Personal Days (3 page)

< 4 >

It’s OK to relax

A while back, the Sprout handed out self-evaluation forms and said,
Help me help you.
We just needed to be as honest as possible. The evaluations would remain anonymous. Some of us, actually all of us, didn’t take it seriously enough, writing things like
I enjoy ice cream and unprotected sex,
in a crazy-person scrawl. That was when the Sprout had a sense of humor. Jules, when Jules was here, answered entirely in Spanish.

We thought the Sprout had abandoned this exercise but today there’s another round. Everyone gets a golf pencil and a three-page packet. This time he wants our names printed at the top. Maxine strolls the conference room perimeter like a strict but hot schoolteacher, like we imagine teachers are in California.

We put a number to everything, 1 to 6, to reflect the strength of our feeling. The statements have a North Korean vibe, affectless yet intense.

I am happy with the way I am treated.

As the workday ends, it’s OK to relax.

Jonah is sure there’s a law against this sort of interrogation. We all respond the way we think the Californians want us to respond, except Jenny, who misheard Maxine’s directions and thought that 1 indicated Strongly Agree.

I feel there are other opportunities for me here.

It’s not OK

The self-evaluation ends with an essay section. Maxine encourages us to
be creative.

A flutter of panic turns into a full-fledged spiritual crisis. We all want to get out of there but no one wants to be the first to leave. All of us except Jill wind up staying for ninety soul-searching minutes, crafting epic texts of dashed hope and toxic cynicism. It doesn’t occur to us that this is a bad idea until we put down our pencils, fingers sore from using such antique devices.

Jill leaves her sheet blank and flees before everyone else.

Maybe it was an 8

A month ago Maxine e-mailed us elaborate charts that none of us could decipher. The words were cryptic:
Release, Objective, Orient.
Was this information meant for us? She used five different colors, a rainbow of anxious strategy. She used fonts we’d never even seen, fonts so powerful most of our computers crashed.

Our latest theory is that she’s a consultant in deep cover, looking to increase profits by 20 percent before the company is sold to the Californians. We base this knowledge on the fact that Laars saw a pie chart in the Sprout’s office, with a green wedge that said 20. We’re trying to decide whether this means she wants the profit margin to expand to 20 percent, or that the current margin should increase by 20 percent of itself.

Some of us are not so good at math. This might in fact be
why
we were hired.

It should also be noted that later Laars thinks maybe the 2 was a 3. He didn’t get a clear view.
Maybe it was an 8?

The not-so-funny part of our Maxine theory, based on something Pru overheard: She’s going to fire three of us by the end of the year, or possibly the end of the month. Pru stood outside the Sprout’s office for a whole minute, listening to Maxine complain about us.

On the human-interest side of the ledger, Jenny reports that she’s seen Maxine with the sexual-harassment lawyer guy, George, jogging lustily in the park.

Emotional rescue

Jenny says she’s heard the Sprout sobbing, the door to his office only partially closed. Jonah accused her of trying to humanize the enemy.

Maybe he was laughing,
says Laars. But we all know that the Sprout’s laughing doesn’t sound like crying. It sounds like this:

Hoo-hoo!

Security issues

Crease thinks that everyone is out to steal his limited-edition Japanese Post-its, the magenta and olive and mandarin orange stickies that he inherited from Jason. We like them, but we’re not thieves. On the other hand, why should
he
get to keep them all? He and Jason were never particularly close. Crease’s desk has no locks and he doesn’t feel that his supply is safe. Sometimes he puts them in his satchel when he leaves the building for lunch.

< 5 >

Because

Whenever we sniff a layoff coming, which is always, each one of us thinks,
It can’t be me because———.

Because I have
too much work to do.

Because I’m
exploited as it is.

Because, really, how much money would they save by getting rid of me versus what untold profits my labor/hard-earned know-how brings in?

I mean I’m joking but seriously.

Realistically, no
way
can it be me.

And then, all of a sudden, it is.

Stay the course

Beware of compliments. You don’t want your stock to rise. You want to stay the course. Someone’s stock rises and we all feel envious for a couple weeks. Then that person gets axed, or is made so miserable that there’s no option but to quit.

It happened to the Original Jack, with his dogged work ethic. It happened to Jason, with his complex yet elegant system of Post-it notation. It happened to Jules.

Jonah thinks the preliminary praise is unconscious on the Sprout’s part, like a poker player’s tell.

The departed send us e-mails after they leave and we forget to write back forever.

Dead letter

Has anyone noticed that the names all begin with J?
Pru writes.
All the fired people.

