I’m getting sloppy. No, not “getting.” I’m already there. Oh God. What has become of me?
I notice it when I arrive at work this morning. I ease into my parking space—a shady spot next to a row of pine trees. This is the same space I park in every day, although it was never officially assigned to me. I’m not that important where I work.
I turn off the engine and eject my recorded book.
“I’m sorry, Amelia!” the main character screams at his nagging wife. “I’m just not—”
Eject.
Not what? I wonder for a moment, looking out over the parking lot. Happy? Straight? In love with you anymore? I would have to wait until afternoon to find out. Nine long hours away.
A gentle breeze stirs the pine trees, shifting the branches until rays of morning sun fall over the hood of my car. That’s when I notice the bird shit, and I gasp. I literally gasp out loud, like Amelia might when she hears what Jonathan has to say. I study the splotches of shit that span the entire length of the hood—milky white and thick with solid dark centers. It doesn’t end there. I also see pine needles, sap from the trees, dead bugs smeared into a morbid film on the windshield. What a mess. And I came to work like this.
It’s the book. The book is making me self-centered and aloof. It’s making me sloppy. Just this week I wore the same pair of black slacks twice. It has to be the book—the only thing that feels important enough to occupy my thoughts. I can’t go on like this. I will wash my car by the end of the week, and the slacks, too. I take my badge and lunch sack from the passenger seat and step outside.
When I arrived at the door, there is a woman blocking the entrance. She’s wearing a long khaki rain coat that seems excessive for the balmy summer weather. She shuffles through her purse, presumably digging for her badge so she can scan it and get inside the building.
I ask the obligatory question.
“Do you need me to let you in?”
“Oh, could you? That would be great! I must have left my badge in another jacket!”
Another jacket? That implies she has multiple jackets for weather like this. I am bemused, but also relieved to find I’m not the only aloof one around here. I scan my badge, and when the door pops open I let her in.
Agenda: 10:00 am
Every morning at ten o’clock, the Junior Marketing Assistants gather in the Marketing conference room for a meeting. This might seem strange to an outsider, who would wonder what a group of people with the job title “Junior Marketing Assistant” actually need to meet about. It isn’t like we’re Marketing Associates. We’re not even actual Marketing Assistants. We get paid by the hour to assist the actual assistants in assisting the associates. We dwell at the very bottom rung of the often referenced corporate ladder. Our assigned Marketing Associates do not know our names or buy us Christmas presents. Last year, the $50 Target gift-certificate that was rightfully mine went to the Marketing Assistant I assist who thanklessly reaped the benefits of all my hard work. But I digress:
We meet to discuss the agenda for the day. (And yes, I too find it strange that a meeting to discuss the day’s agenda does not begin until ten o’clock.)
“Did you hear the news?” Janine asks as we wait for the boss to arrive. “Sandy from downstairs got the ax yesterday. Apparently she was a no-show three times last month.”
We also meet to gossip.
“Who’s Sandy from downstairs?” I want to know.
“You’ve never met Sandy from downstairs?!” Janine gasps.
“If I had met her I wouldn’t be asking, Janine.”
It is fortunate for me that Janine is much more self-centered than I am, and therefore remains unwounded by my frequent sarcasm.
“She’s really weird,” is the insufficient explanation. “It’s probably best that she got canned.”
“What’s weird about her?”
Now another co-worker chimes in. This is Margaret, who measures the difficulty of each assignment in food. She often arrives flushed at my desk, collapses into my guest chair, and irregardless of what I am doing interrupts me to say, “The Geo-Analysis Report is done, but it took me two bags of M&Ms and a Coke to get through it!”
“She was getting divorced,” Margaret informs me. “Her husband announced out of the clear blue sky that he was bored and he was leaving. She got stuck with three kids to manage and a full time job. Can you imagine? My tab at MickyD’s would be through the roof!”
Coming from a woman who is perpetually beginning a diet, these are fightin’ words.
“She was weird because she was getting divorced?”
“No,” Janine corrects me. “She was getting divorced because she was weird.”
