The Cubicle Next Door (12 page)

Grandmother wasn’t at home when I arrived.

I made enough dinner for two, assuming she would return at any moment. But by the time I’d finished my dinner, she still hadn’t come. I put away the leftovers, washed the dishes, and then dried them, all the while contemplating calling Adele, Betty, and Thelma. I had to weigh the pros and the cons. I might find out where she was, but I might also cause needless worry. A sleepless night. Maybe even a heart attack. You never knew, at their age.

Deciding finally to make the calls, I had begun walking to the living room to the phone when I heard footsteps on the porch.

I pivoted and half-ran, half-walked to the back door. I pulled it open just as Grandmother put her hand out toward the knob. “Where have you been?”

She blinked and put a hand to her heart. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry.” I let go of the door, took hold of her arm, led her over to the table, and pulled a chair out for her.

“Thanks.” She bent over and then lifted a foot up onto her knee. Untying the laces, she slid the shoe off and put it down. “I haven’t walked so far in…” She was smiling as she looked up toward the ceiling, contemplating just how long it had been. “Must have been years.”

“You were out walking? By yourself? You could have broken your hip again!”

“Hmm?”

“You were all by yourself?”

“Of course not.”

“Then with whom?”

“With Oliver. We walked the springs.”

“You walked through town?”

“No. We each took a cup along and we toured the springs.”

Springs. The nine springs from which Manitou derives its name. From Iron Springs, up by the Cog Railway, to Seven Minute Springs down by Memorial Park. “That’s over three miles.”

“Is it? It didn’t seem like it. They all taste different. Did you know that?” She put her foot down. She bent to pick up her other one, placed it on her knee, and took off her other shoe.

“Who
is
Oliver?”

“Oliver? You’ve never met him?” She bent to return her shoe to the floor. Straightened. “But he said he met you just this morning.”

“You mean that ill-tempered Englishman?”

“He has a lovely personality.”

“It didn’t seem like it to me.”

“You’ve never been good at first impressions yourself. So you, of all people, ought to be a little more understanding.”

“Do you know anything about him? Because he could be…anyone.”

“I know he likes to cross-country ski.” That was typical of Grandmother. She didn’t trust downhill skiers more than was necessary. It was a sport that was too flashy in her opinion, involving people of dubious character going too fast on skis that were too short. Cross-country skiing, on the other hand, involved work. And work was always good. Therefore, cross-country skiers were also good people.

“Oh. Well, then he’s golden! We might as well give him a halo.”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic. I’m so hungry, I could eat just about anything you placed in front of me.”

That was as subtle as Grandmother ever gets. I rummaged for leftovers and heated them up. She ate them all.

Later in the evening, after Grandmother’s snores had begun rumbling through the upstairs hallway, I sat down at my computer.

I checked out several message boards and a few systems administrator support groups. There are a very few people in the world who actually read computer software and hardware manuals. As far as I could tell, they were all systems administrators. I sent e-mails of encouragement to the posters of the day’s worst horror stories.

Posted a blog.

Checked my e-mails. Received notification that my blog had received Readers Top Five status from the Weblog Review, based on the modifications I’d recently performed. Cool.

I hadn’t looked at my blog statistics for at least a couple months, so I logged back onto the blogging website and brought up the reports. I felt my jaw drop. The last time I’d looked, I’d averaged ten visitors each week. And none of them had been new visitors. For the past month, I’d averaged two hundred visitors a week. Most of them new.

Strange.

I’d noticed a few new people posting aside from the stalwart “justluvmyjob” and “philosophie.” I thought they’d just been surfing by. Guess my modifications had been worth a sleepless night. Nothing else could explain the jump in traffic.

I logged out. Returned to my e-mail program and deleted the message.

Moved on to my next e-mail.

THE CUBICLE NEXT DOOR BLOG

Mr. Please Deflate My Head

Have you ever met anyone who assumes he can do anything? Assumes that just because he’s good at one thing, he’s good at everything else? There’s nothing about John Smith that bothers me more than this. What kind of parents did he have that made him so confident? The kind who did backflips whenever he accomplished the smallest little thing? The kind who went to every single sports event he ever had? Parents like those are just plain reckless. Don’t they know they’re creating monsters the rest of us will have to deal with?

Posted on August 5 in
The Cubicle Next Door | Permalink

Comments

God save us all from Supermen!

Posted by:
wurkerB | August 5 at 10:14 PM

If we only had the hindsight to have some foresight.

Posted by:
philosophie | August 5 at 10:30 PM

Is John Smith my boss? Because they sound a lot alike!

Posted by:
justluvmyjob | August 5 at 10:44 PM

My condolences.

Posted by:
The Cubicle Next Door (TCND) | August 5 at 11:04 PM

Twelve

I
picked Joe up at 7:45 the next morning, Sunday, with some misgivings. He’d called me on my fascination with him. But while I could admit to myself I had one, it didn’t mean I had to act on it.

We ate breakfast at the same Waffle House before heading up the interstate. Ordered the same meal, joked with the same waitresses.

We tried a church someone else in the department had recommended. By the time the service was over, we were just as satisfied with the experience as we’d been the Sunday before.

“Two down. Tons left to go.”

“Do you want me to start marking up the phone book?”

Joe winked at me. “No. Next week’s church will be the one. I can feel it.”

Yeah. Just like I could feel winter coming.

The next morning Joe was hard at work by the time I walked into my cubicle. According to my nose, he’d already gotten himself a cup of coffee.

I peeked around the wall.

He was standing, hands on his hips, glaring at piles of paper stacked neatly across his desk. As I watched, he grabbed two stacks and switched the order. Stared at them again.

He didn’t glance up at me. Didn’t say hi.