Jonah should be very nervous right around now. Same with Jack II. Management will not touch Jenny, because then everything would fall apart. She wound up absorbing the Original Jack’s duties, then Jules’s. She got a bump in title but her salary stayed the same, and she never left work before 7.

She calls it a
deprotion,
which is a promotion that shares most of the hallmarks of a demotion. Jenny and Pru and also Lizzie and sometimes Crease like to think up terms for things that happen in the office.
It could make a good book someday,
says Pru.

Jenny is safe in theory. But we shall see.

No effect

We often forget about Jill, who makes it easy. She is shy around most of us, and when she does speak it’s usually to compliment someone else: Lizzie for her outfits, Pru for her smarts, Jenny for her organizational skills.

My problem is I have a quiet voice,
she once confided to Jenny.

What?

She wants to try therapy but is too shy to call for an appointment.

Jill is worried enough as it is, about life, about everything—quiet voice, limp hair, zero boyfriend prospect, the impossibility of therapy—and so this
J
conspiracy theory does not noticeably disturb her.

Red alert

Waiting for the microwave to finish, Jonah sees a sleek figure gliding across the far end of the hall, tossing something into a wastebasket as she passes. The microwave beeps. An hour later, en route to the photocopier, he notices a glint in the trash. He picks out five broken pieces of computer disc, careful not to smudge the words in thick black Sharpie.

At his desk the pieces fit together quickly, and the mock-grandiose title snaps into view:
MAXINE’S TOP SECRET FILES FOR WORLD DOMINATION
. Penned beneath, in smaller letters, is the name of our former colleague, Jason.

Jonah is so perplexed by this discovery he closes his door and takes a nap.

< 6 >

Greek tragedy

Long ago, in another life, Crease taught English and social studies at an all-girls’ school on the Upper East Side. He left because he felt he was in a rut. Why he thought a fresh start at our office would be even marginally more interesting is not known. Everyone can make a bad career decision but we wonder if there’s something he’s not telling us.

He’s called Crease instead of Chris because last year an ex-student, part of a wealthy Greek kitchen-counter-manufacturing family, began stalking him, saying
Crease, I love you, nonstop.
Perhaps he did not remember her so well? But she had been able to think of nothing but
Crease
for the past seven years. She had returned to Athens to be with her family but was now back, to study communications at NYU but really to be closer to him.
Nonstop.
It had the makings of classical tragedy. She would stand in the lobby, telling her story to anyone who would listen, including the Sprout, while Crease snuck in through a side door and took the freight elevator up.

One afternoon Laars saw her chasing our hero down the street, shouting,
Crease, Crease!
collapsing in sobs at the corner as he jumped into a cab. Pru began taking an interest in Crease. She’d hardly noticed him before the stalking started.

Apostasy

Of course, Crease was already a Maxine worshiper by then. But now he’s announced that he’s breaking away from the pack.

Laars says that in feudal Japan they would suspend Jesuit missionaries by their feet and dangle them in pits of offal. The people in charge would cut little notches behind the ears so that blood would get in their eyes and noses until they broke down and renounced their faith.

Laars thinks this is what must have happened to Crease, Crease who once showed us a sonnet he wrote that used the letters of Maxine’s name to head each line.

Crease reports that those days are over, finis. Yesterday he took the elevator up with the most beautiful woman in the world. He felt extremely self-conscious because of his allergies. He had just concluded a prolonged sequence of sneezing, nose blowing, and eyedrop application. There was the uncomfortable sensation that all his head orifices were leaking in assorted unspeakable ways.

He wanted to say something but couldn’t think of the words. All air had left his lungs. He looked at her profile for one second. Then he looked at the ground. It was just too much beauty in too small a space.

She hit 7.

The seventh floor is shared by a small ad agency, a nonprofit dedicated to giving pets to the homeless elderly, and a vaguely menacing telemarketing concern called Robodial Unlimited or something.

Crease blithely ignores the last option and deduces that she’s therefore either a creative type or a saint.

I think I’ve seen her before,
says Jonah.
She’s sort of average height, skinny?

Thin,
says Crease.
Thin and tall. And Eurasian, do people still say Eurasian?

Thin and tall is Crease’s type, though he himself is on the short side and skews endomorphic.
And she has this amazing British accent.

Apparently she had asked him to
hold the lift.

Is she the one with a lot of makeup?
asks Pru.

Pru might have a crush on Crease. Some days it’s clear that she does. Other times, not so much. She is thin but not terribly tall. She might have a chance if she lost the nose ring, but the rest of us are not sure that a chance with Crease is the key to happiness. In the past some of us thought we detected
sparks
between them. But the days of possible reciprocation seem to have come to an end.

