better to play it safe. Some of these rooms look out on the back of another office building. We wave to the workers there if our gazes happen to meet, and they wave back. That’s as far as it goes.

Jonah has a room with a
door,
but no window. Crease has two desks, on opposite ends of the floor.

The college of noncompetitive running

People put too many things on the bulletin board. Bizarre newspaper items, notices for group shows exhibiting the disgruntled visual expressions of friends of friends, ironically saucy or inscrutable postcards.
Wish you were beer.

Laars polices this corkboard commotion, giving everything a week before tearing it down. Schedules, announcements, responsibilities: These weigh on his spirit. When Laars started with us—six months, nine months, a year ago?—he was full of pep, but we managed to squeeze it out of him.

Laars occasionally gives off an Ivy League vibe, but he actually went to a small liberal arts college called Aorta or something. None of us have heard of it, a school in the Pacific Northwest that doesn’t have grades or even pass-fail. It emphasizes feelings rather than performance. On the website you see pictures of a guy with the eraser tip of his pencil resting on his lip, two girls running noncompetitively—one’s wearing jeans—on a weedy-looking track, a white guy with an Afro reading under a tree.

Multiple-desk syndrome

I’ve got it down to under a minute,
says Crease, and as with a lot of what he says, we need a moment to figure out what he’s referring to.
Forty-seven seconds.
He means the traveling time between his two desks. In his mind, everyone is always thinking about him, worrying over Crease minutiae.

Last year Jason got fired, right in the middle of a project. No one saw it coming. Crease, who was not on the same team, was told to take over
—Step up to the plate,
per the Sprout—but was never told exactly what needed to be done. He had to figure it out on the fly.
Baptism by fire,
as the Sprout, and later Crease himself, put it.

With no time to move all of Jason’s folders and meticulously organized report bins to his own desk, Crease commuted from one side of the office to the other, doing the Jason work until 2 and his own until he left at 7, at 8, at 9.

When the project was over he started moving his own stuff from his original desk to Jason’s—the same model, but with better-greased drawers. Jason had vividly colored Post-its from Japan, exquisite semicircles that he bought on a trip. Crease loved them but used them sparingly because once they were gone, that was it.

After his initial burst of nesting, Crease soon discovered he had more old files than he could easily move, and found himself drifting back to his original home for certain tasks. Now he keeps his Creasedom divided, flitting between the desks several times a day. Each desk has a computer. He logs in as Jason on one, as himself on the other. The commute has become his major form of exercise. He also thinks the division is a good survival strategy: If they try to fire him when he’s not at one desk, they might lose interest before they find him at his second home.