I returned to my cubicle, shrugged off my bag, and then sat down. Logged onto the network and prepared to sync my Palm to my desktop.

“Wish me luck.”

“Good luck.” I gave my wheeled chair a push with my feet and tried to make it to the end of the cubicle divider so I could see what Joe was doing. I got stuck two inches off my plastic floor protector. Tried to push it back up onto the plastic, to no avail. It was mired in the carpet. I gave up, hopped onto my desk, and peered over the cubicle wall. “What’s going on?”

“First day of class.” He was standing now in the middle of his cubicle, briefcase slung over his shoulder. His eyes were darting toward every corner of the room, and he was patting the pockets on his bag. “I’ve forgotten something.”

“What?”

He stopped and looked up at me with an impatient glance. “If I knew what it was, then I wouldn’t have forgotten it, would I?”

I shrugged. “Do you have your PowerPoint slides?” The bureaucracy of the Air Force would screech to a grinding halt if it weren’t for PowerPoint. None of the officers know how to make a presentation unless they can do it on computer-generated slides plastered with the department, organization, and Department of the Air Force logos. In fact, it’s the only software program about which I voluntarily relinquish my expert status. Any airman has more knowledge on the topic than I could ever hope to accumulate.

“Slides! Thanks.” He pulled the cords out of his laptop, slammed the screen shut, and took off down the hall.

“LCD! Shut Down! Barbarian!” Was all I could think to say before he was out of hearing range. I had just finished equipping the remaining people in the department with laptops. I was not about to start buying gratuitous machines just because
some
people didn’t choose to treat their computers properly.

In fact, what I needed to do was start confiscating computers. And then give remedial training before reissuing them. I knew exactly who I’d start with.

When I was new at my job, Estelle used to farm out her correspondence to me. Not the important stuff that would eventually make its way to the one-star general, the dean of faculty, or the three-star general, the superintendent. Those documents were much too valuable to entrust to my shifty work habits. I got stuck with the inter or intradepartmental memos. But only until Estelle realized I didn’t double-space at the ends of my sentences.

After my second memo, she called me out to her office. “Jackie, thank you for typing this up, but I see you failed to double-space after your periods. Again. We need to remember
The Tongue and Quill
.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, and she must have seen the confusion on my face.

She pulled a slim softbound volume from the bookshelf beside her desk and clutched it to her chest. “This is my only copy, but I don’t mind lending it to you if you want to read through it.”

“No, thanks.”

She held it out to me. “It’s okay. Really. Just make sure you return it.”

“I don’t want it. Really.”

“But it explains how to do everything. Like the two spaces at the end of each sentence.”

“But I don’t want to know how to do everything. I’m a systems administrator. If I need to communicate with someone, I’ll send them an e-mail. I won’t write a memo.”

“Take it. Read it.”

I had to take it. Her arm would have fallen off if I’d just left the book dangling from her outstretched hand. But I soon discovered that
The Tongue and Quill
was entirely outdated. The computer is not a typewriter, especially in word processing programs. There were a few formatting issues I didn’t mind changing to revert to
The Tongue and Quill
’s standards, but I was not about to put in redundant spaces. Proportional fonts adjust proportionally to the characters you type. They automatically add the correct width of space after a period is typed.

But I reformatted some parts of the memo and e-mailed it to Estelle.

She called me.

“Did you read
The Tongue and Quill?
”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then did you send me an earlier revision of the memo? Because this one still doesn’t have the two spaces.”

“No. That’s the final.”

“Where are the spaces?”

“They aren’t there.
The Tongue and Quill
is outdated. I’m not going to teach myself bad habits just because whoever wrote it doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

“I wasn’t asking for your opinion. I was asking you to format it to fit standard Air Force conventions.”

“Sorry. I won’t do that.”

She hung up on me. But it was the last time she ever tried to farm her job out to me.

Maybe I wouldn’t have to confiscate Estelle’s computer after all. Maybe I could just consider her duly reformed. Under protest.

Joe returned to his cubicle two and a half hours later. He dropped into his chair. I heard him put his boots up on the desk.

“You survived?”

“
I
did. But I don’t know if
they
did.”

“What’s your schedule tomorrow?”

“Nothing. I teach practically all day on M days, but I don’t have anything on T days.”

M days and T days. A unique Academy innovation. The cadets actually had two different schedules to keep track of, one for M day and one for T day. At first encounter, a person would logically assume one schedule held good for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The other for Tuesday and Thursday. However, despite the glamour of being a military academy, it was, after all, still military. M and T days alternated throughout the semester. One week, M days would be on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; the next, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That way, each course on a cadet schedule would have an equal number of sessions. It allowed every cadet to carry an average of 17.5 semester hours instead of a meager 15. It also allowed a full portion of science classes. Enough that every cadet graduated with a bachelor of science degree, even if his actual field of study had been English. Or fine arts.

The next day it began: The parade of female cadets to Joe’s office hours. From my chair, on that day, I could have assumed the entire cadet wing was made up of females. You couldn’t blame them. It was just like high school—all the girls developed a crush on the cutest teacher.

Some of them were smart. They pled ignorance about the whole concept of premodern history. Made Joe repeat his lecture in entirety. Others asked a single question and were gone in five minutes.

There was a break of an hour around lunchtime, when Joe was all by himself, but then they were back.

Finally, at 4:30, after the last cadet had gone, I heard him lean back in his chair and sigh. “I thought the lecture was fairly basic. Maybe I just didn’t explain it clearly enough.”

“I think it’s more a function of who you are. Until you have a sex-change operation, it looks like T days are going to be tough going.”

There was silence for a moment. I heard his chair squeak. Heard him gulp a mouthful of coffee. Set his mug down on his desk. Far, far away from the keyboard, I hoped.

“Hadn’t thought of that.”