I can’t stop thinking about Half Asian British Accent Woman,
he e-mails Laars at 3 in the morning. Laars forwards the message to all of us.

The haunted résumé

Pru says,
I have this phantom line-space dilemma and it’s driving me nuts.
She’s working on her résumé but the computer keeps giving her a double line space in certain sections, though she only wants a single. There’s no way around it. She’s tried copying the text, scrubbing it with the freebie scrubbing application she’s downloaded, and pasting it into a fresh document. She’s tried changing the font, bolding it, shrinking it. She’s tried rebooting. She’s tried e-mailing it to her home computer and then re-e-mailing it to herself at work, hoping the bugs will fly off in transit.

Twice Pru has simply started new documents, new résumés, typing everything in as if for the first time, and as soon as she tries to save it, the double line spaces pop up. It’s as if the computer loves her and doesn’t want her to leave. The computer wants her to stay in her cubicle within earshot of the vending machines and be miserable for three more years, for five, for ten.

Pru doesn’t want to call the IT guy, because then he’ll know she’s planning to leave and can blackmail her. His name is Giles and none of us trust him. There’s a newer IT guy, Robb with two
b
s, but we’re not sure about him, either. Some of us bonded with Otto, others avoided him. We’ve only unanimously liked Lisa, but that was four IT people ago.

Jenny, who knows something about everything, takes a look at the document and says the problem might be a sequence of letters somewhere in the résumé that’s being read as a command by the word-processing program, causing it to throw in the unwanted extra line space.

In other words maybe it’s her name that’s messing things up. Maybe P-R-U launches some sort of word-processing monkey wrench.

This is possible, since we use an obscure program called Microsoft Word.

Pru says she’s not going to change her name just so she can have a clean résumé. But all of us think that maybe she will. Or at least use her full name, Prudence, which she hates and which would only get her a job at a library in a nunnery on Nova Scotia.

The point

For the past three months Pru’s been saying,
I have to get out of this place.
Lizzie started muttering similar sentiments two weeks ago. Jonah has been saying
Time to leave
for six months now. We have all been saying it, in some fashion, at assorted volumes, without quite realizing it. Perhaps we’ve all been saying it ever since we started here, in our dreams, in our strained and silent thoughts, the right brain murmuring it to the left, or is it the other way around.

Laars has a different mantra. You can hear him say it as he slices through his junk mail every morning with an old butter knife:
What is the point?

Long-term strategies

It can’t be stressed enough: You never want the Sprout to call you in and tell you what a terrific job you’re doing. The Original Jack and Jason and Jules all had these meetings, and then were gone inside a month.

The Sprout calls you in, intercoms invisible bigwigs, chortles about fantastic results and brilliant numbers. He praises you to the skies, says your work is
fabulous.
Where did that come from? We all hate that word and want to kill it.

The speakerphone static is so bad that only the Sprout can understand what they’re saying. He laughs at what you imagine are jokes, turns serious at what might be grim statements of purpose, pulls a face in inscrutable fake alliance with you when the entities on the other end say something ludicrous. But of course you can’t make out a word. That room is torture. You smile and stare out the window, hallucinating insane methods of escape.

Lizzie has survived two such meetings this year but knows she won’t make it through another. She has started backing up various work files by e-mailing them home, in case she needs to look for other employment. She does it surreptitiously. Her résumé is all typed up and suffers no double line spaces, though Laars has noticed that most of it is in Baskerville except for two lines that are in Baskerville Old Face. He was going to mention this to her but she’d already made a hundred copies on expensive heavy bond.

Ideally such a job hunt will be superfluous. Lizzie’s long-term strategy is to marry a handsome Swedish baron or win the lottery. Pru also wouldn’t mind marrying a baron, though she has never specified a country of origin. Maybe they’ll fight over the same one—a slumming baron looking to get fixed up with a bitter but peppy American girl in a faded Almond Joy T-shirt, a girl with her hair in a ponytail. Laars says that’s a recognized fetish in some parts of the world.

The Original Jack used to express interest in dating a socialite.
A socialite or a Rockette,
was his line. We wonder what he’s up to these days.

The lottery

We all play the lottery. We buy our tickets individually because we don’t want to have to divvy up all that loot in case the numbers come up right.

Another plan

Laars says,
I want to be a househusband.

The wording

Lizzie and Crease are on the elevator with three people who are going up to seven, Starbucks in hand. Crease is on the verge of asking if they know his half-Asian mystery woman. He’s working on the wording, figuring out how to be charming rather than creepy, but there’s no way.
I am a lonely man,
he might begin.

Lizzie and Crease reach our floor. He casts a wounded-sheepdog look as the door shuts and the carriage continues its ascent into paradise.