“Her husband works here, too,” Margaret adds. “Bob, the Accounting Associate.”
“I didn’t know Bob was married.”
“No, not Bob!” Janine laughs, amused by the notion that anyone would marry Bob—a man she often refers to as “round and bald.” Incidentally, she has also slept with him twice. “Bob’s Junior Accounting Assistant! Thomas.”
I only shrug. I don’t know who Thomas is, either.
“Isn’t that awkward that they work together?” Margaret asks as the boss hurries in and closes the door. The meeting commences before I have a chance to ask if she meant awkward that Sandy and Thomas work together or awkward that an Accounting Associate works with his Junior Accounting Assistant, because if I even looked at my Marketing Associate the wrong way, my perceived impertinence could be grounds for termination.
“Margaret—I’ve got some bad news,” the fearless leader of Junior Marketing Assistants says before she even sits down. “Those brochures that went out last week were all wrong. I want you to redo them. They have to be sent by close of business today.”
Margaret sighs dramatically and slumps back into her chair.
“I hope Friendly’s is stocked up on coffee flavored ice-cream, because it looks like I’ll be having that Happy Ending sundae after all,” she laments.
She looks at me.
“I guess the diet starts after lunch.”
Lunch “Hour”: 12:15 – 1:45 pm
Janine and Margaret go to Friendly’s, even though there is no conceivable way that Margaret can go out to lunch and also redo all the brochures by her deadline. I guess I know how I’ll be spending my afternoon. It irritates me, but I don’t mention it when they ask me to go along.
“No, thanks. I’m going to hang around here and work on my book.”
“I didn’t know you were writing a book!” Janine exclaims.
I told her twice last week.
“I told you twice last week!”
She laughs heartily.
“In one ear and out the other, I guess!”
I wait until they leave to go to lunch. This way I can stretch the hour and no one will be the wiser. Some might call it a lack of integrity, but I prefer to think of it as a healthy sense of self-preservation. In spite of my cleverness, I find I am unable to concentrate on my book. I sit at the table, pen poised over a sheet of paper, but the conversation at the table behind me draws my attention.
“Did you go into the Accounting bathroom today?” one woman asks another.
The question is peculiar. For lack of greater inspiration, I write it down as I await the second woman’s response.
“No—should I?” the second woman asks.
This question seems more peculiar than the first—mainly due to the ring of enthusiasm in her voice when she asks it.
“Someone’s been hiding out in there all morning,” the first woman reports in the serious tone only a practiced gossiper can achieve. “Nobody recognizes the shoes, so we don’t know who it is. But she keeps unrolling toilet paper then flushing the toilet. Becky from the print station thinks she’s sick—if you catch my drift.”
Since I did NOT catch her drift, I am glad when the second woman asks,
“Sick with what?”
I scribble furiously.
“You know! The morning-after pill!”
I drop my pen. I won’t record any more of this. It’s just too stupid.
“You think she’s giving herself an abortion?!” the second woman asks.
I wait for her to protest this notion on the grounds of its complete absurdity. She says,
“There’s no way she took the morning-after pill to give herself an abortion! That pill is literally just for the morning after. This woman must have taken something different.”
Hook, line and sinker. Stand back, folks. We’ve got a live one!
The Shooting: 2:45 pm
Well, technically the shooting happened closer to two o’clock, but since that was on the first floor and this is the second floor, we didn’t realize it was a shooting until 2:45. We heard several popping sounds, muted but distinct, and assumed the men building the expansion off the print station downstairs had simply knocked something down that they shouldn’t have. Like a printer, or a wall. (It’s happened before.)
“This is incredible!” Janine says at 2:45 when she comes into my cubicle. She looks pale and unsettled.
“What?” I ask.
“There’s been a shooting downstairs in Accounting!”
“What?!”
“Apparently Sandy—that weird woman that got canned—came in with a gun and tried to kill Thomas!”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“I don’t think Thomas saw it coming. She must have just walked right up and shot him. Then Bob tried to restrain her and she turned around and shot him. Then she shot herself.”
“That’s terrible! How could this happen?”
Margaret walks in and says,
“You’ve got all evening to think about it. The police are questioning everyone, starting with the first floor. It might take a while before they get to us, so expect to be stuck here late tonight.”
I look at her, appalled.
“I’m sure Sandy never would have done it if she’d known it would inconvenience you, Margaret.”
“I was just saying!” Margaret snaps.
“I bet Sandy was on something,” Janine ventures. “No person in her right mind would do something like that. I heard she was doped up on anti-depressants and that’s one of the reasons they fired her.”
“Really?” Margaret asks. “I didn’t think anti-depressants had that kind of affect!”
They’re as bad as the women in the lunchroom hashing out the on-the-clock abortion. Then it hits me—what if that was Sandy? What if she was hiding out in the bathroom with a gun in her hands all morning, trying to work up the nerve?
I feel sick.
The Brochures: 6:15 pm
In spite of the excitement over the shooting and a long lunch at Friendly’s (they got back after I did), we managed to get the brochures out on time.
The mistake wasn’t that difficult to fix. It seems the first time the brochures went out our very own Margaret spelled the company’s name wrong. The company is called “Service First”, and they hired us to do an ad campaign about how the customer is always number one. Margaret spelled the company’s name “Serve Us First”. She swears it was her spell checker. She should be fired.
To celebrate a job re-done, she orders pizza. She goes from desk to desk getting votes on toppings and tells every person,
“I don’t know about you, but I need the works and then some after the day I’ve had!”
I guess the diet starts tomorrow.
I ask one of the cops if I can go out to my car to get my recorded book. He says “no.” I’m dying to know what happens.
“I’m sorry, Amelia! I’m just not—”
Hungry? Interested? In the mood?
Reckoning: 8:07 pm
It’s after eight o’clock when the police finally get to us. They talk with each of us separately in the conference room, explaining that they don’t want one person’s memory of the day’s events to contaminate everyone else’s. Like we haven’t spent the majority of the afternoon contaminating away—telling each other every detail we could remember about Sandy and Thomas and what might have seemed out of place today. Even I am guilty as I recount for Janine and Margaret the conversation I overheard at lunch.
Janine says, “Becky only thinks it was an abortion because she had an abortion last week! And I’m told it wasn’t her first!”
Margaret asks, “Why don’t you ever come out to lunch with us?”
Eventually, it’s my turn to talk to the cops. They want to know if I saw Sandy today and if she was acting unusual.
I tell them I’m not even sure who Sandy is. In fact, I heard she was fired yesterday because she was weird or doped up or because she never showed up for work. Possibly all three.
In an attempt to evoke a memory, they show me a picture of her. I turn around and vomit my pizza onto the conference room floor.
Turns out I know Sandy after all. She’s the woman I let into the building this morning—the bemusing one with warm-weather jackets who was blocking the door.
Quitting Time: 9:26 pm
They aren’t going to press charges against me. I guess they can’t because technically I didn’t do anything illegal. But I still might get sued for letting Sandy into the building. This is technically against company policy and I did violate that policy. I bet I’ll get sued by Thomas or Bob, or their families if they don’t make it.
Sandy won’t sue me. What she did is worse.
On the drive home, I listen to my book on tape. Here’s what Jonathan said. This is what I waited all day to find out,
“I’m sorry, Amelia! I’m just not the person you think I am! And I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry, if I’ve disappointed you.”
“You haven’t,” Amelia says with all the self-righteous indignation of a true heroine. Then, quite simply, “I’m afraid I’ve disappointed myself.”
Tomorrow, before I do anything else, I’m going to wash my car.
Then I’m looking for a new job.
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Reviewed by Kent Koren
4/17/2005
Wow, tight ending, good stuff. I guess i though it was totally going to be an auto biographical recount of the painfully mundane office life, which I can empathize with. BUt, unless that really happened, it was a tight story, script-like. Cool. KK
Farctured Frazzled Folk Fables and Fairy Farces, Part II satirizes popular children's stories into adult-oriented renditions. FFFF &FF, Part II is also available in Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble e-book formats.
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